Emily Mann's new play, Greensboro: A Requiem, now having its world premiere at her home theater, the superb McCarter, is a trademark work: "theater of testimony," as it is called, is Mann's technique of crafting a play about a politically charged, violent incident in recent history from verbatim interviews, courtroom transcripts and various other documents. She takes the real words of real people who were involved in a real event, daringly carrying realism further than any other playwright has. She often creates both the urgency and authenticity of the voices: 'This person was there, he said these things to me,' despite the fact that there is no real action on stage. People talk, people listen. We bear witness.

Mann has dealt with the Holocaust (Annulla: An Autobiography), the Vietnam War (Still Life), and the politics of homophobia (Execution of Justice). In Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First Hundred Years, Mann's recent smash hit on Broadway, she has two black women, both over 100 years old, reminisce and tell stories about their lives and their relationships, conveying not only a century of American society but two vivid, distinct and richly revealed personalities. The only onstage action is their preparing a dinner and setting the table, but the play seems so full of individualized and admirable humanity as well as history that I can still see those stage pictures and hear those voices in my mind. This is not likely to happen with Greensboro: A Requiem.

Despite knockout stagecraft (set designed by Robert Brill, lighting designed by Pat Collins), despite a large cast of 11 highly respected actors playing multiple roles, despite the risk-taking by director Mark Wing-Davey, despite the feeling of excitement generated by an important American playwright offering a new play on an interesting and weighty subject, Greensboro disappoints.

The subject is the murder of unarmed demonstrators in the small town of Greensboro in North Carolina. In November, 1979, a racially mixed group of Communists gathered to protest the existence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, together with the American Nazi Party, with the help of the local police and the FBI, attacked the rally and gunned down 14 people (five were killed, nine injured) in a caravan drive-by massacre. Although the events were filmed, and there was ample proof against the guilty men, no one was ever imprisoned. Not only was this episode a flashpoint for racism, it was buried by news of a larger flashpoint and a more exotic racism: the day after Greensboro, the hostages were taken in Iran, and everything else was wiped off the front page.

Mann substitutes chronology for plot and talking heads for characters. We have no idea who these people are or why they believe what they do, so why should we care what happens to them, other than to sympathize with the good guys and hate the bad guys? The good guys are all lumped together: the black Southern millworkers along with the white Yankee intellectuals. They all look and sound like caricatures of the types they represent: Nelson Johnson (Robert Jason Jackson), the black preacher who sees healing on "the far side of sorrow"; the saintly physician-turned-millworker whose mother was a Holocaust survivor; the oddly dressed intellectual white women who preach Marxist revolution; the black women who sing their grief; and so on. It is impossible to remember who's who, despite the supra-titles, and since the actors play multiple roles, I found the only way I could recognize a character when he/she returned was by the superficial clue of costumes.

Oddly, the bad guys are more interestingly distinguished one from another: David Duke (Jon DeVries), who argues with horrifyingly slick logic that racial violence is the inevitable effect of integration and that the only solution is separatism, and the "extremist informant," a slimeball from Jersey (Jeffrey De Munn) who never backs down from a fight and whose final realization at the trial he recounts amounts to nothing more than that he felt like "some kinda jerk."

Theatrically, nothing happens except people making exceedingly long, stupefyingly dull speeches at us. There is no action, merely reports of past action. Characters talk for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, directly to the audience; and because this is verbatim, not invented dialogue, the language is usually unimaginative and tedious. And worse, since much of the talk is by nasty people, we have to listen to hate-filled harangues by white supremacists and skinheads. Worse still, the victims swap shocking stories of their radicalization in a kind of odious "man's inhumanity to man" contest. What's the point? People who go to the theater (particularly in a university town) are unlikely to be so naive, illiterate or cocooned from the ideas of our society that expressions of simple-minded and violent racism are news. There is no subtlety of thought, no felicity of expression, no grace of gesture.

And although Mann covers her subject with thoroughness, she seems to have nothing to say about it. This neutrality is so complete that when the concluding fact is presented (in printed words on a scrim as at the conclusion of a docufilm) that a memorial plaque was erected in Greensboro, it is impossible to tell if this news is offered hopefully, as an example of healing, or ironically, as an example of inadequacy.

At the end, Reverend Johnson says, "When you stand up for righteousness, you create a reality where everybody's somebody." I imagine that this is what Emily Mann intended to do: stand up for righteousness. What she failed to do was create a reality where everybody is somebody — in other words, a play with characters.

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