Using newspaper accounts, trial transcripts, television-news reports, and interviews, Emily Mann has created a "theatre of testimony." This term, coined by the late Barney Simon, director of the Market Theatre in South Africa, describes a form of drama that employs documentary materials to deal with controversial social and political subjects such as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, homophobia, racism, and domestic abuse. Through testimony and oral history, audiences can hear all sides of a story and experience different views of an event. David Savran credits Mann "for bringing a new level of political dialogue and a new kind of contemporary history play to the American theatre." Mann challenges her audiences to confront subjects that are often painful, an approach that some critics have found a refreshing change from the escapist theater of the past.

Emily Betsy Mann was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 12 April 1952 to Arthur and Sylvia...