Building a play from scratch
Most plays begin with a playwright sitting down to write a script. Devised theatre often begins somewhere else: with a question, an image, a piece of research, an improvisation, or a group of artists in a room together. Rather than treating the script as the starting point, devising uses rehearsal, research, experimentation, and collaboration as part of the writing process itself. The final performance is built, or devised, through that shared exploration.
Verbatim theatre is one form of devised theatre. Its raw material comes from the words of real people. Artists conduct interviews, gather testimony, or work from existing documents and then shape that language into a theatrical structure. The creative work is not usually in inventing dialogue, but in deciding what to include, what to cut, how stories are placed beside one another, and how those words live onstage.
There is no single way to make verbatim theatre. Different artists have developed very different practices. Anna Deavere Smith, for example, is known for recreating not only interviewees’ words but also their rhythms, pauses, and patterns of speech. British playwright Alecky Blythe has used “recorded delivery,” in which actors listen to the original interviews through earpieces while performing, allowing them to reproduce the speech with remarkable specificity. Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project grew from hundreds of interviews alongside company journals and other documentary material, using a highly collaborative devising process to build the finished play.
That flexibility is part of what makes verbatim theatre so compelling. Some projects preserve every stumble, repetition, and unfinished thought; others lightly clean the language while retaining the speaker’s meaning. Some focus on one person, while others weave dozens of voices together. What they share is an attempt to bring real voices into the theatrical space and ask audiences to listen to them differently.
For All the Beautiful Things, that meant beginning with interviews and treating the interviewees’ words as the foundation of the script. The devising happened in the choices around those words—cutting, arranging, juxtaposing, rehearsing, listening, and discovering how individual stories might become part of a larger theatrical conversation.
