Career Prep for the Arts, Part 3

 

[This is the third and final installment of the “Career Prep for the Arts” series on Rick On Theater.  Parts 1 and 2 were posted on Thursday. 2 April and Sunday, 5 April, respectively; I invite you to read them if you haven’t already. 

[Part 3 consists of two more articles from the teaching issues of American Theatre magazine.  The first one, from 2026, is about the changes in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., since Donald Trump has assumed control—in particular, the effect his leadership has had on the educational and children’s programs at the Center and the consequences of those alterations,

[The second article, from 2025, is about the changes occurring in graduate academic programs across the country due to funding issues and shifts in the various administrations’ visions for post-graduate theater training and education.] 

“WHAT’S LEFT STANDING OF
KENNEDY CENTER EDUCATION AND TYA?”
by Daniella Ignacio 

[I’ve included the article below, posted on the American Theatre website on 9 February 2026, in my mini-series on “Career Prep for the Arts” because it reports on aspects of that topic even though it’s not part of either the 2025 “Teaching Issue” of the magazine or the 2026 “Learning Curves” issue.

[Under Roger L. Stevens (1910-98; theatrical producer, arts administrator, and real estate executive), the founding Chairman of both the National Endowment for the Arts (1965-69) and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (1961-88), the Center established a number of projects and offices concerned with the education of leaders in the arts, including theater and the performing arts, in the United States (see, for example, “Michael Kaiser: Man of the Arts” [21 December 2016]) and “A Master’s List” by Sofía Barrell in “Arts Administration, Article 6” (14 December 2020).]

The Center’s roles as an incubator of new work for young audiences, and as a generous host for the American College Theater Festival, will be hard to fill.

Among my community of D.C. artists, something that has always inspired me is our ability to place art and joy directly next to anger. That is life here. Our latest source of the fire: Come July 4, according to President Trump, the Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations for two years. In a gesture that coincides with America’s semiquincentennial, or 250th birthday, the president announced on Sunday, Feb. 1 via a TruthSocial post his plans to close the Center for about two years for unspecified construction (though it had an expansion and renovation as recently as 2019 [see “The Kennedy Center Expands” (5 December 2014) and “‘With Newly Expanded Campus, Kennedy Center Aims to Make Art an Experience for All’” by Jeffrey Brown (8 September 2019)]). This move comes after cancellations and internal discord since Trump’s takeover of the Center last year, including his rebranding of the building in his name.

[Donald Trump (b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; inaugurated as 47th President in 2025) was elected chair of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees on 12 February 2026, after Trump had dismissed the appointed board members and replaced them with his own. In May 2026, the board changed its rules regarding eligibility to vote, eliminating the ex officio trustees and permitting only Trump appointees to vote.

[This led the way for a long list of changes (including some that were unintentional, like cancellations of scheduled performances and appearances. On 18 December, the voting trustees authorized the change of the Center’s name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. On 1 February 2026, Trump announced that the Center would close on 4 July for two years of renovations.]

If the board approves the closure, it will be a disaster not only for the National Symphony Orchestra, which offers an average of 150 concerts a year at the Center, and for a slate of theatre, dance, and music tours, but also for the Center’s day-to-day staff and programs that employ local and national artists, including Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences (TYA), which has developed and produced more than 120 unique productions since 1986. 

Kennedy Center TYA’s staff had already downsized, with all its full-time leaders departing in October 2025, including David Kilpatrick, who’s now at Folger Theatre [founded in 1992; not to be confused with the former Folger Theatre Group, formed in 1970, which eventually became Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company], Maribeth Weatherford, now at Signature Theatre [an Arlington, Virginia, company, founded in 1989, that is unrelated to New York City’s Signature Theatre Company, founded in 1991], and Michelle Kozlak. The remaining staff are part-timers. The Center’s education department relies on Department of Education funding for $7 or $8 million out of its $13 million budget, as well as philanthropic and education grants. With that largesse, they managed to reach two million educators, administrators, and students across the U.S., Puerto Rico, and 12 additional countries in one year alone, according to a 2023 annual report.

If the program was already on life support even before the latest announcement, now the question is, what will happen to TYA shows that were scheduled to be developed at the Center during the planned two-year closure? One former staff member who spoke to American Theatre on background confirmed that, based on their knowledge of the contracts, artists might be able to take their shows elsewhere. But where? KCTYA was one of the only TYA companies in the U.S.—and the only one in the D.C. area—that solely produced new works, from commission to premiere to tours to national licensing, and its loss creates “a big void,” said the former staffer, who wondered what other sizable new-work incubator space could possibly take KCTYA’s place.

Of this year’s programming, a Seattle Children’s Theatre co-commission of Keiko Green’s Young Dragon already withdrew its Center run to focus on its Seattle premiere [12-29 March 2026]. Fishing for Stars, a theatre for the very young production by a collective that includes Megan Alrutz, Claire Derriennic, S. Elliot, Renita James, and Xinyue Zhang, comes up as a 404 on the website; another former staffer confirmed that the show, originally announced for a March run, won’t be happening at Kennedy Center. The same goes for a previously scheduled repeat tour of Sesame Street the Musical, which played the Center in summer 2025, as well as Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock. According to an interviewee on background, no budget is currently allotted for next season in TYA, and next year’s season “doesn’t exist.” A former staffer guessed that the focus would have been on bringing in groups or pre-existing scripts, prior to the closure announcement. 

There is one more TYA show scheduled to go up before the July closure, which one former Center staffer called “one of the most creative scripts I have read in a long time”: the world premiere of The Sea Beyond the Ocean by playwright Doug Robinson, who was raised in northern Virginia and is now based between D.C. and New York. Set to run Feb. 28-March 15 [2026; it did], it follows a boy who searches for the missing ending to his favorite unfinished book. Featuring an all-Black cast, it is a Black fantasy in a register akin to Octavia Butler [1947-2006; African-American science fiction and speculative fiction writer] that “allows for the possibility of something different” and “invites people to imagine a better world,” said dramaturg Gabrielle Hoyt.

Robinson said he wanted to write a play for his father, who read books to him over the phone when he went on business trips. It’s “a play for kids who like to read, who find that reading is the safest place for them to be,” Robinson said. “Working through imagination is a way to build the end of the story you want to have. Imagination is the key to seeing a future that has never wanted you there, right? So it’s a play that says a child’s imagination can create a whole world where the characters come out, they tell stories, they learn, and they move forward. They’re not static. They’re not like, ‘We had an adventure, and now we’re going home.’ The world is changed by the imagination. That matters.”

Robinson first pitched Ocean when former staffer Sean-Maurice Lynch introduced him to the KCTYA team. Since being commissioned in late 2023, Ocean received two Kennedy Center workshops: one with Ashleigh King, and another with KenYatta Rogers, who directs the world premiere. Over the years, what has deepened and grown the most is Robinson’s understanding of what endings mean to a child. As Hoyt put it, “It’s become a really moving discussion of how to talk to kids about endings.”

