Ep 30: Arianna Gayle Stucki – A verbatim drama, people’s stories of loss as they want them told

The first of two conversations via zoom. It’s with Arianna Gayle Stucki in the USA, in discussion on how the verbatim drama "Memorial" came to be. We've talked about how stories get told; who tells them; and how that telling may take the story away from the one it belongs to. This is different.In June 2019 Arianna came to NZ to listen to people who had suffered loss and great hurt in the mosque attacks; not to seek a story but to listen to people who wanted to tell their stories. Trust had to be earned and hours of words recorded and transcribed. Long listening and weaving together, and full collaboration, has led to a play “Memorial” – a verbatim drama crafted directly from these words. It has already spoken to other people’s experiences of loss: a family who lost their son to suicide; members of a community in Buffalo, New York who experienced a racist shooting and, further afield, to students in Beirut, Lebanon with their experience of earthquakes. The hope is to bring it to New Zealand. In this podcast Arianna speaks to the process of how this work came about. In the next episode we'll introduce Arianna's co-creator, Adam Elsayigh and the two of them will talk more about the process of its development.