Short Summary of This Book
This book examines the history, ethics and intentions of staging people’s personal stories and offers theater-makers detailed guidance and a practical model—called the Drama Spiral—to support safe and ethical practice.
Contemporary theater has crossed boldly into therapeutic terrain and is now the site of radical self-exposure. Stage productions that would once have seemed shockingly personal and exposing have become commonplace, as people reveal their personal stories to audiences with ever-increasing candor. While there are many successful and inspirational examples of such productions, at the same time, there are significant risks inherent in putting people’s private lives on the stage, particularly when their stories focus on unresolved difficulties or when the performers may be vulnerable.
These risks have prompted the need for a robust framework for safe, ethical, flexible and intentional practice by theater-makers. In order to create a broader spectrum of ethical risk-taking where practitioners can negotiate blurred boundaries in safe and creative ways, this book draws on relevant therapeutic principles and guidelines in order to re-connect therapy and theater and promote best practice in the theater of personal stories—a term intended to cover the myriad forms of theater that make use of people’s personal stories.
The book describes a pragmatic framework that synthesizes theory and practice from the fields of theater and performance studies, psychodrama and attachment narrative therapy. This integrated framework has four elements, which are explored respectively in Chaps. 2, 3, 4 and 5: (2) History: understanding the roots of the theater of personal stories in traditions of art, oral history, social activism, theater and therapy; (3) Ethics: incorporating wide-ranging ethical issues inherent in staging personal stories; (4) Praxis: structuring participatory theater processes to regulate the level of personal disclosure among participants; and (5) Intentions: having a clear purpose in mind when workshopping personal stories and presenting them to audiences. Considered together as an integrated whole, the four elements of the framework are intended to provide a basis for safe and ethical practice in staging personal stories for theater-makers, educators, participant-performers, scholars and researchers.
The Rapid Rise of the Theater of Personal Stories
In recent decades, there has been a rapid hybridization of theater forms and approaches that draw directly on the personal and collective stories of participants, performers, audiences and citizens with stories to tell (Foster 1996; Heddon 2008; Leffler 2012; Martin 2013; Salas 1993). From autobiographical drama to investigatory and documentary plays, from theater of witness to self-revelatory forms, theater-makers are drawing on lived experience and creating powerful work that is transformative for participant-performers, for auto-ethnographic performers, and for audiences and spect-actors (Boal 1979, 1995; Cohen-Cruz 2006; Emunah 2015; Pendzik et al. 2016).
While real events have been a subject of the theater going back to the plays of ancient Greece, since the latter part of the twentieth century there has been a distinct shift within the theater that amounts to a genuine innovation in the way that stories are sourced and presented in the theater. Since the late 1960s, and accelerating since the 1990s, something genuinely new has been taking place on the international stage, a step-change that foregrounds individuals and the particulars of their lives, their personal stories, their subjective experience and their personal struggles as the subject matter for theater-making (Garde and Mumford 2016; Heddon 2008; Landy and Montgomery 2012; Snow 2016). The proliferation of forms and artists presenting such work is vast and increasing, showing every sign of being here to stay. As Guardian theater critic Lyn Gardner has written about autobiographical performances on the stage, ‘as audiences, we like the idea that we are getting something from the horse’s mouth and that what we are being told is true’ (Gardner 2016). Johnny Saldaña has identified more than eighty closely related sub-genres all rooted in real events, including autodrama, self-performance, performing autobiography, documentary theater, factual theater, living newspaper, memory theater, performed ethnography, reality theater, and many others—plus his own specialist focus on ethnodrama and ethnotheatre (Saldaña 2011: 13–14). Many of the sub-genres he identifies focus on the use of people’s personal and collective stories to create theater. Pendzik et al. (2016) have recently added the terms self-revelatory theater and autoethnographic therapeutic performance. The many genres and artists intermix and develop ever more hybrids. This is not to mention the accelerating profusion of reality and reality-based programs on the internet, television and radio. While the many sub-genres focused on people’s personal stories could possibly be set within the broader genres of theater of the real (Forsyth and Megson 2009; Martin 2012, 2013) or the theater of real people (Garde and Mumford 2016), the proliferation of forms is so great that the theater of personal stories could be said to form a genre in itself.
