Class Notes - The Exonerated (13 Sept 2012)

Class discussion on 13 September 2012, following the reading of The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen as well as an article by the play's authors called "The Uses of Empathy: Theatre and the Real World," published in Theatre History Studies 25 (June 2005).

(Attributions are my own paraphrase, I've place implied antecedents in brackets, direct quotes are indicated)
  
AMY: We’ve gone from all this theory to reading a play. How did you all approach this differently?  

CODY: The idea of sincerity and effectiveness—I was very interested in knowing or looking at what the characters are saying as being a performance. Do they believe what they’re saying or are they just going through the motions? For instance, are they just performing notions of “being a police officer” or “being a prosecutor.” It seems as if there’s a larger ideological motivation behind [characterization in the play]. Have the actors been trained or trained themselves to turn away [from their characters] or believe otherwise, thus promulgating notions of “the racist police officer”, etc?  

AMY: This is the central notion of the play—it doesn’t care what the police officers thought. It is a documentary in the traditional sense of the word, in that it is Documenting. A. Story. But you then bring up the performance aspects as well, because you have actors playing these parts. So when it comes to documentary theatre, how do you reconcile that? How is it not a contradiction in terms? What does it mean to have a play that is “documentary theatre?”

JENNIFER: You're not living through the history itself, you’re hearing people talk about the event. You’re creating the Brechtian “man on the street” in a sense. They’re telling a story, the history is the same...

IRIS: Documentary theatre performers attempt to let the story speak for itself, they are conscious of that mediation.
KELLY: I was wondering why this is a movie rather than a play if the issue at stake is authenticity.

DOROTHY: In reading this, I realized I had seen the movie. Docudrama, especially when performed by well-known actors tends to fictionalize events for the viewer. Being aware of the actor’s profession, “fictionalizes the narrative.” I would like to see this [The Exonerated] as a film, perhaps with unknown actors or actual prisoners performing.

JENNIFER: Isn’t there a risk that the audience will think that these unknowns are the “real people” [depicted in the play's narrative]? Isn’t the transparency of the performance [that uses well-known, celebrity actors] better than creating a false sense of authenticity [through the use of anonymous actors].

DOROTHY: I don’t know if that would be better or not. There is always a danger in art of making that mistake, collapsing performers into characters. I think it’s an aesthetic choice.

COURTNEY: I found that to be problematic in the play. In the article, the playwrights mentioned that they asked the actors not to watch testimonials from the actual prisoners to avoid channeling the victims.

MING: But is it really as simple as that? Can we dissolve these binaries between the personal and the political? I don’t know if I buy that.

COURTNEY: My personal connection to the play relied on the decision I felt I was forced to make about whether [the exonerated] were guilty or innocent. Their actual culpability was ambiguous to me, but it seemed to me that to get the “message” of the play, I’m supposed to believe that all these people are innocent? I don’t know that that worked for me.

AMY: Let’s clarify the difference between docu-drama and documentary theatre:

Docudrama is something like the TV show COPS or its equivalent. It’s a reenactment of an actual event. A real thing that’s being dramatized, often in the format of a dramatization.

Documentary theatre is a type of play or performance that originated in a particular historical moment which is an attempt to make a documentary by interviewing people who participated in or witnessed and event and then to stage it. Anna Deveare Smith is possibly the first, or at least the most visible of the first writer/performers in documentary theatre. It’s about doing research into a particular event and then presenting, in an edited fashion, the actual words of the people who experienced the event. So it’s clear that it’s not the actual person [because the performer is always visible], but its also clear that there is a quest for "truth" that is simultaneously being undercut and being staged by people who are not the people. That’s part of the point. It is perhaps a postmodern critique of notions of truth, of the documentary film's notions of truth and how truth is represented. Documentary film traditionally hides the position of the film maker. The power of the performed truth is in our forgetting. Documentary theatre is about staging that position and exposing the ambiguity of truth.

CODY: Isn’t the fact that there is a script working toward that goal? The script in itself shows some sort of authorial intent, exposing the constructed nature of it.

SARA: I think that is what Amy just said that "documentary theatre" exposes, that is to say that documentary film often obscures its mediation, or author's point-of-view, presenting itself as a quest for "Truth," but by its very nature, documentary theatre critiques that mediation with its liveness, making more transparent the constructed nature of documentary film.

ELLEN: In the case of The Exonerated, it doesn’t seem to me the distinction between showing and telling seems to me complicated by the insertion of celebrity. Referencing Derek’s and Jess’s blog post. When it comes to celebrity actors, there is a lot more attached to the celebrity than just the story they’re telling.

IRIS: Discussing celebrity vis-à-vis The Vagina Monologues: Celebrity seems to serve the purpose of that play, but in The Exonerated the experience with celebrity seems different. The hypothetical presence of a live performance make me question what my reaction might be to the celebrities in those roles

ELLEN: Explain the distinction you're making between the role of celebrity in the two plays?

IRIS: It has something to do with the nature of identity in [The Vagina Monologues] seems not to be upset by the celebrity.

DEREK: You felt like you knew the celebrity and, perhaps, that somehow made what you were seeing more real?

