The Arbor traces the tormented life and legacy of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. While renown for her three plays—she is best known to American audiences as the screenwriter of the darkly comedic 1987 movie Rita, Sue and Bob Too!—Dunbar’s life was plagued by chronic abuse and alcoholism. She died tragically at the age of twenty-nine, leaving behind a brief but illustrious career and three children from three different men. The Arbor revisits the site of Dunbar’s hardscrabble upbringing and conducts compelling interviews with her family, presented through the innovative technique of verbatim theater: actors lip-synch documentary recordings of the people they’re playing. The effect is at once theatrical and intimate, conveying with acute honesty the devastating repercussions of Dunbar’s struggles on her eldest daughter’s own troubled life. The New York Times describes Barnard’s original non-fiction work as a “multidimensional collage [that] explodes our expectations of the form. A lacerating study of generational damage and the legacy of neglect.”