Theatre of Witness: Passage into a New Millennium

• Published in: New theatre quarterly 1996-08, Vol.12 (47), p.266-278
• Main Author: Malpede, Karen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Drama; Empathy; Literary criticism; Snajder, Slobodan; Theater; Writing
• ISSN: 0266-464X; 1474-0613
• DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X00010265

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.