A number of the plays seem to argue that more knowledge—more contextualizing as it were—would help us to understand something in a way that we previously did not or even, because of our lack of context, could not. So, perhaps we sympathize with Uncle Peck more than we would if we did not know what we learn about him in Vogel’s play; perhaps we sympathize with Willy in a way we wouldn’t if we knew no more than he was fired and that he cheated on his wife; perhaps we sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories because of what we are told in My Name Is Rachel Corrie. How does the contextualizing work to advance a different perspective on characters and actions than we might have had with less information about them?
If you are thinking of a longer, research paper, you might consider that some people—I think of the creators of the Columbia trailer for Salesman, and of Carol Martin and Ryan Claycomb—argue that contextualizing needs to go both ways, that a playwright ought not to think that she or he can write about anything s/he wants, with no responsibility to the larger community of which s/he is a part, but should be sure that different sides of an argument are represented. What do you think of Claycomb’s and Martin’s arguments—which you could extend, I would contend, to non-documentary plays—and what do you think of Columbia’s desire to contextualize Miller’s play?
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