Testimonies: Four Plays by Emily Mann

by Emily Mann

Emily Mann is one of a handful of contemporary playwrights rediscovering and redefining the art of the historical drama. The four plays in this new paperback personalize, with growing surety and power, the Holocaust (Annulla), the Vietnam War (Still Life), the assassination of San Francisco's mayor and openly gay supervisor (Execution of Justice), and the 1979 North Carolina riot in which an anti-Klan rally turned into a Klan killing spree ( A Requiem). Mann always keeps the issues at flesh-and-blood level. Her plays take us on a tour of the hearts of both her heroes and her villains, which has the power to make them that much more heroic and villainous. Her sympathies may be left-wing, but her right-wing characters are never cartoons and her leftists are rarely unalloyed saints. All are written from the gut outward. She shows that such outsize characters don't belong just to the past. Once we look through her eyes, we can see these people walking among us every day.

Genres: Plays, Theatre

Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Still Life
By Emily Mann

[Colin Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Testimonies: Four Plays by Emily Mann is a collection of docudramas written from first-person testimonials, court documents, interviews, and news footage. Plot isn't necessarily relevant to these plays principally because Mann builds each play around a series of elongated dramatic monologues. On the whole, the premise for each play is intriguing, but prior knowledge seems essential. For example, Execution of Justice is a stunning, pathos-riddled play about the trial of Dan White, the former San Francisco politician responsible for the murders of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. I am familiar with Milk's life and death, so this play resonates in ways that Greensboro: A Requim, a play about the shooting of several protestors by the Ku Klux Klan, does not. I suspect the power of each play is the way in which they activate prior knowledge while offering alternative narratives for stories of abuse and corruption.

It's hard to say if the plays collected in Testimonies: Four Plays offer anything new or merely reaffirm what I already know. I enjoy her approach to each subject, but I also wonder how relevant each play remains the farther we get from the events she dramatizes.