From Verbatim Illusion to Epistemic Collapse: Knowledge, Authority, and Testimonial Injustice in Dennis Kelly's Taking Care of Baby

Abstract

This paper explores how Dennis Kelly creates a destabilised epistemological landscape through the formal conventions of verbatim theatre. Though the play imitates documentary realism, it subverts the authority of testimony at once, revealing a deepening crisis in the production and transmission of truth. Taking Care of Baby is faced with the essential task that underlies this entire project: a documentary, in name, reveals how institutional discourses—legal, psychological and media—both mediate and distort individual testimony. It opens up some important questions about who can speak, whose knowledge is recognised, and how the truth is constructed or denied in these power-inflected frameworks. The paper seeks to explore how the play performs the decay of epistemically trust and the sidelining of lived experience, specifically regarding the protagonist, Donna McAuliffe. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s theoretical framework of epistemic injustice, the study investigates both testimonial injustices, when a speaker’s credibility is deflated through prejudice, and hermeneutical injustice, when interpretative resources needed to make sense of certain experiences are lacking in a collective. It asks (1) In what ways does the play imitate and overturn mechanisms of verity theatre as a method to challenge truths in charge? (2) In what manner do institutional voices perpetrate epistemic violence on the protagonist? (3) How is the audience complicit in processes of signification and misrecognition? The paper uses a qualitative methodological approach and combines close reading with discourse analysis to study narrative structure, fragmented testimonies and the intertextuality of contending voices. Attention is given to how the interview format of the play creates an illusion of authenticity even as it lays bare its artificiality. Kelly’s action, the study finds, creates what might be called an “epistemic collapse,” in which no single story reaches authoritative status, and all accounts are made suspect. This fall also critiques institutional power, implicating the audience as one complicit in validating or denying claims to truth. In the end, the play reveals how fragile knowledge systems are and emphasises the human costs involved in erasing marginalised voices.