One real-life ending: the exit of Kennedy Center TYA staff. When Michelle Kozlak departed, Robinson said, she called him personally; his play was what kept her there for as long as she could stay. Conversations about who would take over her work were had. “Not gonna lie, it was scary to have that transition,” said Robinson. “But I have never felt those fears come to reality. I have never, for one second, felt a lack of intentionality or support from Kennedy Center TYA.”  

For now, the company is in rehearsals, and the room has been an “intentionally and actively joyous” place, Robinson said. For the actors, staying focused on the art is important. Many were reluctant to speak for this article prior to opening out of fear that the administration would retaliate against the show. Said Robinson, “Simply put: the Kennedy Center commissioned me to write a play, and they’ve paid me all my money before the first rehearsal. I can pull the play and I’m not missing a dollar. It’s not about that. It’s about what we as a group want to do.” 

He recalled a conversation with the company on the first day in which they spoke about their feelings and why they were choosing to stay. “That was heartbreaking, hearing the individual inner life that people had to contend with,” Robinson said. “But they all still came to the conclusion that telling this story in what is historically known as Chocolate City, to kids, in a time where people think representation is only in service of some DEI language . . . How could we not?”

The joy they’re finding, Robinson said, is also in direct relationship to a kind of resilient protest. “Do we stand up for our home? Do we stand up for a place that I went to as a child wearing ill-fitting dress shoes with my mother?” Robinson said, recalling his first visits to the Kennedy Center. “If, and I hope this is not true, if the last new work produced by Kennedy Center TYA is The Sea Beyond the Ocean, I am grateful that the last group on that stage is a group of homegrown actors, homegrown designers, and homegrown storytellers. Because, the Kennedy Center is, yes, a symbol, but it’s also a local theatre.”

On the day that it was announced that Center would be closing for two years, Hoyt said, the staff spent the day making sure that the company was getting paid in a timely fashion. “They were responding to emails of mine within 5-10 minutes, about my direct deposit details, when they didn’t know if they had jobs anymore,” Hoyt said. “What they were doing was making sure that the contractors and artists in their building were being, like, financially, taken care of and safe. It was wild. I do not know if I would have had the fortitude to do that that day, but they did.”

“It really has become an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Robinson said. “Everyone is stepping up in ways that both I appreciate and also wish that they didn’t have to. It is a both-and situation, right? It is brilliance in the face of difficulty—not that difficulty has made the place weaker, if that makes sense. The building is the people. The storm can rage around them and they’re saying, how do we keep as many people safe as possible? How do we ensure that this is not a place of more chaos, but the eye of the storm? That this place can be calm and still, and we are going to make it through?” 

Hoyt agreed: “The D.C. arts community has lost a lot of funding. Institutions have closed. Institutions are going to keep closing. For me, I did not want to cause more loss, just because I would feel a certain way going into a certain building. Doug’s play is beautiful, and kids and families should get to see it if they feel that they can go there.”

Another KC program for young people had already left the building: Last Dec. 22, American College Theater Festival (ACTF) suspended its affiliation with the Kennedy Center after 58 years of partnership with the Kennedy Center. KCACTF was the oldest program at the Kennedy Center (indeed it predates the Center’s official opening, in 1971). In a Facebook post, ACTF shared that “our affiliation with the Kennedy Center is no longer viable . . . We want to assure you that this change does not mark an end—but a new chapter . . . ACTF will continue to serve as a ghostlight—a beacon of joy, a sanctuary for all, and a place where every artist feels seen, safe, welcomed, celebrated, and beloved.”

[For those who’re not of the theater and don’t know what a “ghost light” (or “ghostlight”) is, see “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020).]

According to Kelsey Mesa, who has managed the national program with Gregg Henry for nearly a decade, ACTF held an emergency meeting the day after the “Trump Kennedy Center” name change announcement at which the national board voted overwhelmingly to separate immediately because “there was no way to move forward.” They had already cut Kennedy Center-run intensives for 2025 and 2026, after being told to cut $1 million with four months to go in the Education department’s fiscal year, and the intensives were the only budgeted item left. 

[The Kennedy Center offered various training intensives for young artists, though recent reports indicate potential significant changes or closures to these programs for the 2025-2026 seasons. Historically, these intensives have provided specialized, high-caliber training across a number of artistic disciplines.

[Intensives are high-speed, immersive training programs designed to make significant progress in a short amount of time. Unlike a standard weekly class or a one-off workshop, an intensive typically involves all-day training over the course of several days or weeks.

[The instruction by established professionals is usually highly specialized to hone technical skills and artistry, offering networking and mentorship opportunities. Many intensives require students to live on-site to fully immerse themselves in the professional lifestyle.

[At the Kennedy Center, these programs acted as career-development tracks for young artists, moving them beyond basic classroom learning into the essence of their chosen field. They were geared toward pre-professional students or emerging artists looking for a "gateway" into professional companies.]

One silver lining: The KCACTF National Committee and its regional conferences have operated under a separate nonprofit organization, ACTF Management, Ltd., so ACTF can continue in a different form outside of the Kennedy Center. Its regional conferences, run entirely by volunteers who work at universities and have their own artistic careers, continue to thrive, with four for 2026 already under their belt. 

The national festival presents a steeper challenge. Finding a space isn’t the issue; the biggest costs are travel, accommodations, and continued learning opportunities, which were covered by the Kennedy Center. ACTF had already planned to hold the national festival in Minneapolis, with Twin Cities theatres like Children’s Theatre Company, the Guthrie, Mixed Blood, and the Playwrights Center offering space, keynote artists, hotel recommendations, and more. But their split from the Kennedy Center means that the ACTF nonprofit doesn’t have enough funds and so will not host a national festival this year. (The decision was made before the recent ICE takeover of Minneapolis.) Also at risk in the shuffle: an ACTF fellowship that allowed budding theatre journalists to attend the O’Neill Critics Institute.

[The National Critics Institute (frequently referred to as the O’Neill Critics Institute) is a two-week intensive workshop for arts writers and critics held at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It’s designed as a “boot camp” in which mid-career professionals and emerging voices hone their skills through rigorous writing assignments, mentorship from veteran critics, and immersion in the O’Neill’s National Playwrights and Music Theater conferences. Through the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, top student critics from across the U.S. have been able till now to win a fully funded spot at the summer institute.]

In the future, said Mesa, we may see “a version of ACTF that omits the national festival but gives young people opportunities to bridge their careers.” It also may be possible to partner with other organizations to host the festival, but the price of putting it all together can run to half a million dollars, a big cost that is not always evident to potential hosts, Mesa explained.

Students are still showing up for local ACTF gatherings. In attending Region 1 [New England states] and 2 [Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania] this past January, Mesa said that one play that particularly touched her, during the National Playwriting Program’s 10-minute play event, was Plums by Sarah Galante, an MFA candidate at NYU. Mesa called it an “intense, grey-area, loving” conversation between two lesbian mothers whose 6-year-old daughter comes home with bruises on her arm, spurring questions about harm and protection. It was a quintessential ACTF moment: A Region 1 co-chair of the National Playwriting Program, Cassie Seinuk, had won the national 10-minute play award at KCACTF in 2015 with her play Occupy Hallmark, which was also Mesa’s first experience with KCACTF, in a reading she directed for the National Festival.

As ACTF still hopes to provide opportunities for community colleges, small arts colleges, and MFAs alike, they are actively accepting donations to stay afloat and sustain national opportunities. “This work is for students who do not come with privilege, and gives them the chance to be theatre artists,” Mesa said. “I want the field to step up for it.” 

Calls to action within the D.C. theatre community have been swift. In a statement, TheatreWashington executive director Amy Austin said the Center’s closure “will have widespread ramifications for the D.C.-area performing arts community and everyone who benefits from a culturally vibrant region.” The service organization urged folks to donate to its Taking Care Fund, which supports D.C. arts workers through tough times, and encouraged displaced arts workers to use the fund.

[From “The Story of Theatre Washington”: 

In the early 1980s, the Washington Theatre Awards Society was founded to recognize and encourage excellence in professional theatre in the Washington, DC region through the presentation of The Helen Hayes Awards,

. . . .

In 2011, with the encouragement of a wide range of stakeholders, a stronger and more robust organization evolved – theatreWashington (one word, lower case t, capital W). It was a call to evolve from an Awards presenter to a more layered organization to serve the community. Presently, working in tandem with the community, Theatre Washington (two words, capital T, capital W) is evolving into a full partnership organization in service to the community with multiple year-round, core programs.

[“Theatre Washington is an alliance of theatre organizations, theatre-makers, and theatre supporters that promotes and nurtures a creative, equitable, healthy, and diverse regional theatre community.”]

Last Tuesday, Kennedy Center Arts Workers United, representing Actors[’] Equity, SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the union that represents theatrical directors and choreographers], IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents stagehands, technicians, artisans, and craftspeople in TV, film, and stage], and more, spoke out. “A pause in Kennedy Center operations without due regard for those who work there would be harmful for the arts and creative workers in America,” the union said in a statement. “Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law. We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause.”

Hoyt, who lived in D.C. for five years as literary manager for Round House Theatre [Bethesda, Maryland], reiterated the respect that she has “for every artist who was supposed to come through Kennedy Center this year, who did come through Kennedy Center this year, or who did not come through Kennedy Center this year. Saying no is an act of profound bravery, and it’s really necessary. That we made a different choice, I think, does not negate theirs, and does not imply that theirs was wrong, or invalid, or created harm of any kind. The theatre community has to have solidarity right now. We have such respect for a lot of amazing artists who are faced with terrible choices. There are no good choices. This is a bad situation.”

It’s also true, she noted, that the DMV area [a local appellation for the “District (of Columbia), Maryland, Virginia.”]  “is a great place to be a kid who loves theatre,” citing education programs and productions at Imagination Stage [Bethesda], Round House Theatre, Adventure Theatre MTC [DC], Theatre Lab [DC], Educational Theatre Company [Arlington], Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, and many more. “It is hard for me to imagine that the Kennedy Center’s ability to serve young people is going to end this year,” Hoyt said. “I just, I don’t—that cannot be, under my personal cosmology.”

[Daniella Ignacio, a writer, theater artist, and musician based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing editor of American Theatre magazine.

[Ignacio’s report on the effects on the D.C. area of the changes being wrought at the Kennedy Center is very personal to me.  I was born in Washington and have often admitted to being something of a Washington chauvinist.  Even though I haven’t lived there since I went away for high school in 1961, my parents lived there almost their entire married lives (the exception being a five-year period when my dad was a Foreign Service Officer abroad). 

[I returned to D.C. frequently for the rest of their lives and, since they were theater-lovers, one of our frequent activities was going to the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, Arena Stage, and many of the small houses that arose in the area after 1980.  I watched Washington grow from an almost theater desert in the ’50s and ’60s into a thriving and vibrant theater town.  (I wrote a little about this in “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011] and “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction” [26 November 2011].)

[The Kennedy Center wasn’t even there until 1971 (I was out of the country in the army when it opened and didn’t get back to Washington until 1974), but the change it effected on the D.C. area’s theater was remarkable.  Within 10 years, our own little “Off-Broadway” burgeoned.  My parents and I were in hog-heaven.  To see it in jeopardy now because somebody’s sticking a monkey wrench into the works disheartens me—and makes me angry.]

*  *  *  *
“DEGREES IN THE SHADE?”
by KJ Sanchez

[This article appeared in American Theatre’s annual training issue, “Learning Curves” (Winter 2026 – volume 42, number 3); it was posted on the AT website on 16 February 2026.]

With some MFA theatre programs closing and others opening, an educator talks to colleagues about the state of the academy.

I never thought I would be a professor. And I never imagined I would live in Texas. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and—well, we New Mexicans had some opinions about the Texans who came to ski our mountains.

For 25 years I lived in New York. I ran American Records (my theatre company), wrote plays, and directed across the country. In 2015 I was invited to Austin to be a guest respondent for student productions at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The works were part of the Cohen New Works Festival, a biannual week-long festival where audiences can see up to 40 productions, tucked into every nook and cranny of the Theatre and Dance building, featuring work created, curated, and produced by students. On my first visit to UT Austin, I moved from show to show, gob-smacked—how had I never known about this magical land where the students were on fire and the teachers seemed to truly like each other?

Playwriting professors Steven Dietz [b. 1958; playwright, theater director, and teacher] and Kirk Lynn took me for a cup of coffee and asked if I’d be interested in spending a semester in Austin as a guest instructor. That semester turned into a teaching gig—and now here I am a professor, and I lead the school’s MFA in Directing program.

Yesterday was a fairly typical day for me: My first class was at 9 a.m. It’s called Spectacle as a Political Tool. Two graduate directors and I teach 60 undergraduates (most in their first year) from colleges across the UT campus about how spectacle has historically informed self-governance. After that, I had meetings with grad students to talk about the classes they’ll take next semester: One will take a sound design class, another is excited about a choreography course offered by our dance program.

In the afternoon I joined the graduate designers in their studio class to discuss the art of iteration. That evening I sat in on techs: a three-person all-femme adaptation of Macbeth [27 October-2 November 2025] and an all-the-bells-and-whistles-we-can-muster staging of Cabaret [30 October-9 November 2025].

