XONR8 Theater:

Verbatim plays about crime, punishment, and innocence, written by students and performed at the OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista.

"Verbatim theatre is a type of theatre-making where the text is generated from interviews with 'real life' people."
-National Theatre Website

What the project is all about

XONR8 Theater is the culmination of our team's work with the California Innocence Project (CIP), a non-profit organization dedicated to freeing people who have been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. 

In the first part of the XONR8 Project, groups of students reviewed applications to CIP by prisoners and recommended whether or not CIP should take the cases based on the evidence they found. These recommendations were made in closed sessions, in order to preserve applicants' privacy. 

In XONR8 Theater, students conducted and transcribed interviews, and turned the "raw material" of the interviews into short verbatim plays which they performed at the OnStage Playhouse. Most of the plays concern the work of CIP, but others focus specifically on the lives of people who work in law enforcement. 

You can read all the scripts by clicking on the links in the programs, which you can find here:

What students said about the project

"On the first day of the project I did not know how to write a play. The first thing we did was interview two people that worked at the Innocence Project. Then we transcribed the interview and turned it into a verbatim play. We refined and refined until it was ready to be performed. The day the exhibition, we went to practice in the morning to familiarize ourselves with the set. Before I knew it, the show was over and we were taking photos onstage."
-Gabriel (you can read more on his digital portfolio)
"I learned that you can’t know for sure if your play/exhibition is going to flow wonderfully if you don’t know the context in which it’s going to happen. We saw the performance venue for the first time on the day of the play and we didn’t know it had so much potential for our play, so we did a lot of last minute changes to take advantage of it."
-Sofia (you can read more on her digital portfolio)
"Transcribing a conversation is a long, painstaking process, but it's one that produces some of the best, most natural pieces of writing. I loved the way that our play effortlessly told a compelling story through our interviewee's words. A defining moment for this project was at the exhibition at the Onstage Playhouse, when [California Innocence Project director] Justin Brooks emerged from the audience to thank us. He was with a team of law students who were all wearing navy blue XONR8 t-shirts. 
-Cristina (you can read more on her digital portfolio)

Devising, Rehearsing, and Performing - in photos

My Prototype

At the beginning of the year, Mackenzie (my teaching partner) and I interviewed the director of the California Innocence Project, Justin Brooks, as well as his colleague Mario Conte. wrote a script using the words from this interview, and we launched XONR8 Theater by performing it for the team. You can see the components of the prototype by following the links below:

Professional Models

In preparation for writing the scripts, the team did readings of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (a play drawn from interviews with people who were exonerated after being put on death row for crimes they did not commit). 

XONR8 Theater: Project Documents

  • You can find the Student and Parent Guide that I sent out at the start of the project here
  • You can find the Project Map here
  • You can find the list of deliverables and due dates here
  • You can find oral history how-to guides here
  • You can find structures for critiques here
  • You can see a weekly reflection template here
  • You can see all the presentations I made for this project on "What We Did Today", starting with the project launch on Monday, October 27th