Storylisteners for Democracy: Ryan Claycomb Asks What We Have Learned from Verbatim Theater

Dr. Ryan Claycomb remembers the night he found the subject that would animate and define his life as a literature and theater scholar. It was the first night he had ever seen a verbatim theater production. Verbatim theater has a unique relationship with democracy, because in many ways it is democratic. As Dr. Claycomb describes it in his new book, In the Lurch, verbatim theater is, “socially engaged performances whose texts rely on word-for-word testimony. Performances such as Fires in the Mirror, The Laramie Project, and The Vagina Monologues have at their best demonstrated how to hold hard conversations about explosive subjects in a liberal democracy.”Still, the book is not a celebration of the artform and his career. Rather, it looks critically at its effectiveness in the face of a hard move toward illberal ideologies around the world, and he does not spare himself in that investigation. What role does art and testimony play in the shared experience, political and otherwise? At the heart of that question is a concept critical to both narrative and listening: empathy.Dr. Claycomb is both a Professor of English and Theater as well as an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts.