Thoughts on Playback Theatre

I was talking with a friend tonight about playback theatre. It took me back to the first performance of that kind I went to, when I was hooked.

A woman told a story about her sister who had died. She told the story of their relationship. And the actors played it back, while she, the “teller,” short for storyteller, sat at the left of the stage.

They got to the part of the sister dying, with one actor playing the sister and the others playing the teller and her other family members. The actor playing the dying sister had been laying across three acting blocks, representing the hospital bed, placed in front of a curtain, and then she simply rolled off the back and disappeared behind the curtain.

It might sound corny or cheesy, or even slapstick or something like that, but the effect was kind of profound. You were left with the complete absence of the sister. You could feel the loss. The woman was moved beyond words and could only, at first, with tears in her eyes, hug the actors at the end of the performance. It was maybe a catharsis, maybe just a presencing of the feeling of loss, but we all, everyone in that room shared it in that moment. We felt it with her.

I knew I had to do this kind of theater, and share these experiences in this way, to literally put myself in another’s place and them in mine, to lose ourselves in each other, maybe. I did playback for about a year and a half and always think about going back to it at some time.