“Truth will out”: Politics, religion, and gender in Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine

This paper investigates how Daniel Berrigan, the playwright-cum-protagonist of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), sets out to use theatre as a podium, at a time of great political turmoil, to provide the facts of what is going on in the Vietnam War. In doing so, he documents the facts using the tribunal theatre, a genre derived from documentary theatre. Mary Canal’s theory of Inclusionary and Exclusionary otherness, as expounded in her article “Othering: Toward Understanding of Difference,” is adopted as a methodology. The paper attempts to find answers to the following questions: How are documentary theatre and its offshoot tribunal theatre used as revolutionary theatres? What are the forms of othering present in the play? How is gender bias present even in resistance? How does religion become an underlying cause for Inclusionary othering? The paper concludes that politics, religion, and gender are fused in the experience of the tribunal theatre of the Vietnam War.