Introduction

For most readers who have seen the term before, documentary theatre connotes an arch-realist theatre that hybridizes the role of artist with that of journalist, ethnographer, antiquarian, or community organizer. It is understood to be a practice in which performance texts are constructed out of found non-fictional materials, often with some explicit pedagogical or activist aim. For many, documentary theatre also connotes an emphatically populist political theatre, wherein historically marginalized groups that are excluded from institutions of “fine art” can represent themselves to themselves. Documentary Living Newspaper plays of the 1920s and 1930s brimmed with formal invention, and contemporary documentaries include multimedia immersive works, puppet plays, and even Broadway musicals; yet many who hear the term still associate it with a kind of earnestly scrupulous political theatre primarily concerned with establishing the factuality and urgent importance of its contents.