Although it may seem new, fact-based drama can be traced back to ancient Greece. Not much is known about that other than it was Phyrnichu's 492 B.C. production of The Capture of Miletus. Current documentary has its roots in practices developed in the 1920s-930s in Eastern Europe.
There were theatre troops in the USSR known as Blue Blouses because they wore factory workers' overalls. They were employed by the Union's Department of Agitation and Propaganda. They used them to dramatize news and current events by using staging with song and dance. By 1924, these performances had come to be known as zhivaya gazeta or living newspaper.
In the 1930s, documentary theatre spread to Europe and the United States. In Europe, the form was embraced by left-leaning political theatre groups. It combined fiction and reality to expose truths about the common man. In the United States, Hallie Flanagan Davis and Morris Watson adapated the form. It became large-scale living newspapers. The original idea was an animated newsreel, but the form soon evolved into its own theatrical genre. This genre used things like vaudeville techiques, Agitprop, and spectalce. The form came to a halt in the U.S. at the end of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939. However, it started again in the 1960s.
During the 1960s and the 1970s, this form of theatre was influenced by Bertolt Brecht's distancing effect. It often made the audience raise questions about reality. Some recent plays in this movement are The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith, and The Laramie Project by Tectonic Theatre Project.
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