Class Notes on The Exonerated (9/13/12)

Cody: Opened discussion with question about what it means to perform the roles of prosecutor or police officer in this play? How can these characters possibly believe what they’re saying and are these parts/lines pointing to the potential for a larger ideological apparatus at work?

Amy: Question of genre. The play doesn’t care what those police officers or prosecutors thought. This play doesn’t at all seem interested in documenting in a documentary sense, where all sides and stories become important. Is it a problem with the genre of “documentary theater”? How is that not a contradiction in terms?

Jennifer: Problem with documentary theater is that we don’t hear from people who lived through the events.

Iris: Might be important that we keep in mind the directions in the introduction – to “let the stories tell themselves.”

Kelly: Why didn’t they turn the interviews and research into a movie? If they’re so concerned with these questions as introducing real issues that require action, why not make a movie that will reach a wider audience? Why theater?

Dorothy: There is a movie version, though, and it also seems problematic. The movie version with pretty famous professional actors (Susan Sarandon kept coming up) fictionalizes these events even more because we recognize the actors. Might be better to cast unknowns because it might be easier to then accept this as both a performance and an event in real life.

 Jennifer: Seems, though, that it might risk being too close. Risk that we would believe that these things actually happened to these people. Would we lose something then by not being able to gain a critical distance?

Dorothy: That might be a value judgment – which is better aesthetically?

Jennifer: In the intro, though, it does state that the playwrights want to the story to be “told,” not “relived.”

Courtney: There’s something even problematic about that statement, though, because is there even a clear distinction on could make? The common worry about “actors channeling real people” – is that even possible?

Ming: Also important to take into consideration how casting would work to dissolve the binary between the human level and the political level.

Courtney: One thing that struck me as I was reading that might be helpful here is that it seemed really important for the audience to believe in the innocence of these people. To get the message of the play, we’re required to believe in the innocence of all the characters.

Amy: Make sure we’re handling the difference between “docudrama” and “documentary theater” properly (terms that were being thrown around in discussion of casting and genre). Docudrama is reenactment of a historical event that is dramatized but documentary theater is a type of play that came onto the scene at a particularly historical moment (probably with Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror in 1992). Documentary theater is about doing a documentary and staging it, with the same editing of real worlds of people that the format of film documentary uses (“talking heads” format). There’s a thrall to authenticity and a centrality of a quest for truth. But this is undercut by the apparatus of theater – this distance seems important. Problem lately, after postmodern negation of truth, that we can’t ever avoid the subjectivity of the performer or the author. Film helps hide that narrator position but theater is about staging that and not letting us forget it.

Cody: Even the fact that this a script we’re reading shows the constructive nature of the project. Other things, like using Dilbert as a type of chorus, starts to collapse the differences in medium.

Ellen: Docudrama has more of a “God perspective,” you were here type of vantage point. The distinction between playing and telling that is emphasized in the intro seems complicated by use of celebrity actors. There’s always the questions attached to who’s telling the story – what do they personally bring to the potency of the story.

Iris: Reminds me of Vagina Monologues and how that’s been cast. Seems that, in VM, celebrity actors serve the purpose of the play better. This one doesn’t work as well with celebrity actors because in VM, the words are supposed to be anonymous but really could be any woman. The nature of the identity of the character is not upset by recognizing the person playing it. These characters are much more specific.

Derek: Trying to figure out how this mechanism works in VM but not in Exonerated – so you recognize the person performing and because of that it makes you think about the role differently somehow? Why doesn’t that work in Exonerated?

Dorothy: The difference has to do with importance of gender in VM. Any woman can play those women, but in Exonerated there’s a problem with class distinction and celebrities playing someone of a different class. Versus the kind of forced identity politics, the “any woman” stance of feminism.

Ellen: Part of the goal of VM is simply to have women say “vagina.” It’s a politics of consciousness raising (like Vagina: A New Biography, which we should all read review in New York Review of Books). Seems less clear to me what the activating force of this play is. What action should we leave feeling instilled to perform?

Ming: Reminds me of Derek’s question from the course blog on the terms of success for documentary theater. The difference between raising level of awareness or somehow connecting to audience on level of humanity?

Andrea: Seems that we should read the intention as importance for political action. Real, government level response to this play is apparent and it seems that response should make this successful.

Dorothy: Has to do with the political motive of white guilt. Idea that not everyone is innocent – the court system can be messed up, but that doesn’t make everyone innocent.

Whitney: Seems important for documentary theater genre to simply be about raising important questions that this play raises. (Example of theater in Chicago on 1990’s police torture scandals)

Kelly: Problem, though, is that I knew what the message was going to be in this play as soon as I started reading it. I knew that everyone was going to turn out to be innocent. Problem in my evaluation of the play because of that.

Ellen: Also important to account for the gradual shift over time that a play like this produces, which might allow us to have the kind of reaction Kelly had. It’s hard from a production history to analyze what the political intent of the production was at its beginning. Part of the institution of theater (necessary to keep it in business) that the nature of politics surrounding a show will change based on audiences and contemporary events at specific times. It can be off-putting sometimes to have nothing but that sense of collective relief that we’re being forced to feel. Especially when the initial purpose might have been more interested in reigniting a conversation. But, with this play, the stories themselves are what surprised me. Some of them almost shocking for their “cliché-ness.”

