Theatrical Strategies of Testimony in Judith Thompson’s Palace of the End and Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire

The first decade of the 21^st century has been marked by a surge of political writing for the stage. Plays written in response to the events surrounding September 11, 2001 reveal an unprecedented level of theatrical experimentation directed specifically at describing the social, religious, and political forces that continue to transform post 9/11 world.
In response to these forces, researchers have seen a surge of political plays directed specifically at describing this incendiary past decade. The results have been satisfying, partly because more than protesting the profound changes shocked individuals and notions, these plays provoked original and exciting theatrical experiments. These experiments encompass theatre, theatre based on real events and people using transcripts and speeches. They encompass the theatre of testimony where verbatim reportage is combined with the testimony to create first person narratives based on personal experience.
Through text analysis of Canadian Judith Thompson’s (1954- ) Palace of the End (2007) and Iraq-American Heather Raffo’s (1970- ) 9 Parts of Desire (2005), this study will chart the course of these experiments, highlight the innovations and attempt to understand their implications for political theatre. Both plays depict real people as fictional characters and both employ monologue speech delivered in direct address to the audience. An emphasis on the individual’s personal account and experience of world events is the raw material each playwright has used to fashion characters who exhibit varying degrees of fictionality.  But, monologic speech and personal accounts are also the raw material of testimony, and a question is raised whether both Raffo and Thompson are breaking new ground in refining the “literature of testimony” (Felman 114) for the theatre. Furthermore, a question which this study is mainly concerned with whether these dramatic texts have initiated what might accurately be described as an unprecedented development in the political theatre.