Verbatim Theatre - Examples

Examples

Recent, high profile pieces of verbatim theatre include: The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman & Tectonic Theater and its sequel, The Laramie Project-Ten Years Later, both about the hate-murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998; Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans, My Name is Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, Deep Cut by Philip Ralph and Katharine Viner, The Permanent Way by David Hare, Counted (2010) by LookLeftLookRight. Unusually, London Road (2011) by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork, is a verbatim musical, in which the verbatim spoken text is coupled with music composed and sung to resemble the source interviews as closely as possible.

Another recent example is Black Watch, a piece that integrated interviews taken with actual members of the Black Watch with dramatized versions of their stories and dance pieces. The piece originated in the Edinburgh Festival and was created by the National Theatre of Scotland and Gregory Burke. Also, a play by Dustin Lance Black, 8, is an example that uses interviews and courtroom transcripts in order to reenact the legal argument and witness testimony of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case.

Recorded voice delivery is an extension of verbatim theatre in which actors have recorded interviews played back to them during the performance, allowing them to directly mimic the accents and manner of speech, as well as the words, of the people they portray. This technique was pioneered by American actress Anna Deavere Smith in her play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. A more recent example is Grandpa Sol and Lily's Grandma Rosie by Lana Schwarcz, in which Schwarz portrays the residents of a retirement home via puppetry and playback of interviews via iPod.

In 2012, the Welsh National Theatre put on a play about money problems between the different social classes named sgint. It was the first Welsh language Verbatim play.