Show Me the Gun, or Shoot Me With It (Entry #3)

     "When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality."
                    -Julie Taymor

     I went to the New Orleans Fringe Fest for the first time a year ago. It was a doozy. I saw a show called Nightmares that a troupe from NY did in an old church (it was nightmarish, in a bad way). I saw a show at a lounge called Murder Ballad Murder Mystery done by a group from Austin, Texas, which was wacky and fun and also needed some major script rewrites. But the show that I truly loved and had laughter tears over was The NOLA Project's Oregon Trail: The Play. It was exactly what it sounds like. For those unfamiliar with Oregon Trail, it was an old PC game that looked like this. The show was the best 60 minutes of theatre I have seen in a while. Rapid fire comedy, creative ways to handle dying of dysentery and crossing a river on stage, and even included a part of the play for the audience to go hunting, complete with nerf guns that you fired at actors on stage while they were trying to, you know, act and stuff. What made it so awesome though was that even though the entire show was based on one specific computer game, it was written in a way that made it appeal to anyone, even an audience member who had never heard of the game before. It was incredible.
     It was also almost the anthesis of "true" theatre. It was a play written about a computer game. Nothing in the play ever made me go, oh my god, that's so relatable. I left repeating some of the jokes, but I didn't walk out with a new outlook on life.
     The show that convinced me of something true was Sojourn Theatre's How to End Poverty in 60 Minutes. The show ended and I walked out of the room overwhelmed, stressed, enlightened, deeply troubled, impressed, and totally blown away. It was part of last year's Dept. of Communication Studies' HopKins Black Box season. The production was described as

"This is not a play; it is not a lecture; it is not an interactive workshop; it is not a physical theatre piece; it is not a public conversation. "How to End Poverty in 60 Minutes" is all of these things. Most significantly, it’s an opportunity to challenge a different audience every show with the question: how do you attack the problem of poverty in America?"

     It was heavy stuff. There was a script that a group of actors used as a jumping off point. They would present an idea through dialogue and performance, and then they would all break off and lead a small discussion with broken off chunks of the audience. You as a small group and actor/guide would have to come up with a decision to whatever the question was, and then that actor would bring it into the performance and suddenly your ideas and thoughts were in the performance. Everyone paid $7 to get in, and at the end of the night, all of the groups had to decide what the biggest problem in Baton Rouge was. Was it the education system, the city infrastructure, homelessness, etc. Each topic represented a real business or organization in Baton Rouge related to that topic. The topic that had the most votes was rewarded with the show's profits from that night. It was quite literally jaw-dropping. There was an urgency from the moment I walked into the room that I needed to do something NOW, and I left hot and ready to discuss these ideas with people. It took very real situations that affected me and people I knew personally and with the aid of theatre and performance, presented the facts and brought up questions in a way that forced me to think about them collaboratively with people I never knew in ways I never thought. Truth was bleeding from that production at an alarming rate.
     I do think there is a difference between performances that offer some kind of truth versus performances that strive for documentary "verbatim" reality. It's a subtle one, but I do think it's notable. Performances that offer a kind of truth often hint at the truth, or nudge it in your direction in hopes that you'll want to pick it up and examine it. It's often masked inside of a story or placed in a metaphor. My second show example isn't the case here, but I find that this is usually how it goes. A performance that strives for "verbatim" reality, however, seems to bash it over my head. It's often angry and looking to make a statement. It's loud and has a call to action and is thrashing around violently in hopes of getting you to feel a certain way.
     Martin says on page 5, "Is documentary theatre just another form of propaganda, its own system of constructed half-truths for the sake of specific arguments? Typically its texts and performances are presented not just as a version of what happened but the version of what happened." That's the problem I have with documentary theatre. It almost insists that it is right, that "this is what happened." It presents itself as the truth. Like a rare occasion to watch history come to life on stage. It doesn't give me a chance to think, it tells me how I should feel. It's in your face.
     Performances that offer some kind of truth and performances that strive for naturalistic reality differ in their approach of telling the story and of influencing the audience. One places the information there and allows you to examine it, while the other presents itself as fact that you should accept. The trouble then lies in the accuracy of the "fact", the gathering and compiling of the "fact", and what the person with the "facts" wants me to know (or not know).