This rapid expansion of personal stories on the stage, in their myriad sub-genres and hybrids, has meant that practice has raced ahead of theory. Where once we could make what seemed like clear distinctions between dramatherapy, psychodrama and theater practice (including applied theater), this is no longer the case. To highlight this point, in 1996 the dramatherapist and author Phil Jones could justifiably write that ‘the chief difference between theater and Dramatherapy […] is that the Dramatherapy experience allows for the exploration and resolution of projections whereas the theater only invites an expression of projected feelings’ (Jones 1996: 135). As this book will demonstrate, this distinction no longer holds. Theater practice has moved on considerably since the 1990s, and the older distinctions between theater and therapy have been thoroughly reconstituted and problematized in the crucible of the theater of personal stories. Mainstream and applied theater now includes personal stories where people recount, deconstruct, work through, critically analyze, reflect on and, yes, sometimes even resolve (see Jones’ quotation, above) all manner of difficult and painful human issues that might previously have been thought to be the exclusive purview of therapeutic settings. These stories are often portrayed in autobiographical fashion by the person themselves (Haughton 2018). Looking at recent examples, the themes that are addressed in these personal stories include people sharing their experiences of trauma, loss, addiction, violence, crime, war, illness, injury, marginalization, pain, torture, abuse, prejudice, oppression, rejection, abandonment, and many other difficult, painful, horrific or life-threatening experiences. The theater of personal stories includes many positive stories, too; I am highlighting the difficult and painful themes because they are the themes likely to raise the ethical questions I am addressing here.
When I say that practice has raced ahead of theory, I am simply pointing out that we need ways of theorizing the why, how, where, what, when and who of such performances, and ways of structuring our thinking and our processes around such radical self-disclosures in front of audiences. To offer perhaps the most startling example I have yet come across, we are now at the point in the contemporary theater where a wounded former soldier—a double leg amputee in his early 20s who was wounded on a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the British Army—reenacts in front of 900 people in a public theater the moment when his legs were blown off by an improvised explosive device. (The scene is played through a thin veil of fiction that changes superficial details, e.g. he is called by another name.) The scene shows the moment of the explosion and its aftermath of screaming, smoke-filled horror and confusion, and shows the soldier’s rescue by his platoon. For me as an audience member, this harrowing scene was almost unbearably shocking because the soldier was essentially reenacting his own near-death experience. This scene was in the highly acclaimed production The Two Worlds of Charlie F by Bravo 22 Company, with a script by Owen Sheers, which toured to packed houses across the UK in 2012 and about which a televised ‘making of’ documentary was filmed, presented by Alan Yentob (Sheers 2012). The main reason for the public notoriety of the production was that it featured a cast mostly comprised of wounded war veterans, including infantryman Daniel Shaw, the young soldier described. In my conversations with members of the production team after a performance in Wolverhampton, they referred to the theater-making process and the production of Charlie F as ‘rehab drama’—in other words, an integral part of the soldiers’ rehabilitation for psychological and physical wounds suffered in battle.
The Two Worlds of Charlie F is just one of the many and increasing examples of radical self-exposure in the portrayal of personal stories of extreme distress on the stage. At the moment when we see people reenacting on the public stage their experience of being mutilated in battle, followed by standing ovations in packed houses, all bets are off and we need to completely re-examine previously accepted notions of the boundary between theater and therapy. Seemingly no topic is off limits in the theater of personal stories, and this has serious ethical, theoretical and practice implications for theater practitioners who work with people’s personal stories (including their own). And Charlie F is by no means an outlier at the extremes of self-exposure on the stage; I will provide examples from a selection of plays addressing highly personal topics that are just as significant as that represented in Charlie F.
A Note About Terminology
In this book, I use the umbrella term ‘theater of personal stories’ as a term of convenience to encompass all theater-based forms that include people’s personal and collective sto...