Drama and Life Writing

Taken from:

Hubbard, Robert. “Drama and Life Writing.” Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms; Volume 1 A-K. Ed Margarette Jolly. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001. 285-287

Drama is not an obvious medium for autobiographical elaboration. The dialogic nature of mainstream Western dramatic traditions, not to mention the collaborative or conventionalized nature of most traditions of theatrical production, militate against authorial self-reflexivity. There are some exceptions, of course (such as August Strindberg, whose tortured relationships with women were occasionally vented through his plays, and the modern manifestations of the one-person show and performance art); but most dramatists have reverted to narrative, diary, and letter to reflect on their lives.

On the other hand, biography has frequently been appropriated as material for dramatic representation, in particular a form of history conceived as biography of the powerful. Many cultures have such traditions. The Western tradition goes back to 5^th-century Athens. One of the extant Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’ Persae (performed in 472 BCE; Persians), dramatizes the defeat of Xerxes’ Persian navy at the hands of the Greeks, at the Battle of Salamis – a battle in which the author, and doubtless many of the audience, took part: the play works though the effects of defeat on Xerxes and the Persian court. And Aristphanes’ Ranae (405 BCE; The Frogs), a dramatized fantasy debate between the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides, amounts to the kind of popular biographical sketch of the two. Moreover, in a society without discrete conceptions of myth, history, and religion, mythical figures such as Oedipus or Medea could be regarded “historically”, and thus treated almost quasi-biographically – although the sheer variety evident in ancient dramatic plots and character treatments suggests audiences were never simplistic about historical “truth”.

English drama before the 16^th century frequently personified abstract moral qualities and sins – sometimes somberly and reverentially, sometimes farcically. Perhaps the best-known and most enduring English-language examples are Mankind (written c. 1465-70) and the late Everyman (c. 1520, but adapted from the 14^th-century Dutch Elkerlijc), a play which as its title implies, aspires to be a kind of universal exemplary biography in dramatic form. In what the 19^th century called the “mystery plays”, the medieval guilds exerted their civic pride and wealth through outdoor productions of free adapted Old and New Testament events merged with often comic scenes evocative of everyday life, and perhaps even specific individuals in the community. The plays were part exemplary, part festive, part self-congratulatory on the part of the guilds; but they also vibrantly articulated a form of communal biography. In China, too, medieval drama exhibited a biographical impetus. During the Mongol Yuan dynasty (13^th and 14^th centuries), dramas of the zaju type often portrayed heroically conceived figures of the Three Kingdoms era (220-65), while others focused on law cases, including some based on a famous living judge (whose real-life severity was, it seems, transformed theatrically into wise benevolence).

Sixteenth- and 17^th – century European drama, increasingly political and secular in its concerns, witnessed an expanded willingness to make dramatic capital out of the lives of real-life historical personages. Early examples include John Bales’ King John (first version c. 1538) and lost anti-Catholic character-assassinations such as Bale’s The Knaveries of Thomas Beckett. As professional theatres became established, and the profession of playwright emerged – a profession that often required patronage from powerful figures, including the monarchy – pro-Tudor hagiographic plays proliferated, while other dramatists picked safe historical material, such as the 15^th-century pretender Perkin Warbeck, who provided the subject for several writers. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (performed c. 1587), a huge success, was sourced from the dimly known Central-Asian warrior Tamerlane. If, as many critics have thought, the play was deliberately anti-establishment in its portrayal of a crude shepherd vanquishing mighty kings, it also suggests the limitations of the time, in that so distant a figure had to become a vehicle for Marlowe’s ideas rather than a figure from English history.

By far the most influential exponent of biographical drama in the English-speaking world has been, of course, Shakespeare, whose plays based on English, Scottish, and Ancient monarchs and emperors (and the “improvements” and interpretations of them by generations of actors and producers) fed back into popular historical conceptions of the individuals, perhaps most notably in the cases of Richard III, Henry V, and Macbeth. The plays remain elusive in their political orientation, however, with some critics regarding the English history plays as a collective justification of the Tudor regime as laudable and inevitable, while others see them as slyly subversive. (In the case, for example, of his Henry VIII, modern directors often structure productions to expose Henry as a prototypical tyrant, an interpretive stance that could have been life-threatening at the time.) It is perhaps Shakespeare’s ability to dramatize political figures while, through his craft, making their life events have universal and private-psychological resonance, that allows such persistent ambiguity and richness. And he was not so foolhardy (or he was too self-serving, depending on one’s view) as to tackle contemporary politics or political figures head on. The contemporary figures of Shakespeare’s world are either small-town and comic (The Merry Wives of Windsor), or situated in foreign or fantasy lands. The temptation to read The Tempest autobiographically, with the creator of fantasy and magic Prospero/Shakespeare laying down his powers in the autumn of his life, has proved strong to producers and critics alike; but the reading remains at the level of conceit, and however likely psychologically, there is no documentary evidence of any autobiographical intent.

