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Theatre of Witness: Passage into a New Millennium

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Karen Malpede
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Abstract

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 47 , August 1996 , pp. 266 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. New York: Norton, 1993, p. 46.

2. See, among other sources, Gutman, Roy, Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993)Google Scholar; War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, two volumes (New York: Helsinki Watch, 1993).

3. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., p. 6, 10.

5. Snajder and I met at the 1994 Dionysia World Festival of Contemporary Drama where The Beekeeper's Daughter premiered. The play opened as a sold-out workshop in New York the following February, and was staged in Australia in May 1996: another New York production is planned for the 1996–97 season. Snakeskin was to be the centrepiece of that same festival in September 1995, after its German premiere. Among the playwrights who might be said to have written at least one play in a tradition of theatre of witness are Yeats, O'Casey, Augusta Gregory, Lorca, Stein, Lillian Atlan, Nellie Sachs, Ariel Dorfman, Caryl Churchill, Athol Fugard, Nzotake Shange, Tony Kushner, Helene Cixous, Emily Mann, Larry Kramer – a far from exhaustive list.

6. ‘Sto Moze Kazaliste?’, Novosti, 30 07 1994, p. 29Google Scholar, trans. Jasna Perucic, as ‘What Can Summer Festivals Do?’, unpublished. In this article, Snajder also wrote: ‘I want to assert unequivocally that this play is one of the most honest representations of our tragedy I have encountered so far…. I was deeply moved by this play, although in actuality, the play deals with “their” problems, not “ours”. But the world is homogeneous in its tragedy’.

7. Author's notes to Snakeskin, unpublished manuscript, trans. Niccoleta Gaida.

8. This, in any case, is a phrase he uses to describe his experience of watching Beekeeper, so the longing, at least, is on his mind.

9. Felman and Laub, p. 75 ff.

10. Stevan Weine, unpublished preface, p. 3, 4

11. Forche, p. 45.

12. Felman and Laub, p. xvi–xvii.

13. See Strozier, Charles B., Apocalypse: on the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon, 1994)Google Scholar, for the study of this phenomenon.