A long day. But a wonderful day. Because I am feeling extremely grateful to have this job. Even though I never thought I would be what Kirk Lynn calls an “indoor cat,” every day I understand more deeply what the academy can offer . . . and every day I worry about what might happen to any one of similar graduate programs across the country.

I don’t think I’m alone in that when I hear of another MFA program closing or pausing, I fear a trend. Social media postings give us anecdotal information about these closures, but I am cautious about generalizations without comprehensive data about how many programs have closed versus how many have been created within a certain time frame. Perhaps this “wait until complete data is in” approach is simply an attempt to remain stubbornly optimistic. (Quite likely.)

That said, I reached out recently to two educators in the midst of great change: Luis Alfaro [b. 1961; Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist], associate professor of Dramatic Writing and director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing program at the University of Southern California (USC [Los Angeles]), and Seth Gordon, professor of Directing and Theatre Management at the University of Oklahoma (OU [Norman]). Maestro Alfaro posted recently that his beloved MFA program, which has been in existence for more than 30 years, will be “sunsetted” after this school year is done. Meanwhile, Gordon plans to reopen an MFA in Directing program at OU, which shuttered about 20 years ago.

The first takeaway I gleaned from conversations with both Alfaro and Gordon is that none of the three of us think graduate school is the only way to advance a playwriting or directing practice, nor do we think graduate school is for everyone. A perfect example is Alfaro himself, a MacArthur Fellow who is in a very special group of educators who have received tenure due to extraordinary commensurate experience. Not only did Alfaro never get an MFA himself—he never went to college.

“I went straight into the field in the ’80s,” he recalled. After studying with playwright María Irene Fornés [Cuban-born American; 1930-2018], Alfaro worked as a poet and performance artist. “The weird thing about being at USC,” Alfaro told me, “is I was raised in abject poverty in one of the poorest, most violent neighborhoods of L.A., which is where USC is.”

How did he get from there to here? “I’m a child of the apprenticeships, the internships, the fellowships, all of that,” he said. “I wrote a ton of letters to people, and said, ‘Hey, I love your work and I would love to meet you.’”

One of those meetings was with Mark Russell [b. 1955; experimental theater producer/curator/”programmer” (his word)], who ran New York City’s P.S. 122 (and would later run the Under the Radar Festival), and who steered Alfaro to such spaces as DiverseWorks in Houston, Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, and Guadalupe Arts in San Antonio, Texas. “I went everywhere, right?” Alfaro recalled. “Instead of going to New York, I got to go around the country. And that circuit was full of amazing people.”

One of Alfaro’s favorite spaces was Boston’s The Theater Offensive, where artistic director Abe Rybeck [b. ca. 1956] would “pair me up on these double bills with these veteran artists that were extraordinary.”

As I listened to Alfaro describe his on-the-job training and apprenticeships, it dawned on me: The days of a broke emerging artist being able to afford to travel the country and learn from veteran artists are gone. The cost of living has made it essentially impossible. This is where some graduate programs are taking up the slack. Yes, graduate schools are cost-prohibitive for far too many, but where an artist like Alfaro once moved from city to city seeking mentorship, we now bring the elders and leaders of the field to our graduate programs to meet our students, to offer workshops, feedback, and mentorships. An additional benefit of this new model is that our guest mentors see the work of and also interact with our undergraduate student body. What once served one emerging artist at a time is now serving many.

Alfaro and his colleagues were told by USC leadership that the reason the MFA program was closing was due to a pivot to a “revenue-based model.” This news was particularly surprising, given that USC made their Acting and Dramatic Writing programs tuition-free starting in the 2024-25 school year. I asked Gordon about this: How would he respond if OU mandated that he create a program centered on revenue?

“We are a Research 1 University, as are you,” Gordon said. “So the fact that we will have the kind of impact on the field that I hope we’ll have is what we’re all about. I am assuming that if I am ever told we are switching to a revenue-based model, the subtext of that is, ‘We’re not an R1.’” The philosophy that guides both of our programs, as Gordon put it, is about “how we are going to contribute to our field: by providing it with the people that the field needs to lead it responsibly into its next chapter.”

Alfaro has trained many such leaders, with students going on to become the next generation of writers in live performance, TV, and film. He said he tailors each student’s program of study to best prepare them to lead in their own unique way. “I can see what each one means in the field,” he said. 

Because USC has been accepting two writers on average per year, Alfaro explained, “You can diagnose and build a program for them. ‘What do you need?’ What we’re doing is spending time to figure out how to find them the right mentors, to connect with the right people. Then every year, there’s one that’s sort of extraordinary, and you have to build something special for that one student. That’s what graduate school can do.”

That may sound shocking. In fact, one rationale Alfaro was given for the program’s end was that this model—of many instructors hired to serve a very small number of students’ needs—is financially untenable. The fuller picture, though, is that Alfaro and his colleagues teach and mentor all across campus.

“I teach undergraduate courses, I teach in acting, I teach in critical studies,” he said. “Right now, I’m teaching a Latinx course—packed—and I’m teaching the Playwriting 1 undergrad. So I’m teaching courses that are not in my MFA program, but that bring a lot of money into the program.”

Not only are we faculty teaching across degrees and areas of specialization, so are our graduate students, who teach many of the introductory courses that bring in large numbers of students. Another common part of our work as graduate faculty is to bring our research into STEM spaces. Here at UT Austin, I watch in awe as my colleague, associate professor Kathryn Dawson, area head of the Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities program, has been leading a cohort of theatre and dance faculty and graduate students who have been collaborating with UT Austin STEM researchers on a multi-year grand challenge involving over 100 Principle Investigators (project leads) across 40 departments, as they study various aspects of climate change and resiliency.

I asked Seth Gordon why he decided to lead the charge in restarting a long-dormant graduate program. “I don’t think we really understood at the time the degree to which we were filling a void that appears to be developing,” he admitted. “We just figured there’s a need in this part of the country.”

Gordon received a grant to study graduate programs in his region—which is larger than you might think. “Oklahoma, the states that touch Oklahoma, and the states that touch the states that touch Oklahoma—that right there is about 10 or 15 states,” he said. Even within that larger region, Gordon found only two comparable theatre directing MFA programs: UT Austin, where I teach, and the University of Arkansas.

His ambitions aren’t just that OU’s MFA students work in the theatre field. “I’m hoping that this program will allow people to find themselves as leaders as much as directors,” Gordon said. “My hope is to expose them to the field of directing, but also to the field of nonprofit leadership.”

Part of Gordon’s mission with this new MFA program is to nurture new companies that form among student cohorts, having already seen some success along these lines with former undergraduates, who have formed a theatre company called Co.Arts Theater Co. (formerly Collective Arts Productions). That company has also welcomed current students into its ranks, so that they’re “forging that first level of connections.”

