In The Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation by Ryan Claycomb (review)

Reviewed by: In The Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation by Ryan Claycomb Megan Lewis IN THE LURCH: VERBATIM THEATER AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION. By Ryan Claycomb. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023; pp. 163. Academic discourse is predicated on novel contributions to fields of study and making arguments based on our expertise; scholars set out to prove our points and convince readers of their merits. Therefore, it is rare and enriching when an author engages in dialogue with past versions of their argument. Ryan Claycomb, whose area of expertise is verbatim theatre, takes himself on in this deftly argued book, asking if theatre in the liberal West is sufficient any longer in the face of "what feels like the possible end of democracy" (3). "I was ruined by Anna Deavere Smith," he writes in his championing of verbatim theatre, a form that "advances a political vision of a utopian democratic public sphere" aimed at "inclusive and em-pathetic democracy." Once championing the form and its potential with "breathless hopefulness," from his position post-pandemic, he now reexamines the utopian promise of this form of theatre (3). He reflects on his own participation in the "fantasy" of its democratic potential against a global pandemic, an insurrection, two presidential impeachments, and reckoning with the United States' racist legacies. Claycomb traces three premises about documentary theatre in his argument: that these plays—"democratic dramaturgies," he calls them—stage an idealized space for democratic discourse; that such public spaces are often framed as utopian; and that utopias orient toward empathy. In chapter one, "Democratic Deliberation and the Theatricalized Public Sphere," Claycomb maps the characteristics of verbatim theatres that emerge from post-Cold War liberal democracies such as the US, UK, and Canada. These characteristics include emphases on inclusive voices, public opinion integrated into the work, the appearance of evenhanded neutrality around polarizing topics such as racism, and a commitment to open-ended narratives. Verbatim theatres repeatedly imagine themselves as "reparative events to create dialogue in response to violence" (35). This is evidenced by work about Matthew Shepard's murder in Laramie, Wyoming, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, or stories of teenage asylum-seekers created through Ping Chong's Undesirable Elements methodology. In the second chapter, "Debating in Utopia," Claycomb wrestles with the ways in which empty stages become spaces where we play out problems in places (such as Laramie, Wyoming in Tectonic's famous 2000 work, or the post-9/11 prison in Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, 2004). In his analysis of these two plays, Claycomb probes the tension between the intended utopian space of democratic deliberation promised, or imagined, by these plays and the harsh realities, decades later, of the continued homophobia and xenophobia these works were aimed to bring to light. "The utopian peg on which verbatim theater has hung its hopes," writes Claycomb, is the tethering of politics and affect: "to deliberating and feeling together in the phenomenal space of the theater" (51). In chapter 3, "Feeling Together," Claycomb explores connections between listening, empathy, and theatre. He historicizes the concept of empathy from the Reagan era to the contemporary political landscape, tracing the shift from the "liberal pluralist social vision" of, say, Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991), Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror (1992), or Tectonic's Laramie Project (2000), to the political limits of staging marginalized voices post-9/11 and post-COVID. Using Ping Chong's Children of War (2002) and Smith's Let Me Down Easy (2009) End Page 125 as case studies, he traces a shift from a Habermasian public sphere of discourse in which "social ideas can and must be argued and adjudicated" to a Levinasian face-to-face encounter in which we are obligated toward one another through the encounter (1). The breakdown in our social obligations to one another is the subject of chapter 4, "The Opposite of Empathy Is Suspicion," where Claycomb explores the current cultural-political climate, which he says is "defined by critique, suspicion, paranoia, and antagonism" (95). He examines the challenges of verbatim theatre in the current zeitgeist through three...