STYLE AND INFLUENCES


STYLE (AS LISTED IN THE BOBBIE CLEARLY SCRIPT) This play is composed of interviews, recordings, and public presentations.


The audience is a group of interviewers and sometimes they are spectators at a public event.


The characters are always aware of the audience and speak to the audience.


They know they are being documented. There are no private moments.


Bobbie Clearly depicts a town being documented by a film crew over the course of eleven years. Revealing information via interviews makes for no private moments. Since the characters are aware they are speaking to a camera, the audience gets to see them both performing a particular version of themselves for the public and their natural interactions that come out despite the camera being present. Below is a list of genres, films, and television shows that Bobbie Clearly is influenced by or deviates from.


DOCUMENTARY THEATRE Documentary theatre, also known as docudrama or verbatim theatre, is a genre of theatre that is created directly from historical and archival materials, transcripts, interviews, newspapers, or biographies. What separates Bobbie Clearly from documentary theatre is that this play is fiction; it is not based off of real life events. Even the town where it takes place—Milton, Nebraska—is made up. Meanwhile, documentary theatre is usually pulling directly from specific sources, which allows us to key in on a specific community. For instance, the community of Laramie, Wyoming, after the killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is the setting of Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project. Crown Heights, Brooklyn, during the 1991 race riots is the crux of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror. These plays are rooted in historical events and specific geographies while Bobbie Clearly is set in a fictional, rural town with events and characters who have been imagined by the playwright.


DOCUMENTARY DEVICE IN TELEVISION “The Office” (2005-2013) is centered around the employees working at a paper company called Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The premise of the show is that a documentary crew has come in to film the lives of Dunder


16 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


Mifflin’s employees. In order to get a documentary feel, it is shot single-camera as opposed to a multi-camera set-up, where many cameras are recording the shot from different angles, like we see on most sitcoms. The single camera has to be moved and set up again each time there is a new angle or shot. It also leaves space for interview sections in which the characters are alone, revealing information directly to the audience, similar to Bobbie Clearly.


The trend of this documentary style continued in other television shows made after “The Office.” Both “Parks and Recreation” (2009-2015) and “Modern Family” (2009-present) use single-camera setup and utilize the interview-style confessionals that “The Office” does. All of these shows can also be considered "mockumentaries"—or works that take the form of documentary in a fictionalized, comedic manner. In all of these shows we also see breakout moments where characters look directly at the camera for emphasis. In theatre, when a character breaks the scene and communicates directly to the audience, this is called “breaking the fourth wall.” On “Parks and Recreation” and “Modern Family” there is no stated premise of a documentary crew recording the lives of these folks; the audience assumes there is a reason these people are being documented even though it is never made explicit. Our culture has latched on to this style because, as we see in Bobbie Clearly, it gives us private moments between character and audience in such an intimate way that we do not normally see on screen or stage. It allows us to see a duality of these characters: their actual selves and the performed version of themselves for the camera, how they want to be seen by the world.


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