Another gap in the field that the academy has taken up: providing space and resources to work and bridges to cultivate relationships. When I moved to New York in the early ’90s, not only was I able [to] work in theatre for next to nothing because my rent (in Chelsea, no less!) was $250 per month, but I and my colleagues could work in grungy but cherished hole-in-the-wall venues like Todo con Nada on Ludlow Street, because those venues were affordable to self-produce in. Emerging artists today are often priced out of similar opportunities to build their oeuvre and hone their craft. They may instead get that chance in graduate school. As Alfaro notes, at a well-funded university, those resources can be extraordinary.

“Last year, I had all the second-year stage managers, mostly women and people of color,” said Alfaro. In a single year they got to work on “a big, fat musical, and then Angels in America [1991; Tony Kushner; 18-27 April 2025], and Marat/Sade [The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade; 1963; Peter Weiss (German); 18-27 October 2024], and a site-specific space. Where are they going to get that training and that capacity, on that level, in the way that they’re doing on campus?”

[nb: USC staged only Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches in this season.]

Don’t get me wrong: Graduate programs are not perfect. I often reflect on the times I have not been the ideal mentor that a student deserved. And I am fully aware of how expensive graduate programs can be, even when tuition is waived and students get paid to teach or work as research assistants. With the cost of living, it’s still a massive investment.

But one thing I know to be true: Graduate programs are contributing to our field’s future in so many ways. Our biggest challenge at the moment is to make those contributions visible.

Though his MFA program will no longer be accepting new graduate students, Alfaro is not going anywhere. First he has his current graduate students to serve—and I’d lay down good money that these current students are going to get some of the best teaching of Alfaro’s career. He’s working every day, building new collaborations and devising new systems to keep serving all his students, now and into a new, if uncertain future.

What we all understand is that we have no theatre if we have no new plays. And Luis Alfaro—hands down one of our greatest living playwrights—has always been a mentor by nature. His dedication to passing the torch is true, and is sure to carry on in whatever form comes next.

“I feel like a drug dealer,” he quipped. “I’m gonna make you love writing a play. You won’t even realize we’re gonna write a whole play, but we’re writing a whole play.”

As Kimberly Belflower, a UT Austin playwriting MFA from 2017, put it, “What starts here changes the world.”

[KJ Sanchez is a director, playwright, and author of The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge, 2025).  She founded American Records and leads the MFA Directing program at the University of Texas, Austin.]

More About Healing Theater

 

Both Bryan Doerries and KJ Sanchez use theatre to confront the toughest human challenges, from battlefield trauma to prison

[This post is a follow-up on “Theater: A Healing Art” (3 September 2023).  Theater as a healing art is an idea that was put into my head by Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), an experimental theater director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s, and about whom I’ve blogged often on Rick On Theater.]

“NOT ALONE”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt

[The article below, the transcript of a conversation between KJ Sanchez and Bryan Doerries moderated by Rob Weinert-Kendt, was published in American Theatre’s October 2015 issue (volume 32, number 8) under the heading “Conversations.”  It was posted as “Bryan Doerries and KJ Sanchez, Mediators and Resensitizers” and slugged “Interviews” on the AT website on 23 September 2015. 

[(The text below is taken from the online version of the article which has more of the conversation than the printed text.  The final passages of the digital edition were badly edited; I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning them up for reposting on Rick On Theater.)

[Bryan Doerries and his Theater of War, which is all about healing through theater, are the subject of “Theater of War” (22, 25, and 28 June, and 1 July 2024).]

The creators of ‘Theater of War’ and ‘ReEntry’ compare notes on adapting and creating cathartic experiences for servicemembers and other hard-hit communities.

Neither has served in the military, but both Bryan Doerries [b. ca. 1977; pronounced DOOR-eez] and KJ Sanchez [b. ca. 1967] have felt called to serve in other ways: Doerries with his company Outside the Wire, which since 2008 has toured his stripped-down translations of Greek tragedies to military bases around the world, including at Guantanamo Bay (AT, July/August ’11), and Sanchez with ReEntry, a docutheatre piece she created with Emily Ackerman [playwright and actress based in New York City] based on interviews with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the same AT issue) [premiered at Two River Theater Company, Red Bank, New Jersey, 24 January-15 February 2009]. Both have since branched out to do similar work in other contexts: Doerries with healthcare workers and prison guards, and Sanchez with pieces about equity in the arts and most recently the legacy of brain injuries in professional football (X’s and O’s: A Football Love Story at Berkeley Rep [premiere: 16 January-1 March 2015], coming soon to Baltimore’s Center Stage [13 November-18 December 2015]; AT, March ’15).

[Outside the Wire is “a social-impact company,” say the official statements of its mission, “that uses theater and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end-of-life care, prison reform, domestic violence, political violence, recovery from natural and man-made disasters, substance abuse, and addiction.”  It was started in 2009 by Doerries, its co-founder (with Phyllis Kaufman, a lawyer and the company’s producer).

[Outside the Wire is the umbrella organization for several related projects, including the Theater of War, whose origins reach back to 2005, though it, too, was formed in 2009. ToW is “a project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to service members, veterans, and their families to help them initiate conversations about the visible and invisible wounds of war.” (The dates of formation for both Outside the Wire and Theater of War are given variously in different sources.)]

Doerries’s new book about his work, The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, will be published on Sept. 22 by Knopf [2015; for a review by James Shapiro, see Theater of War, Part 1], along with a volume of his translations of Ajax, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Prometheus Bound, titled All That You’ve Seen Here Is God [Vintage, 2015]. A star-studded 10-city fall tour to mark the book launch begins Sept. 27 [2015] at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Some months ago, Sanchez and Doerries, who are friends and colleagues, met for drinks at Soho’s [New York City] Ear Inn to talk shop about military culture, the machinery of tragedy, and why talkbacks are an obscenity.

[For some thoughts on “talkbacks” from a playwright’s and a dramaturg/writing teacher’s perspective, see “Thoughts on Playwriting” by Kirk Woodward (31 January 2021).]

KJ Sanchez: What I love about your book is that it covers all your work, not just your work with the military, but how all of these plays can serve as palliative, as healing, as a reflecting pool and a conduit to important, life-changing conversations we don’t seem to be able to have until we have that play that can ignite them. What the book can do is become a lighthouse for a lot of people who want to do this kind of work.

Bryan Doerries: I hope so. I certainly hope so.

Sanchez: I have to make a confession. When I first saw your presentation on an Army base, I got really emotional—and that was before the actors even started. I got emotional with your introduction. You get up there and say that in your marrow you are committed to this conversation that is about to happen. It’s clear how personally dangerous it is, how professionally dangerous it is, and you lay it all out on the line. The way that you introduced Ajax [442 or 441 BCE; by Sophocles (497/496-406/405 BCE)]—the way you set the stage for who Ajax was and what his friend Achilles meant to him, and the loss of dignity and humanity that Ajax suffered when Achilles’s shield is given to Odysseus instead—this was all in your introduction, and I was already just completely engaged.