After the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, and the reinvigoration of a defunct London theatre, John Dryden and others created a vogue for heroic tragedy, often historically based. Once again, the obvious sources were classical history (notably Dryden’s All for Love, 1677, his version of the Antony and Cleopatra amour fou), with the subjects ennobled through the strictures of continental neoclassical style and decorum. Elsewhere, Shakespeare’s influence was felt widely, and contributed especially to the rise of historical drama in the German states, most notable examples being Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773; Goetz von Berlichengen with the Iron Hand), which Goethe based on the autobiography of the eponymous 16^th-century knight, Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1800; Mary Stuart) – in which the unusual historical confluences of two powerful women at the epicenter of politics produced a kind of dual psycho-biography of England’s Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots – and the same author’s three-part Wallenstein, centring on this Austrian leader during the Thirty Years’ War (on which subject Schiller was a specialist).

Since the Romantic era, whose fascination with the overweening individual complemented the history-as-biography-of-the-powerful underpinnings of earlier periods, this type of historical drama petered out by the 20^th century, ironically as many of the earlier plays were being rediscovered for performance. In the 20^th century, stage interpretations of real lives developed in a number of disparate styles, many of which are relatively small scale. Grandiose portrayals of the lives of the famous (or notorious) have largely become the territory of film and television.

Something of the historical tradition in theatre has survived though. The American South, for example, continues to maintain the quaint genre of the “outdoor historical drama”. In a similar manner to Shakespeare’s history plays, these rural anthologies mythologize the lives of historical figures. Usually based on the lives of American frontier heroes such as Daniel Boon and Davie Crocket, outdoor historical dramas typically reinforce the American myths of rugged individualism, rural simplicity, and manifest destiny. Paul Green stands out as perhaps the most prolific and successful playwright of this form. Seemingly beneath the radar of the theatre elite, the elaborate spectacle of outdoor historical drama routinely dwarfs other forms of American theatre in audience attendance and loyalty.

“Documentary drama”, a less provincial and more highbrow form of biographical theatre, encompasses a wide range of texts and styles. Many dramas identified as documentary drama maintain a traditional “well-made” theatrical structure; this despite the fact that they are composed almost exclusively of material complied – often verbatim – from historical sources. Others take on a more free-form narrative style. The Federal Theatre Project’s controversial and quickly censored Living Newspaper survives as an early example of documentary drama in the United States. The form achieved notable success in postwar Germany as a means of grappling with recent history and contemporary events: Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Openheimer (1964; In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer) examined the 1954 American hearing that accused the scientist of delaying progress in developing the hydrogen bomb; Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlun (1965; The Investigation), based on court records and accounts, dramatized the trial of the perpetrators of events in Auschwitz – a play simultaneously premiered by 14 German theatres and by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London; and Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldaten (1967; The Soldiers) controversially posited Winston Churchill’s complicity in the death of World War II Polish leader General Sikorsky (Britain’s National Theatre banned its own production of the play).

In more recent practice, Emily Mann’s acclaimed plays Still Life (1980) and Execution of Justice (1983) use theatre to explore highly charged political and social problems. The tradition continues in such dramas as Martin Duberman’s In White America (1964) and Steven Dietz’s God’s Country (1994). Whereas Duberman’s play uses speeches, oral histories, and other historical documents to explore the African American experience, Dietz employs similar dramaturgical strategies to investigate the phenomenon of white supremacy. In the solo form, Anna Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1993) and Twilight (1994) represent two powerful examples of personal narratives scripted into theatrical texts. More arranged than written, documentary drama provokes powerful responses from audiences. The controversial points of view that emerge from this style of theatre indicate that the method of placement of texts often matters as much as the selection of the texts themselves.

The tradition of the “one-person show” is another important form of dramatic life writing. The origins of this vibrant form date back to the Victorian practice of “platform performance”. In this 19t-century tradition, elocutionists performed selections of poetry and prose in churches and recital halls in Britain and the United States. These platform performers provided an alternative for those Victorians who were too pristine for the seedy associations of the 19^th-century professional theatre. Gradually, writers began reading their own work at venues pioneered by platform performers. Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain all supplemented their incomes by “playing themselves” in these venues. These cultivated expressions of literary persona eventually inspired the formation of a lecture circuit, the Redpath Lyceum. Platform performers also found opportunities on the Chautaugua platform, and to a lesser degree, in vaudeville houses.

Although platform performance no longer exists as a vibrant form, the legacy of the movement continues to flourish. The phenomenon of Mark Twain Tonight (performed from 1954) provides a good example. In 1947 a young actor named Hal Holbrook began to research Twain’s career as a platform performer. He soon developed a one-person show in which he impersonated Twain. Thousands of performances and more than 50 years later, he still performs his acclaimed work. Hundreds of similar biographical shows followed suit. Literary figures remain popular subjects, as do politicians, lawyers, scientists, and virtually any talented person connected to public life. Prominent examples include William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst (1976), first performed by Julie Harris; The Importance of Being Oscar (first performed, 1961), scripted and performed by Michael MacLiammoir; David Rintels’s Clarence Darrow (1975), performed by, among others, Henry Fonda; and Give ‘em Hell Harry (1975), conceived and performed by James Whitmore. Through dramas such as these, biographical writing continues to flourish in the form of the one-person show. The colossal expense of mounting shows on Broadway even encourages the form: a cast of one—especially if a star—combines audience appeal with a ceiling on costs.

