Documentary Theatre in a Documentary

5 min readMay 11, 2024

Despite my swearing off Wrongfully Convicted podcasts, I found myself watching a similarly themed docu-series recently. I was maybe halfway into the first episode before I realized it was a doozy of a wrongful conviction case. Were it not for the theatre element, I might have quit watching right then. I’m glad I stuck around.

Mind Over Murder is about the impact a murder had on a small town in Nebraska called Beatrice (Bay-AA-trice). Six people were sent to prison for the crime, then pardoned and exonerated but it’s still a painful and contentious issue in the town, even decades after the events. The documentary shows us people who are still convinced that the exonerated people did it and tells the stories of many of the people involved. All of that would have been enough for a fascinating documentary — but happening alongside it is a community theatre production of a verbatim style show about the situation. Not surprisingly, for this theatre maker, the theatrical element was the most touching piece. The show brings the community together in incredibly moving ways and changes minds that previously seemed as though they’d be fixed in their beliefs forever.

For me, it’s a story about the power of theatre. While watching, I wondered how this theatre in small town Nebraska decided to be so brave and bold as to create a verbatim show about something so contentious. Then I wondered how this documentary team managed to find out about them. In reading about it, I was surprised to learn that the theatre piece was a part of it from the start. The show wasn’t independent of the film. The director of the documentary commissioned the local theatre, hired a professional writer/director to create it and had it all integrated from the beginning. The director thought she’d track the actors’ changing points of view — but it was the audience’s change of view that became the most remarkable. The performance brings people together who you’d never have thought would tolerate one another. It changes minds that seemed unchangeable. You see a seismic shift happen in one night at the theatre. Why does theatre work where nothing else had? Nothing. Not the judicial system. Not film. Not time. Not important conversation. Why theatre?

I’ve been thinking about it. And I think it is a strange combination of intimacy and alienation. I think the alienating effect of hearing the words from someone else’s mouth allows someone to hear things you’d otherwise be guarded against. For example, I cannot bear to hear Donald Trump’s voice. I mute it, fast forward through it, sing over it, whatever I have to do to avoid hearing him. I have a visceral response to his voice and face. But when someone reads his words or pretends to be him, I listen closely and watch without all the walls.

For the family of the murdered woman, I imagine the six people who were convicted of the murder were similarly triggering for them. The family could not shift their opinions of them because they were always in the same bodies, with the same voices as before. But in the theatre piece, you’re looking at entirely different people. It makes it possible to see them differently. That alienation effect allows you to let go of some things, I suspect.

And then there is the intimacy of being all in the same room together. You’re sharing space with the actors, those characters and an audience of people who have a wide range of experience and opinions. Crying together, laughing together, can really shift things.

We are really in the room with the story when it’s in a theatre.

I think, too, that it is important that it is the real words that were spoken by the subjects and not a dramatization. If a writer wrote them, then it would be easy to dismiss as a work of fiction. But when a writer has simply taken what was said and shaped it into an evening, it is very hard to dismiss. This style of theatre is called verbatim or documentary style and it can be very powerful.

One of my most profound acting experiences was doing Fires in the Mirror, which is a verbatim play about the Crown Heights riots. There was magic in stepping in to real people’s words and ways of being. I don’t even know Anonymous Young Man #2’s name but he will be with me forever because I can still find his cadence and rhythm in my memory — even though it was over three decades ago. And audience members heard him, too — through me — even though we shared neither race, nor gender. I imagine that discrepancy helped them listen, maybe.

But of course the production of the play in Mind Over Murder was way more powerful because it was not only performed by members of the community but for members of the community, including people featured in the story. That raises the stakes exponentially. It’s brave of the theatre company and maybe that’s why it has such a profound effect in the end, because everyone can see what it took to get everyone together in one space.

The documentary doesn’t reveal its own role in setting up this production. I suppose it prefers to have us believe that the community itself had the idea. But I think it’s kind of beautiful that one artist commissioned other artists to make something healing. And maybe some other community, reeling from some other trauma, might take up the challenge to do something like this for itself. Maybe we could find a way to fund the arts so communities across the country could create similarly cathartic and healing works. That’s a project I’d sign up for in a heartbeat.