And I was so happy to see that you put all that personal investment in the book, too. You had talked to me a little bit about losing your girlfriend Laura. Obviously, losing someone you love is a key moment in anyone’s life, but I didn’t realize how that really triggered what you would do for the rest of your life.

[Laura Rothenberg and Doerries met at the University of Virginia in 2002. She had cystic fibrosis from birth and died on 20 March 2003 at age 22 when her body rejected her transplanted lungs. In his grief, Doerries said, he turned to the Greek tragedies he’d read in college because he could relate to the great suffering the characters underwent. That experience, he professed, led him to the Theater of War.]

Doerries: You know, you make one decision in your life: I’m going to care for a person; I’m going to put it all on the line and see where this leads. I’m going to face death, I’m going to face suffering. And it just continues to open world upon world upon world. I owe all my work to that experience, and it keeps unfolding in all these ways that I could never expect. Laura died on March 20, 2003, in the East Village in our apartment, and a year ago, on March 20 [2014], I found myself sitting in an office at [Memorial] Sloan Kettering [Cancer Center; cancer treatment and research institution in Manhattan] being asked whether we’d bring Philoctetes [409 BCE by Sophocles] to this cancer hospital. We did five or six free performances, engaging these oncologists in open discussions about death and dying and being in the presence of suffering, using this ancient play as a catalyst. At the end of that, the head of surgery’s wife comes up to me and says, “We’d like to ask you to be our commencement speaker this year for the surgical oncologists.” I always thought I would get a high school graduation, or you know, the Rotary Club, but to be given the opportunity to speak to 75 of the top surgeons at the top training institution in the world for oncology was a huge opportunity.

So standing in front of these doctors, I hit them really hard—I talked a lot about Philoctetes and about Hippocratic medicine, the limits of medicine in the ancient world and how there was wisdom in conceiving of a medicine with limits. I had no idea if it would land. And then, at this black-tie event at Cipriani, one by one these doctors, these chairs and chiefs of the program, came up and said, “That really touched me.”

[Doerries was probably speaking of Cipriani 42nd Street, an elegant event space known for its high-end Italian cuisine. It is directly across East 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal. (There are—or were in 2015—a number of Cipriani eateries of different types in Manhattan.)]

What I’ve learned over the last six years or seven years is that sometimes it really takes an outsider to change the culture of an institution, whether that institution is the theatre or a hospital or the military. The only way to stand in front of an audience of a thousand Marines who are thinking about the ways they could disembowel you, who are resentful at the fact that you’re there telling them about Greek tragedy and they’ve been “volun-told” to see it—the only way to stand there with any confidence in my opinion is to revel in being the outsider. You don’t have to be hyper-masculine; you don’t have to be accepted or even be liked by them. You just have to deliver this thing to them.

Sanchez: And you have to be willing to listen. That is very, very clear with what you do. Even if what you ask them is, “So tell me how we got it wrong,” then that opens the door.

Doerries: That’s the best!

Sanchez: That’s the best question, right?

Doerries: I know it’s working when two things happen. One is when the lowest-ranking member of the community for which we’re performing, the food service worker in the prison, the private in the military, the palliative care hospice nurse in the hospital setting, stands up and speaks the truth of his or her experience in front of the highest-ranking members. The second way I know it’s working is when people talk about how much they hate the experience, and they can openly do it in their own words. It becomes all the more validating, after the person who said, “This is the fucking most pretentious thing I’ve ever experienced,” for someone to say, “This is the most life-changing thing I’ve ever experienced.” I find myself grinning from ear to ear when people stand up and say, “This is bullshit.” Because we’ve created a place where that can be said. I mean, where else can that be said in these regimented hierarchical environments, you know? I mean, it’s okay for us to get up and say it at the Public Theater, but to say it where your job is on the line?

Sanchez: Wouldn’t that be fantastic if we could have more of that immediate feedback loop in the American theatre at large? Because the only way we have feedback is audiences can give thumbs up, thumbs down, reviewers can talk about what they liked or whether the writing was successful. This isn’t about, “Do you think we’re good playwrights?” It’s: I’m going to do my very best to share, to tell you this story in an artistic, human way. Then I want to hear whatever you have to offer, all of you.

Doerries: When we move the needle and audiences are buzzing because they’ve been touched in some meaningful way—not necessarily explicitly about a social issue, but touched as human beings—we have an opportunity to do something with that energy. Yet 99 percent of the time, with great speed and efficiency, we suck the life out of the possibility in that audience. We do that by having a dramaturg come out and give a lecture; we do that by having people who share our political beliefs come out and congratulate us for having those beliefs; we do that by, worst of all—with all due respect—having the artists come out and talk about process. That’s the most soul-deadening thing you can do after an uplifting experience in the theatre. Instead, this model, which I know you subscribe to—

Sanchez: Well, we outright stole it from your design when we did ReEntry at Center Stage, then at Actors Theatre of Louisville [Humana Festival of New American Plays; 15 November-17 December 2011]. We did exactly what you do: Immediately after the performance, panelists came up. With ReEntry it was a veteran, a spouse, and either a chaplain or a mental health worker. And their job was to give their first-blush personal response to the play. It can be, “This play made me angry,” “This play was exactly my story,” “This play made me question how I’m going to talk to my husband,” or, “What you didn’t get in the play was this.” And then a town hall discussion. It’s completely different than having the actors come out, and then the audience has to be nice and say, “What was it like to be that character?”

Doerries: It’s to the point where the word “talkback” has become an obscenity to me. Not because the word isn’t descriptive of what we should be doing—we should be talking back. It’s an obscenity because we have turned it into a manifestation of our most banal, most unimaginative impulses in the theatre. Theatre is a psychotropic experience; it changes us biochemically. It puts us in a different state of consciousness. And once we enter that state of consciousness, something can happen.

Sanchez: We need to coin a new phrase—“talk-across.”

Doerries: Yeah!

Sanchez: Instead of a talkback, you know?

Doerries: I mean, right now it’s really a “talk down.” It’s about, how many different ways can we condescend to the intelligence of this audience? Until we’ve deadened the possibility we’ve created. The model that we use and that you have innovated on in your own way—I do think it speaks to the ancient model from which these ancient texts derived and evolved, which is that a city would empty all of its courts, its places of work, its places of worship, and send one third of its population to a theatre, and 17,000 people would sit according to tribe and rank and watch plays that were explicitly speaking in some way to fundamental human experiences. Not as sheer entertainment and not as therapy per se, but as a religious experience—a rite, something that is sacred.

Sanchez: I get a little squirrely when I hear the word religious, but my version of that is about bearing witness.