Justin: Saw the play in performance pretty early in its run (2004) and the director used light and space to set apart the exonerated from the other characters. Interesting because audience then gained insight into what the interview process with these people would have been like. Made me wonder about why they chose these particular six stories over all the others.

Jess: These characters may have seemed especially riveting? Saw a student production in 2005 with all student actors at a small liberal arts college. Problem with age-appropriateness and demographic tensions.

Justin: Early readings of this play actually had more characters, ten total, that were then cut during editing. These six somehow emerged as more interesting or important.

Courtney: Sunny’s important seems most obvious because she isn’t actually exonerated. The political message behind her story seems the most clear.

Ellen: Important to remember that, in choosing, even for real life major legal cases, everything is very carefully staged. The selection criteria for federal court cases is often based on lovability of the client or the political inclinations of particular judges. What correspondence might we see there with why these particular stories were chosen?

Dorothy: Story about inmate beating the prison guards. People’s actions problematizing the image created in court. The sympathy factor of the audience in a case like that is hard to produce.

Ellen: “Radio Reader” show on NPR is currently reading Anatomy of Injustice, book which pays attention to the complexity of bringing case to appeal when justices have declared legal leaving an innocent person in jail if there’s no miscarriage of justice in the original trial. Seems we can definitely understand the need for this abstraction for overall effectiveness of the legal system, but from a practical level, this is insupportable. Cases that go up in front of Supreme Court are so staged – what the effect of this play is then? Seems emotionally potent, but it doesn’t have the Brechtian follow-up of deconstructing and questioning the mechanisms at work behind these problems.

Amy: But this play importantly had a real world effect. That may not have happened with another version of the story or with non-celebrity actors. There seems to be a very strategically deployed affective state in order to insist on one particular cognitive outcome.

Ming: Referenced pg. 17 of the “Uses of Empathy” article and how Jensen and Blank scrapped anything that didn’t feel like dialogue with the audience. What about the type of emotional coercion at work here is a dialogue?

Ellen: Brings back questions Carlson raises about melodrama. This play functions along with structure of melodramatic affect.

Amy: This takes us back to acting style. Brecht is talking specifically to actors in his theories, Jensen and Blank are talking to the characters. Removing affect from the characters and their narratives in order to deploy affect about the entire situation. These characters don’t matter – the point is the system and they’re trying to generate emotional reaction around death row.

Ellen: At the same time, they’re very interested in keeping those characters straight. They can’t entirely pull away from the structures of emotion that fourth wall theater maintains to engage audience.

Ming: But Sunny was the most important to me and I did leave feeling bad for her. I had my emotional reaction to the entire situation directly through her character.

Courtney: But that emotional reaction was ultimately a push to question and aide restructuring of the system, not to help Sunny directly.

Sarah: The important thing is the continuation of circumstances that the play suggests. We need the momentary empathetic responses in order to connect, but there also needs to be a larger impetus.

Dorothy: Brings to mind the choosing of protests for court cases. Another “Rosa Parks” was considered first for that court case. Importance of wanting to have a personified character behind these questions and events.

Amy: Making a plea for the stakes of this class and our work as scholars. A large amount of our political and ideological opinions come from narratives. Reading performance as a construction of narratives will make us better judges, but we can never lose that part of emotion and turn completely Spock. The point is to become smart about our reading of performance and keep in mind the importance of casting, even from scholarly standpoint. It will matter what you write about in scholarly careers. People won’t want you to write on some things based on your background, political outlook, education, etc.

Jennifer: Circle back to Kelly’s original question about why this is a play. Maybe it has something to do with the effectiveness of a communal audience?

Kelly: Communal audience does seem to fulfill political mission of Exonerated in an important way.

Sarah: Reminded of Davis and the story of the ram that was put on display. It was only spectacle when a community of people were watching it and paying to see it.

Jennifer: Seems different, though, from Handke’s message of the audience working as a unit and how to go about motivating them.

Dorothy: Importance of making it a play seems to connect to the type of people that go see plays. It’s a different class of people then those who watch documentary films.

Amy: Reminded of Andrea’s work and medieval theater. There’s an importance of community and making immediate things that were absent at the time. Putting Christ on stage – there’s something important about theater and the actors repeating their performances for different audiences. “Doing it again tonight.”

Courtney: That seems even more significant if the people acting are not the people who these situations happen to in real life. Support for having celebrity cast.

Ellen: While I am strongly supportive of this type of work in general, the problem for me is on the mechanical level. Nothing has changed from theater in 1850 until now. How does that affect hopes for political change? When will we be able to address complex political issues on equality that need to go past this traditional format? The system of expression becomes really problematic because it doesn’t change Carlson’s point. If emotional commitment continues to be the thing that translates directly into political action, are we ever going to get to a point of new politics? Can we invite others to try and maintain a type of critical stance when politicians have been trained that emotion is the way to effect political change?

Amy: What becomes important is the knowledge of the play regarding the performer – at what moment are essential elements of the performer relevant? Gets back to the question of scholars and how the identity of the writer affects his/her work.

Dorothy: That seems extremely important and there are some things that people can’t or shouldn’t say because they don’t have a particular kind of perspective.

Sarah: But what do we lose with that kind of attitude? When we focus on the issue of a person’s identity, what do we potentially lose in the nuances of their argument?