Verbatim Play Project: To Drive or To Cats.
-Recorded and Transcribed to the best of my
ability, though I'm sure my human qualities skewed it a bit.
-I did not get consent to record this, but I
plan to tell everyone next class and, by then, we will have experienced this
piece and I could retract it if needed. (giggle as I ask for forgiveness later)
-Key of characters: /
overlap … thought continuing over next text or coming
into from last person’s thoughts.
SCENE Favorite
(Ambient keys and bags adjusting roller chairs
and keyboard. A random girl humming as students are coming into class)
A-
…well I found the Qlab
folder/
B-
oh yeah?
A-
… but I don’t see
where it… mentions…the small project
B-
I think it was a
separate link… via moodle/
C-
..the… to turn in the…
It was email.
D-
It was email?!...
C-
Yeah
D-
I’m gonna send her an
email but, but Shannon mentioned it in class
B- But she was going to upload a moodle
something/
A-
I thought it was a
google Drive.
B-
I emailed as well
cause I couldn’t… find the moodle thing… I couldn’t find a link that worked at
least.
A-
yeah… none of these
links… just bring me to a different… file… oh, here it is! Oh no its, that’s
where you drop the logic files unless on here, ok yeah no, ok here so it’s it’s
it’s the last one where/
B-
I feel like…/ when I
tried
A-
That says small
project 2 this’s a different class, this is a different class’s small project
B-
I tried to add it and
it wouldn’t let me, you know how it like, it either makes something available
or not, it would not let me put it into anything that… was connected to that
link… Your shirt has a lot of cats.
E-
Yeah It does. It’s one
of my favorites.
When it comes to verbatim theatre that I have seen
or heard, I’m not sure I recognized that it fits into this category while I was
experiencing it, if I’ve experienced much at all. And, even now, studying a bit
about the style, no shows pop up as pieces that I identified in this category
from brain scans of past visits to the theatre. Does that mean that I haven’t
seen or read any? I’m fairly sure this is not the case, but perhaps it is
difficult to separate the verbatim label from experiences we’ve all had and
then (at least perhaps from a playwright’s perspective) recall them strongly
enough to want to write about them.
If I were to think about the verbatim play
attempt above, having not listened to the recording, I’m fairly certain I would
have forgotten about the conversation about cats, because it was much less
important in the moment than finding the link to upload the homework. However,
in listening to the recording, I found that the dude with the cat shirt shifted
our entire conversation in the moment. It was an obstacle to the initial goal
which was to get homework turned in correctly. But it was so powerful at that
moment. For what it’s worth, my memory had almost completely forgotten about
the cat shirt even though it only happened earlier today (perhaps in part
because my allergy to cats makes me prefer to forget about them, sorry friends
who love them dearly). The brain does weird things when it prioritizes the importance
of our experiences. I can understand Peter Cheesemen’s urging argument to make
it the responsibility of more than one person to interpret the material.
However, isn’t a director putting his spin on any piece of theatre or film? Isn’t
the playwright choosing that which should be said and what might have more
impact as dark matter? Goffman, again, comes to mind when we try to delineate between
what a playwright/director/design team/company of actors “gives” and what the
audience receives or what the conglomeration of that work “gives off.” A piece
of theatre is created to give a specific message, but that may not be what the
receiver receives, based on the effectiveness of the framing. I’m not sure it’s
ever possible to get completely neutral even with verbatim theatre, because
there is always a human of some kind re-telling the story from their
perspective. Even robots are skewed based on their human creator’s perspective.
Now that I think of it, I’ve seen probably
hundreds of documentary-style shows if you consider Europe travel videos by
Rick Steves, NOVA specials with Alan Alda, Cooking shows by Jaques Pepin, and history
pieces on the BBC. Even Garrison Keillor
episodes of Prairie Home Companion probably have some element of verbatim in
the comment that the artists have between sets as they ease into their next
prepared piece (something that happened in rehearsal, they liked it and
recreated the shtick between sets for performance), much like Carol Burnett was
known on her show for being able to improvise better than the writing itself, I’m
sure some came from happy mistakes in rehearsal. I would not consider any of
these examples verbatim theatre if we go to the truest definition because every
episode has an ultimate story to tell and lens to focus our experience through.
But how does this differ from verbatim theatre, really?
If the definition is that every word and
movement that is re-created is not changed in any way from its original, I
would argue that there is no such thing as verbatim theatre. Instead I offer
that this label is a way to categorize those pieces that are most like the
original but are not recorded digitally and reproduced. Instead, they are “re-called”
by a human who experienced something worth repeating for someone else in this
world.
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