What Is Ethnodrama?

Ethnodrama is the scripting and theatrical staging of interview transcripts. Rather than just reading an interview transcript in a performative manner, ethnodrama reconstructs interviews into monologue and dialogue to resemble a traditionally mounted play for an audience. Most ethnodramas are monologic since interview transcripts of one participant are the most readily accessible for adaptation.

Ethno is short for ethnography which is a scientific study about people and culture – so it is important to know that Ethnodrama is always about people talking about their lives and experiences.

The goal of ethnodrama is to use the conventions of theatrical performance to portray to an audience a live representation of people’s experiences that credibly, vividly, and persuasively inform the spectators. The ethnodramatic playwright extracts the most noteworthy passages from the interview transcripts and, like a film editor, “edits” the units into a form that creates a unique theatrical world.

- Revised from Fundamentals of Qualitative Research by Johnny Saldaña.

On the Script for Making Gay History: Before Stonewall

The script for Making Gay History: Before Stonewall is formated as a scored transcript , inspired by the early published plays of Anna Deavere Smith. Essentially, all of the filler words (“ums,” “aahs,”), disfluencies, pauses, and errors were retained in the transcribing process, and each time the speaker took a pause while speaking, a new line of text was started. This style of transcription attempts to capture the cadence of the speaker as much as possible; therefore, the words look more like poetry on the page. Also note that if a speaker speaks for a long period of time without a break or pause and that doesn’t fit on one typed line, the speech wraps to a second line and is indented to indicate that speech continues unbroken.

In the following excerpt, Sylavia Rivera, Latinx, transgender woman; activist and participant in the Stonewall uprising, talks about what led to her decision to leave home at the age of 10.

SYLVIA RIVERA

Yeah.

I left home at about 10, ten-and-a-half. I was almost 11.

Ya know and the only reason that I left home at such an early age was ‘cause my

grandmother came home crying one day.

With the tears in her eyes and says, “They’re calling you a ‘pato'”

which means “faggot”

in the Spanish language.

And it- it- it hurt her so bad

because they were doing this to me. And she knew where I was coming from. She even

knew.

I had that much respect for my grandmother.

I- I didn’t- I didn’t want- I don’t want her to suffer.

It wasn’t my suffering.

I was worrying about her suffering.

A Note on Verbatim Documentary Theatre

Verbatim Documentary Theatre is a sub-genre of ethnodrama wherein the actors listen closely to the original interview recordings upon which the ethnodramatic script is based so they can learn the interview subject’s speech patterns, rhythms, and intonations such that they can reproduce them as closely as possible during the performance. In traditional theatre modes, the actor creates a character; in verbatim documentary theatre, the actor attempts to reproduce a recorded voice. When available, the spoken recording is enhanced with video recording such that the actor might access and recreate physical mannerisms and gestures.

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