Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage Palgrave Macmillan, January 2010
Documentary theatre is a form of theatre created from the verbatim use of interviews, photographs and historical proceedings. This book brings together essays, interviews and performance texts, many published here for the first time, which describe and analyse documentary theatre around the world: both its history and its proliferation since 9/11.
The Dramaturgy of the Real is a provocative international collection of writings by leading scholars and artists, all of whom ask questions about how we have come to understand reality and truth in the 21st century, and specifically, how we can stage the real within the frame of the fictional while questioning the relationship between facts and truth. The theoretical, historical and performance texts included in the anthology give the reader access to ideas about aesthetics, truth, and reality in countries as diverse as Poland, Argentina, South Africa, Lebanon, the U.S., Holland, and Germany.
Polish contributions include essays on the history of documentary theater in Poland by Agnieszka Sowinska and Joanna Ostrowska, as well as the texts of two Polish plays: The Filesby the Theatre of the Eighth Day and Burn Your House Down by Pawel Demirski, along with an interview with Demirski by Pawel Sztarbowski, We’re not Hyenas.
Carol Martin is Associate Professor of Drama at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City.
The translation of the Polish texts has been made possible through generous grants from the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Book Institute in Krakow, Poland. Special thanks to the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Poland, for its help.
