10

History, Memory and Trauma

in the Documentary Plays
of Emily Mann
Attilio Favorini

If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the
Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new litera-
ture, that of testimony.
(Wiesel, 1977, p. 9)

The thing I love about documentary theatre is that you can-

not lie.
(Mann, 2000, p. 8)

Over the course of the twentieth century, the enormities of history

challenged anew, and relentlessly, the capacity of memory to frame
or contain them. Nonetheless, traumatic suffering, particularly when
associated with cataclysmic world events, political ideology, and/or
institutionalised oppression, is characteristically processed through an
assortment of memorative activities and occasions frequently in con-
flict or contradiction: autobiographical archiving; reminiscence; nos-
talgia; public commemoration; the influence of memory milieux such
as family, state, class or religion; historical consciousness as reflected in
public or academic scholarship; memory sites such as museums, heritage
societies and public archives. The content or even viability of memory
is caught up in such systems, ‘which either support, suppress, distort
or even destroy the potential of other collectives and of individuals to
remember’ (Domansky, 1997, p. 238). ‘Memory work’, such as might
be undertaken in the construction of a memory play, may involve the
negotiation of a complex infrastructure consisting of ‘all the different
spaces, objects, “texts” that make an engagement with the past possible’

151
A. Forsyth et al. (eds.), Get Real
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2009
152 Attilio Favorini

(Irwin-Zarecka, 1994, p. 13). Further, history and memory may be seen

to take different paths of engagement with the past. Historians aim to
capture the synchronicity of a past moment so that conditions and
interpretation match, attempting to bridge temporal distance in a sort
of intellectual leap. Rememberers encounter the past in a manner that
is inescapably diachronic and relational, connecting past to present and
bridging temporal distance via the stepping stones of a lived life.
Irrespective of their differences, both historians and memorialists
construct narratives, subjecting accounts of the past to a degradation
Cathy Caruth warns of: ‘The difficulty of listening and responding to
traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, that does not
reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story,
is a problem that remains central to the task of therapists, literary crit-
ics, neurobiologists, and filmmakers alike’ (1995, p. vii). While this may
be taken as a more hopeful formulation of Adorno’s ‘After Auschwitz, it
is no longer possible to write poems’ (1973, p. 362), the difficulty is only
compounded by recognising the ‘lack of registration’ (p. 6), the hole or
void surrounding the traumatic event, as when the Holocaust is seen to
have involved a ‘collapse of witnessing’ (Laub, 1995, p. 65). Thus, the
labyrinth of contested memory sites, the familiar comforts of generic
storytelling, and the demands of bearing witness all conspire to impede
the writer driven by remembering a traumatic past. As suggested by the
words of Elie Wiesel in my epigraph, in response to such stress mod-
ernism spawned a literature of testimony, of which the filmed or staged
documentary is a prominent trope.
The documentary dramas of the American playwright, director and
producer Emily Mann (b. 1952) offer the opportunity to consider such
issues in their complex interaction. Since the 1970s, Mann has been
‘sculpting’ (her word) documentary dramas from transcripts of pub-
lic documents and from interviews she has conducted herself with
the subjects of her documentaries.1 The body of Mann’s work encom-
passes material that has regularly invited documentary treatment:
the Holocaust (Annulla), race relations (Having Our Say, Greensboro),
the Vietnam War (Still Life) and a sensational murder trial (Execution
of Justice).2 Her attempts to avoid conventional dramatic genres have
invited the accusation that she does not write plays at all.3 She calls
Annulla ‘an autobiography’, says Still Life is ‘constructed as a traumatic
memory’ (Mann, 1997, p. 34), subtitles Greensboro ‘a requiem’, and terms
her collection of four plays ‘testimonies’. So engaged is she with histor-
ical course and documentary voice, with managing the tangle of arch-
ive and testament, that taken together her plays form a metanarrative