Doerries: If I had one word to define this work, it’s permission. How many different ways can we give you permission—you, the audience—to speak the unspeakable? To acknowledge the thing that you buried deep and denied? To face death? To collectively acknowledge our shared humanity, and also, most importantly with the tragedies we perform, to acknowledge the limitations of human compassion? The note I give actors before they go onstage is: “Make them wish they’d never come.” The reason I say that is because if we push an audience to a point where they wish they weren’t there, and in some way they’ve been trapped—whether they’re “volun-told” or it’s socially unacceptable to walk out, or it’s a place without an aisle—that then we can create this moment where we can actually interrogate why it was so difficult to be in the room. I used to think it was all about empathy, but for me it’s much more about shared discomfort.  

[For an example of a situation like the one Doerries describes above, see my discussion of Richard Schechner’s The Prometheus Project in December 1985 in “Appropriation in the Theater” (8 May 2015).].

Sanchez: Right. You know, we use the phrase “compassion fatigue” a lot, when we’re not really all that tired of being compassionate. But you are actually dealing with communities, with doctors and hospice workers who are facing death every day, dealing with a military on their 8th, 9th, 10th deployment—you are dealing with people hitting the wall.

Doerries: Absolutely.

Sanchez: And you’re saying to the actors: Throw the wall back at them and then somehow you bust through together.

Doerries: Yeah. Push it past them, past what people in the room can handle. I mean, most of our audiences are red state audiences; they don’t share a lot necessarily in common with the actors or with me in terms of our values, our political perspectives. But if we share nothing, at least we share that we were uncomfortable.

Sanchez: That is such a great place to start. That’s the base of human experience.

Doerries: So if you want to have a conversation about abortion, if you want to have a conversation about war, if you want to have a conversation about traumatic brain injury, start with a portrayal of human suffering first, push the audience past its ability to hear it, witness it—and then have the conversation. I guarantee you it won’t be a shouting match of people trying to savage each other with ideology, because we have moved the audience from one cognitive space to another, and it creates the opening. I see it every place we go, from San Francisco and Cambridge and D.C. to the most rigidly conservative audiences in the middle of the country.

Sanchez: Ajax was your first project; you used that play as a way of talking about battle fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic stress—depending on who you talk to, because some folks don’t like the term “disorder”—the spousal experience, and obviously suicide. Talk us through a couple of the other pieces that you cover.

Doerries: Concurrent with the development of Theater of War, I also developed this project, presenting readings of Prometheus in supermax prisons. At first I thought we were going to perform it for the inmates.

Sanchez: But then something even more interesting happened.

Doerries: After trying to get into Rikers Island and getting very close but not making it, I met a social worker there who said, “Listen, I have a cousin who is the director for corrections in the state of Missouri, and he might just be crazy enough to allow you to come in with Prometheus Bound [ca. 430 BCE; by Aeschylus (525/524-456 BCE)].”

Sanchez: It’s always about meeting the one that’s crazy enough. Or desperate enough. I once had a Marine Corps retired general say to me, “We’re desperate now—we’ll try anything.” That’s why he was all for bringing theatre into the military.

Doerries: Yeah, God bless the military. They’re not like foundations that need metrics before they try something. They have a problem the scale of which is so large, and for better or worse, they have such a large portion of our gross domestic product and our tax dollars, and you and I came in at this moment where they were trying everything: They were trying sand rock gardens, they were trying equestrian therapy, they were trying dolphins. Greek tragedy or documentary-style theatre [what Sanchez does; see “Feud for Thought” and “Real Talk About Real Talk”] actually seems relatively middle of the road when you think about all the things they were trying. They were throwing them up against a wall and seeing what stuck.

Sanchez: So back to: You met this woman who had a cousin who might have been crazy enough to try this.

Doerries: Yeah, so I call the cousin and he immediately returns my call. His name is George Lombardi, he’s the director of corrections in the state of Missouri. And he says, “Listen, I really like your idea. We have some programs already for prisoners, but what I think maybe would be more valuable is if you came in and did the performance for corrections officers and other people working in the prisons. No one ever does anything for them, we have very little psychological services for them, and they do time eight hours a day and live in these hellish environments, and, you know, maybe something could happen.” The more I thought about it, I thought, well, there’s not closer analogue to the military, where I knew the project was really working, than the sort of paramilitary apparatus of those who work in prisons. They have rank, they have file, they report their surveillance, there’s punishment. To a certain extent, there’s no difference between a barracks and a hospital and a prison. They’re all systems of rigid hierarchy, of discipline and punishment. And Prometheus is about discipline and punishment! It’s about living within this hierarchical structure.

Sanchez: I was very struck with how many guards identified with Prometheus, and see themselves as part of the prison industrial complex in a way that really surprised me.

Doerries: Theatre gives us the opportunity to step back from the roles we’re all playing, to acknowledge the archetypes and look at them more objectively. Everyone who works inside a prison is aware that a very thin barrier separates them from the people they have power over—that only grace separates them in many ways. Many who work in prisons come from the same socioeconomic background, the same neighborhoods, the same classrooms, the same gangs, as the people who are in the prison themselves. So that came out immediately in the discussion of Prometheus Bound after the first performance we did at a supermax prison for the guards: “I’m Prometheus; I’m the one who can be punished for showing compassion to the people that I’m guarding,” or, “I’m the one that if I get a DUI will get a mandatory sentence of five years or more, while you, because you can afford a much better lawyer, Bryan, will get off.”

You know, all of these communities that we go into are communities that practice a kind of emotional detachment at the center of their work, whether it’s surgeons or soldiers or guards or corrections officers. And theatre has the capacity to create a safe space for them to let down the barriers—to allow the Trojan horse of Greek tragedy in and to feel something, and to do it in a public, and even in a performative way.

One of the things I’ve also learned from this work—and this is the center of your work in every way—is that we need mediation. Theatre is mediation. Like, if I allowed myself to feel the things it would be appropriate to feel from the walk from here to the subway in relation to people that I saw on the street, I would be destroyed. So I practice this clinical detachment as well. I need to be wrested from it, for it be wrenched away from me, and the shock of being in the presence of a believable portrayal of human suffering, with an amazing actor delivering it, can do that.

Sanchez: I understand why some doctors and others become desensitized; it’s a survival mechanism.

Doerries: Certainly. It’s not adaptive to be crying when bullets are flying at you, or when you’re in an ER and you’re having to cut open someone’s chest. But there has to be a sanctioned place to feel those things, and the theatre was that sanctioned place. This is not some fanciful fabrication. It was the place where everyone stopped working, they came together, and they purposely put themselves in front of an experience that would elicit these feelings. In a century in which 80 years of that century was spent fighting war—in the latter half of a century in which a third of the Athenian population had died, if we believe Thucydides—there is no one in the Athenian audience who wouldn’t have known the screams of these characters. There was no one in the audience who wouldn’t have understood that first- or secondhand. So for the last six years, the experiment for me has been: What do we do when we take these ancient stories, which I think are a technology designed for very specific audiences that had lived these experiences—

Sanchez: The original apps, is that what you’re saying?

