The Exonerated (Style)

Style

Documentary Theater

The play belongs to the genre known as documentary theater, in which contemporary social issues are explored, often from a leftist or liberal standpoint, by the artful use of nonfiction materials, such as interview and court trial transcripts, speeches, articles, public hearings, and the like. The purpose of documentary theater is to challenge the audience to examine a particular social issue, such as an inequitable political system or social structure, abuse of power by those in authority, or other issues relating to class, race, gender, or sexual orientation.

The authors of The Exonerated interviewed many former death row prisoners and recorded hundreds of hours of audio tapes, which they then converted into typed transcripts. They also studied court transcripts and case files. As they write in the introduction to the play, "We spent countless hours in dusty courthouse record rooms, pawing through thousands of microfiche files and cardboard boxes full of affidavits, depositions, police interrogations, and courtroom testimony." Then they shaped and edited these voluminous and unwieldy documents into a ninety-minute play. Almost every word comes from the public record or from an interview the authors conducted. The result is a dramatic work that uses everyday language as spoken by real people, the stories of real people having been shaped by the dramatists into a theatrical form.

Although modern documentary theater was pioneered by German dramatists Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in the 1920s, the genre is as old as theater itself and can be dated back to 492 B.C.E., when the ancient Greek playwright Phrynichus wrote The Capture of Miletus, a play about the Persian War. Contemporary American dramatists who work in this genre include Mark Wolf, Emily Mann, Anna Deavere Smith, and Eve Ensler.