Documentary theatre

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Documentary theatre is theatre that wholly or in part uses pre-existing documentary material (such as newspapers, government reports, interviews, etc.) as source material for the script, ideally without altering its wording.

[edit] History

Documentary theatre has existed as a genre for as long as theatre itself has existed. Attilio Favorini, professor of Theater Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, dates the first dramatic documentary impulse back to 492 BC when the ancient Greek playwright Phrynicus produced his play The Capture of Miletus about the Persian War. He traces the genre through to European medieval mystery plays, Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's historical tragedies, French revolutionary patriotic dramas, British and American 1930s Living Newspapers and German plays about the Holocaust.

In its modern form, documentary theatre was pioneered by two famous German authors and directors – Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in the 1920s, focusing on issues of social conflict, class tensions and power structures. Essentially derived from Brecht and Piscator's Epic Theatre, Piscator developed his own 'Living Newspaper' in the 1930s.

In his documentary anthology, Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater, Favorini collects the most important 20th century examples of the genre and demonstrates that documentary theatre is highly relevant and resonant in societies that create and consume contemporary news as aggressively as we do.

Anna Deavere Smith invented this form of theatre recently with her acclaimed master piece called "The American Characters."