IRIS: Not more real, but also not less real.

DEREK: How does this mechanism that you’re describing work? You recognize this celebrity performing, they’re visually familiar, you feel like you know about the person to some degree, and because of that, it made you feel like the character [in The Vagina Monologues] could be that person? So why wouldn’t it work similarly in The Exonerated?

DOROTHY: To me the “obvious” difference is that when we’re looking at a celebrity, we assume that she is cisgender, we assume she has a vagina. But, when we see a celebrity playing a different class, there is a certain resentment –There is a forced identity politics in feminism, because a vagina is the only criteria for entry. When it comes to prison, though, class rather than race or gender is the major distinction—class, not race—is what intervenes [and class is what separates celebrities from other people?]

ELLEN: But, also part of the goal of The Vagina Monologues is just to get a bunch of women to say vagina. Which is a very low-level political goal, but one that is effective based on recent events in the news.

[Michigan Democratic State Representative Lisa Brown being barred from speaking during abortion debates after saying, "Mr. Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no.'"  Later performing The Vagina Monologues on the State House steps.]

It’s much less clear to me what the “activating force” of The Exonerated. What is the dramatic or dramaturgical gesture? What is the action we’re meant to take away from it.?

MING: Referencing Derek’s post, What are the goals here? What are the political versus human goals?

ANDREA: I think we should read their intention as political. Celebrity plays a role in that. The playwrights cited that celebrities wanted to be involved and that, as a result, they got the governor to commute the sentences of those exonerated. The project was successful, according to the playwrights, in that sense.

DOROTHY: This seems to me like a performance of white guilt. (Told a story about her own dad in prison. Dad says he went to jail because police staged an illegal search of his home, Mom says he went to jail for having drugs in the house.) Not everyone in jail is innocent. Perhaps people should be exonerated because they had an unfair trial, but that doesn’t mean they’re not guilty.

WHITNEY: Maybe there are some people in jail that shouldn’t be, but does that mean that people should be released just because they were being tortured in prison? For me that is a really important point of documentary theatre --> —to allow the audience to make a decision either way-->—raising those important questions rather than forcing answers on them.

KELLY: Because this play was associated with Tim Robbins' company, I felt like I already knew his political position going in and, therefore, I knew what was ultimately going to happen… I knew what the “message” was before I'd even had a chance to see the argument.

ELLEN: But we must remember that [The Exonerated] was not a singular performance, but a series of performances over time. What becomes apparent after watching the evolution of a piece like that over a period of time is perhaps not the original political intent of a piece, but the drift. We can look at historical examples to see how productions shift the “original message” to adapt to the desires of present and future audiences. As it stands now, The Exonerated feels somewhat self-congratulatory in a way. The machinations are not the same now, after the “phenomenon” of the show is common knowledge. It was originally a way of re-igniting a much-needed conversation, as referenced in Jenna’s post. I mean, we always already know before even reading or seeing the play that everyone is going to be exonerated, right? That seems set, but the stories themselves are pretty surprising. Some of them just for their typicalyness (typicality?) were shocking (that is, miscegenation, female rape, homicides, etc. They are shocking in their clichéness). Maybe our consciousness is set now in a way that it wasn’t when the play was originally staged. Did anyone see the original?

JUSTIN: I saw a staged reading in St. Louis. It was new-ish then and the version I saw was cut to a certain degree. In listening to these stories being told rather than lived, and knowing that they're selected with a sort of intent, you’re getting a similar experience to the playwrights' initial interviews. There is a sense of why they are chosen [the stories and the prisoners].

JESS: But why these six people? What was erased or lost by the exclusion of the other exonerated? I saw it performed a Knox College, a small liberal arts school in the Midwest. There is was staged by young, upper-middle class white actors, and I frankly felt it to be an awkward experience.

COURTNEY: It seems clear to me that Sonny’s story is important because she wasn’t exonerated, she dies. The political message came through for me there.

JESS: You have to leave with some hope for the human race. I don’t feel like you can end a piece on a major critical note.

ELLEN: But trials themselves are very explicitly staged. I leave that to us to discuss: What do we see there?

DOROTHY: Balancing our desire to see the people exonerated by the end of the play, but not have the criminality or violence of their stories be sympathetic.

 [I got involved in the conversation here and subsequently missed a lot]

ELLEN: I was surprised to find in the enlightening book, Anatomy of Injustice by Raymond Bonner, that the courts are not legally obligated to grant a new trial to an inmate on death row, even if he is found to later to be innocent (because of a confession, DNA evidence etc) if there was no documented legal mishandling of the original trial. You can understand the abstraction of this rule, someone might pay someon for a confession, for instance, but it’s still horrifying. The abstraction of the legal system is something to be explore—Courtney's post deals with this to a certain degree— the sort of dramaturgy of the legal system. The figures in The Exonerated, they are theatrically managed, the characters of the performers are so overdetermined. So what the effect of this play is—it seems very emotionally potent in making us feel the horror of conviction in the face of innocene. It doesn’t have the Brechtian follow-up. Exposing the system and then giving the audience the tools to address it.

