The Trauma Box Redux
and the Distance of Realism
I’m facilitating a shallow introduction to Verbatim Theatre with my second year students. And I’m wishing National Theatre at Home had a edu option, because I recently saw their production of Grenfell, having walked out of an earlier version of the show during intermission a few years ago at a small community center and theater space. It obviously had the potential to be—as it is now—an important play. I would like to hear my student’s thoughts on the new version.
Remembering the early production and comparing it with the NT production is an excellent lesson in dramaturgy.
Form matters. Narrative matters, even when the model is agitprop. The audience needs to care about something.
At the beginning of the old version, we witnessed a town hearing. Local politicians and businessmen. As the journalist-cum-playwright put it, “We’re concentrating on the villains”. I believe angling for anger, before appealing to empathy, was an odd dramaturgic choice. I actually left the theater thinking I was a cold person for not being moved by the first act.
However, the NT version of the play, begins with the actors entering one by one, each introducing the Grenfell resident they will be portraying. Each is carrying a cardboard box: symbolically moving into the community that is/was Grenfell Towers. Near the end of the play, we learn that the boxes are those the fire department gave to each tenant, filled with the personal items that were best-guessed to be meaningful by the clean-up crew. One box per apartment. One woman says that their box is still unopened. Her family is waiting for the “right time”. She’ll know when it’s the right time.1
One of the challenges with verbatim theater is creating a relationship between the real people and the actors. There are no characters in a play like this. It’s also important to find the meaningful use of all theatrical conventions. Why a play and not a dossier? (Which was the question I was left with in the early version I saw.)
Docudrama vs. documentary vs. documentary theater vs. ethnographic theater vs. verbatim theater.
How we love to make categories. Autobiography, memoir, biographical novel, poem. What is the requirement of “truth” in a poem?
A wonderful poet once told me that their persona poem was accepted by a big-deal publication (maybe the biggest-deal publication), but that when the editors discovered the persona was a fictional character, they nearly halted publication. Sometimes I am very sure none of us know what we’re doing.
And I like that.
I keep wondering if our demand for the truth, weirdly coupled with our wilful blindness to hyperbole and the (re)structuring of events to better justify the world, is a remnant of our post war struggle with Absurdism. I’m not trying to make any deep philosophical statements. I’m happy to skim over the mental puzzles, to take Viktor Frankl’s words at face-value, and beg the question that we require meaning. The story remains the same, but we shuffle the narrative. Juxtapositions create context. Context creates hyperbole. Or sentimentality.
All of it, still realism.
The world has to make sense to us. We have to “find” (i.e. construct) the reason for events of our lives, and of other people’s lives. Even in the lives of dogs, forests, ancient civilizations. Stories are the hooks that work their way into our emotional center and move us.
A dry list of facts requires imaginative leaps on the part of the reader to create a response. I suppose this leaping is a skill that the arts can teach us to do on our own. But I believe there is a value in a collective leap of understanding: the specific narrative2 that the art’s form directs us toward.
But looking at the verbatim form: why is the play more effective3 as agitprop than would be a gathering of the actual people of Grenfell speaking the same words, using the same gestures?
Of course, the play protects the subjects from having to unpack their trauma box again and again. But is the layer of fiction also a protective layer for the audience as well? One that allows us to risk failing… failing to protect, to avenge, to comfort? Is it, ironically, a distance that allows us to empathise? Gives us a community that we can temporarily involve ourselves with?
The NT production ends with the audience members being invited to carry heart-shaped banners outside, into a courtyard area of the National Theater: a theatricalized protest. A theatricalized vigil.
And you have to ask yourself if those terms are redundant.
Turning to my own work, I wonder: what is the role of dramaturgy in a memoir in verse? How does the poet create the distance required to invite empathy, without eliciting pity, or demanding privilege?
I am looking to Schechner’s idea of “Restored Behavior”. While he analyses performance, I can see parallels to the written word: the ecstatic element in automatic writing, and the reconstructed events of first and second drafts. After all, aren’t theatrical rehearsals essentially sequential drafts?
History is not what happened but what is encoded and transmitted. Performance is not merely a selection from data arranged and interpreted; it is behavior itself and carries in itself kernels of originality, making it the subject for further interpretation, the source of further study. — Richard Schechner
A lot of dancers have said that dance itself is a language. But language is also a dance. It can move the spirit that would move the body.
I wrote about my Trauma Box last year, unpacking and repacking it after my cancer diagnosis. Some things become little more than artefacts, conjuring soft aches and compassion for the person who put it in the box for the first time.
Maybe the distance of time alone is enough to make a biographical work inherently a work of verbatim theatre.
I knew this person when.
Her narrative is meaningful.
But none of us owe her anything.
Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’ll be back later this week with an audio poem. And again on Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.
Until then, have a great week!
Warmly,
Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama
A deft open-ending of the residents’ personal narratives.
A story is the series of events at issue, while narrative is the story “mediated” through how the teller presents it, e., through “narrative discourse. https://law.temple.edu/aer/2020/05/04/narrative-or-story-know-the-difference/#:~:text=A%20story%20is%20the%20series,.%2C%20through%20%E2%80%9Cnarrative%20discourse
I was going to write “arguably”. But I believe that is has been more effective in the case of Grenfell, as it was in Laramie. The former as agitprop, the latter as an invitation to personal reflectation.
Ah, I like this deep dive into the need fo truth. From my perspective, I often think that readers now want absolute truth rather than an allusion to a universal truth.
To explain - often, when I've put up a poem, folk have messaged me asking if I'm ok, or if so-and-so really happened. And I've had to explain that yes, I am ok (as ok as a human can ever be ok), and that the situation protrayed in the poem was invented, an illustration of a truth which may be real for some and not for others.
Any art isn't necessarily true in that moment (of writing or reading) but it contains truths which can (and often will) occur.
I don't know if this need by audiences for absolute truth is good or bad - I tend to lean towards the bad, because this need seems to reflect a an inability to understand allusion and illusion as an essential part of an artist's toolbox.
If that all makes sense.
I really liked this, Ren. It caught me “unawares”; I was tripping out on how teaching creative… anything… we teach about “show and tell”. The balance. In my case it now speaks directly to the image and text relationship in videopoetry. Thanks for taking me out of my reverie. I needed that.