ABSTRACT
Practical requirements in producing a verbatim play include finding a rehearsal space, a performance space and actors for the show – matters which are addressed in this chapter. Whether the actors are professional or not, they will need to be auditioned by the playwright and/or director. Even professional actors might not have worked with verbatim theatre pieces before and so need to be cast for their ability to adapt to delivering many of their lines ‘out’ to an audience, thereby breaking the ‘fourth wall’, as well as interacting with other actors on the stage. Actors might also face challenges in playing a ‘real’ person, as opposed to performing a fictional character created from the playwright’s imagination, and choices must be made about whether they act in a mimetic style, trying to replicate the original narrators, or simply look for their own interpretation of their characters based on what they find in the script.
The nature of many verbatim theatre scripts means that actors will also be faced with theatrical transformations of time and place during their performances, which generally do not occur as frequently within fictional forms of theatre. Such situations mainly arise because the lines the performers are speaking were narrated in the present, but about the past and so questions will arise as to whether the actor is an older person who is remembering something or a younger person whose experiences they may be speaking about, as if in the present. Such matters are generally ironed out during the rehearsal period.
