Staged

"No one uses the term "show trial" as a compliment: we usually understand theater as antithetical to the workings of justice. But after the Second World War, directors and playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Peter Weiss, and Arthur Miller sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging trials as shows. In the two decades after the War, the Moscow show trials, Nuremberg trials, House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, and the Eichmann trial were all turned into plays. Why re-stage these trials within a theater? How can the stage represent atrocity and narrate histories of oppression differently than a courtroom? And, finally, how do the processes of aesthetic judgment change an audience's understanding of justice? To answer these questions, Staged combines extensive archival research into performances of postwar documentary theater with a critical reading of Hannah Arendt's political and aesthetic philosophy, addressing at the same time broader debates within critical theory about the relationship between aesthetics and politics"--