The appeal of the life of letters is not limited to the one-person show form. Multi-character “literary dramas” thrive yet another important, if under-recognized, form of biographical drama. Similar to literary biography, literary drama depicts the lives of writers. Although not widely identified as a sub-genre of biographical drama, literary dramas number in the hundreds and included many very popular and Robert E. Lee’s The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail (1970) was the most produced play in the United States during the 1970s. Other examples of this genre include William Nicholson’s Shadowlands (1989), based on the marriage late in life of C.S. Lewis; Michael Hastings’s Tom and Viv (1985), depicting T.S. Eliot’s troubled first marriage; and, more recently, John Guare’s Broadway drama, Judas Kiss (1999), about the Oscar Wilde scandal. Many film versions of literary drama also exist. The Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love (1998) is a prominent example.

The texts for “performance art”, unusually, draw mostly on autobiographical sources. With its roots in futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and conceptual art, the eclectic range of performance forms lumped under the term “performance art” makes easy definitions difficult. Still, the frequent tendency to perform the “body as text” (Chris Burden, Karin Finley, and Ron Athey, among others), combined with the increasingly common practice of transforming autobiographical stories into dramatic texts (Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Holly Hughes, and Michael Kearns, to name a few), locate performance art as a noteworthy form of theatrical life writing. Most performance art pieces are solo works. But unlike the one-person show, performance art usually features the performer’s life experience as the central core of the theatrical text.

Finally, the genre frequently described as “community-based theatre” straddles the line between biographical and autobiographical writing. Currently practiced extensively in Britain and the United States, community-based theatre represents a modern incarnation of what might once have been referred to as “folk drama”. Both terms describe what happens when tightly knit groups of people dramatize the stories that define their communities. Community based theatre, or “grassroots theatre”, as it is also called, differs from traditional forms of folk drama in that it often has as its goal an explicitly empowering and therapeutic performance. Facilitated by artists and scholars in the fields of performance studies, drama in education, and psycho-therapy, community-based dramas share the characteristic of being produced by, for, to, and about a given community. Because of an emphasis on both the individual and the group, community-based theatre exists at the crossroads of biographical and autobiographical forms of theatre.

As is evident, these dramatic forms of life writing comprise a very broad spectrum of theatrical text. Although widely different in form, they unite under a common focus: the representation of biography and autobiography through the art of theatrical presentation.

~Robert Hubbard~

Further Reading

Cocke, Dudley, Harry Newman, and Janet Salmons-Rue (editors), From the Ground Up: Grassroots Theatre in Historical and Contemporary Perspective, Ithaca, New York: Community-Based Arts Project of Cornell University, 1993

Dawson, Gary Fisher, Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form and Stagecraft, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999

Filewod, Alan D., Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canaad, Toronto and Buffalo, New York: University of Toronto Press, 1987

Gentile, John S., Cast of One: Onr-Person Shows from the Chautauguua Platform to the Broadway Stage, Urbana University of Illinois Press 1989

Goldberg, RoseLee, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, revised edition, New York: Abrams, and London: Thames and Hudson, 1988

Hillman, Richard, Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern Drama: Subjectivity, Discourse and Stage, London: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997

Hoderness, Graham, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, and Lanham, Maryland: Barnes and Noble, 1992

Hubbard, Robert J., “The Author on the boards: Intertextuality and Literary Biographical Drama” (dissertation), Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University, 1996

Jellicoe, Ann, Community Plays: How to Put Them On, London and New York: Methuen, 1987

Johnson, Walter, Strindberg and the Historical Drama, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963

Kuftinec, Sonja, “A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre”, Theatre Topics, 6/1 (1996): 91-104

Lamport, F.J., German Classical Drama: Theatre, Humanity, and Nation, 1750-1870, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Lindenberger, Herbert, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1975

Mackerras, Colin, Chinese Drama: A Historical Survey, Beijing: New World Press, 1990

McConachie, Bruce, “Approaching the ‘Structure of Feeling’ in Grassroots Theatre”, Theatre Topics, 8/1 (1998): 33-53

Paget, Derek, True Stories?: Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen, and Stage, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990

Patterson, Michael, German Theatre Today: Post-War Theatre in West and East Germany, Austria and Northern Switzerland, London: Pitman, 1976

Redmond, James (editor), Historical Drama, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986 (Themes in Drama series)

Russell, Mark (editor), Out of Character: Rants, Raves and Monologues from Today’s Top Performance Artists, New York: Bantam, 1997

Sherman, Jason (editor), Solo, Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994

Stern, Carol Simpson and Bruce Henderson, Performance: Texts and Contexts, London and New York: Longman, 1993

Subiotto, A.V., German Documentary Theatre, Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham, 1972 (lecture)

Young, Jordan R., Acting Solo: The Art of One-Man Shows, Beverly Hills, California: Moonstone Press, 1989