AMY: But then the playwrights' article in Theatre History Studies did just that. Exposing the efficacy of the celebrities performing in front of the governor had an effect, “The article is called 'The Uses of Empathy' and it shows the benefits of using an emotional argument to affect a cognitive outcome. If you feel this way about these stories, then you must make this decision."

MING: What did the playwrights mean in saying that anything that didn’t feel like a dialogue with an audience had to go? I admit that I was feeling engaged with the characters' stories. I was somewhere between feeling potently (potentially?) persuaded and incredibly manipulated, but what about that is a dialogue?

ELLEN: There is a similar political strategy to the one in Uncle Tom's Cabin, right?—if you feel this way about these characters and this story, you’re an abolitionist. It’s melodramatic propaganda. It solves the activist problem, not the systematic problem (vis-a-vis Brecht)

AMY: There is a difference between re-living a story vs telling one, though, in terms of acting style. Brecht is talking to actors, and these playwrights [Blake and Jensen] are talking about the characters. They’re trying to remove affect from the characters, from the narratives in order to deploy the affect about the situation. We’re not supposed to care about David or Jesse or Sonny, we’re supposed to care about the system. They’re trying to generate an emotional reaction around the idea of death row. How do we put so many people to death when so many could be exonerated? It’s the dog whistle that Ellen often refers to—it’s trying to make sure that future iterations of the production do not focus on creating pathos. It’s about the management of where and why we feel emotions and for what reasons.

ELLEN: I agree that that’s their ambition, but they’re not entirely pulling away from the conventions of fourth-wall theatre?

AMY: We need to locate the sotry of Sonny in one body for coherence, but not necessarily because the playwrights want us to care about Sonny as a person.

MING: I did empathize with Sonny to a certain degree, though? Maybe I’m a stunted viewer?

COURTNEY: But you don’t want to go send a check to Sonny… You want to stop the killing of other Sonnys in the world?

SARA: The end goal in dialectical theatre is not a complete lack of empathy, after all, but the management of it. Even Brecht acknowledges this, that theatre completely devoid of empathy is boring. The end game is not the prevention of empathy, but rather the prevention of catharsis through an empathetic realtionship to particular characters.

DOROTHY: Wanting to have a representative case a la Rosa Parks.

AMY: I want to make a plea for the stakes of our class and this work. A majority of our political and ideological opinions come down to narrative. In order to get better at reading “texts” as performance in order to be better judges of those narratives. The goal is not to be Spock, nor is it possible. It’s about how smart we are at reading narratives and being able to complicate the maters happening before us as narratives and as performance.

JENNIFER: This brings me back to Kelly’s questions. Why is this a play? If we agree with Ming, that there is no way to go into this play and not leave affected. Perhaps its more effective to be a part of the community of the audience

KELLY: I didn't think about the communal experience in the theatre vs. film.

SARA: I appreciated Davis's anecdote about the ram in relation to this notion of community. That watching a ram standing in a field is no one's idea of entertainment until a large group of people then buy a ticket to watch that ram. That it is only in actively chosing to be a member of an audience that we are receptive to the theatricality of performance. This makes me think about Vice President Joe Biden's recent chains comment. How those at the event found it to be powerful rhetoric, while those not present and seeing the comment via media saw it as race-baiting--What is that effect? Who has bought the ticket here, and how does that effect theatricality in the Davis sense of the word?

JESS: Theatre is important because it helps us identity narrative in our lives. This makes me feel better about theatre’s relevance in our world.

DOROTHY: Another reason this might be a play had to do with who goes to see plays? It’s targeting a particular class of people...

AMY: One of the thing that makes theatre more effective than film is that it has to come alive again tonight. Jesus wouldn’t get cast as Jesus because it’s more important that the performance of "Jesusness" be embodied again and again every night than any authentic experience of the man himself. It’s about being there.

COURTNEY: Couldn’t we combine the two? Meaning it isn’t the people who have been in prison who need to go and act it out, but the people who are not involved with these issues?

ELLEN: In many ways I support this kind of work, but on a more profound level, if the point of this work is to make you feel bad for slaughtered innocents, then nothing has changed since the 18th C. If that’s the case, when can we ever address inquality that doesn’t star virgins and mustachioed bad guys. It’s excrutiatingly familiar. The politics that I don’t like have been better at manipulating this structure. It has the power to make people make decisions in a jury box that are just wrong. Can we invite others to engage a nuanced political stance when they’ve been trained to not only preference but segregate preference emotions to crtical engagement.

MING: Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair has helped me to think about The Exonerated.—

AMY: One thing that makes the The Vagina Monologues so powerful is its ubiquity.

DOROTHY: But because "dudes" aren’t acting in/policing the The Vagina Monologues.

AMY: But this brings up issues then of the physiology or immediate truths of a person's body that are salient to the experience of performing a role. When do we probe that and when is it not necessary? It is relevant not only to the theatre, but to your career as scholars. What you’re allowed to speak is going to be questioned by things that people have projected on you. Rightly or wrongly.

[Conversation here turned to a discussion of identity politics as class ended.]