Doerries: Yeah, I think of them more like external hard drives. When you plug them into an audience for which they were designed, the plays know what to do and the audience knows what to do in return. Like when you transplant a kidney, and before you finish suturing it into the new body, the urethra is pumping urine. There’s something about these plays that are living, breathing, organic technology for delivering a very specific experience.

But this is where your work comes in; there are so many people who are suffering and need an intervention of this nature for which there is no classic text and something needs to be devised.

Sanchez: Right, American Records’ mission is to make work that chronicles our time, and work that serves as a bridge between people. So my job is to listen to a particular community, to a particular story, and then what I do is I frame it in a palatable way. I’m a huge fan of documentary films, but documentary theatre does something very different, similar to what you do, which is that it allows us to bear witness together. So I start with a subject, something that I find burning and interesting. This is going to not make any sense, perhaps, but I pick subjects I don’t understand yet what I feel about. That’s been my guiding principle for the last 10 years: that what I think and feel about a situation has nothing to do with what I’m trying to do. In fact, I’ve turned down stories and projects—

Doerries: Where you have a lot of skin in the game?

[My recent post “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025) is an excerpt from KJ Sanchez’s book The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge, 2024). (The selection was published as “Feud for Thought: How I Made a Play Out of a Family Drama” on the American Theatre webpage on 20 March 2025.) The book explores the field of documentary and investigative theater and offers a guide for making interview-based plays.]

Sanchez: Yeah. I’ve been asked to do something about immigration, and it’s like, no, I know how I feel about that. Then it becomes agitprop theatre.

Doerries: That’s a really important distinction. Because I think theatre that wears its politics on its sleeve alienates the very audience one would hope to engage. It’s not about the opening of meaning, or discovery, it’s about the closing of meaning and discovery.

Sanchez: I took some heat from my colleagues with ReEntry. I had a handful of people angry at me because I didn’t make an antiwar play. They thought that Emily and I made a pro-military play because I didn’t end the play with “war is bad.” I ended it with, “You know what? They’re still going back, and they couldn’t give a shit what the war is about.”

But all of these stories are incredibly emotional; the stakes are unbelievably high. For the last 9 years I’ve been promising myself a nervous breakdown. I keep saying that when I’m interviewing somebody, my job is not to let them know how I feel about anything. I’m on board for wherever they’re going to take me. So I don’t cry; I set aside all of that. Someday I’m going to go away, find a shaman, get into a sweat lodge, and let it all out. And I’m sure this happens everywhere you present: There’s a line of people who want to tell you their story, right? I find people who don’t feel comfortable talking in front of the group, they pull you aside.

Doerries: Yeah, definitely. It goes on for hours.

Sanchez: Where do you put that?

Doerries: It just gives me energy. It doesn’t take away. What I see night after night in the audiences when we perform is a palpable sense of relief.

The first question I ask all audiences is: Why do you think Sophocles wrote these plays and staged them for his community? What was he trying to say—what was his objective? Of course, the subtext of that is, How did this make you feel? And “how does this make you feel” is a question I wouldn’t want to be asked myself. So I say, “Why did Sophocles write this play?” I’m making it sound like a quasi-academic question. At one of our first performances, at an artillery base in Germany, this junior-enlisted soldier immediately raises his hand and says, “I think Sophocles wrote Ajax to boost morale.” And I say, “What’s morale-boosting about watching a great warrior lose his best friend, come unglued, attempt to kill his commanding officers, and ultimately, against the pleading of his wife and family, take his own life?” Before I could finish the question, the soldier shoots back, “Because it’s the truth.”

Sanchez: One of the best compliments I ever got was a lance corporal who walked up to me and said, “First of all, ma’am, I would like to say, I’m very glad this did not suck. And secondly, it’s good to know I’m not alone.”

Doerries: That’s terrific. I was at Camp Pendleton, and a Marine came up to me and said afterward, “Hey, sir, I liked your little skit.” I was like: You’re right, it is a skit.

Sanchez: We’ve talked about this before, but you and I have both noted the difference in communicating with military leadership versus leadership in the American theatre.

Doerries: Oh yeah.

Sanchez: I can get a general to return my emails and my phone calls, but there are a good number of artistic directors who don’t have the time and ability to communicate well.

Doerries: Well, for what it’s worth, maybe the general has more resources.

Sanchez: Yes, that’s a good point. One of my favorite things that Anne Bogart [b. 1951; theatre and opera director; one of the artistic directors of SITI Company] ever said to me was a little advice she gave when I was becoming a director. She said, “You need to figure out if you’re a person who’s round on the outside and square on the inside, or square on the outside and round on the inside.” The military and medical and service communities that we work with are very square on the outside. You get a response—either, “No, thank you,” or, “We’d like your play at our base, please advise.” Done. But in the world we traffic in, because of all of our creativity, we’re round on the outside, so it’s more difficult to communicate, to be hard when we need to be hard. Do you know what I mean?

Doerries: It’s actually been a big revelation for me. Would I rather deal with academics, people in the theatre, foundation people—or with people in the military to try to get something done? No question who I’d want to work with. There’s something so remarkable about the efficiency. There are a lot of inefficiencies, obviously, in the military, but if you give people in the military two pieces of paper with a quick proposal, and maybe one phone call later, it’s executed, usually flawlessly—maybe a little too literally. If you work in the theatre or with academics, you have 20 phone calls. Maybe it’s part of the culture from the get-go, or maybe it’s just when you’re facing life-and-death issues, you don’t have time for all the bullshit. You attack problems more efficiently. There’s something deeply refreshing about it.

Sanchez: Does it make you crazy when well-intentioned people say, “You know, you should hook up with the USO”? That makes me crazy!

Doerries: No. We did partner with the USO on a quarter of a million dollar grant, and they were great partners, and they have an enormous reach.

Sanchez: But it’s about, “Let’s entertain the troops.”

Doerries: It’s different. So the other person person that should be sitting at this table is Adam Driver [b. 1983; actor], whose organization Arts in the Armed Forces, of which I’m on the board, espouses that specific approach. He was in the military, the Marine Corps, he went to Juilliard, he’s had a successful career, and he feels that people in the military deserve not to be condescended to with what passes for entertainment. They deserve to be uplifted and challenged, and so he doesn’t do plays that are explicitly about the military—he does John Patrick Shanley [b. 1950; playwright, theater director, and filmmaker], and he allows the audience to have its own human response. They’re not about discussion, but they’re about raising the bar and saying, you know, it is a form of service to go into these communities and bring something that actually is challenging or uplifting, rather than to you know, simply entertain.

[Arts in the Armed Forces (AITAF) was a non-profit organization that brought arts programming to active-duty service members, veterans, military support staff of the United States, and their families around the world free of charge. It was founded by actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker in 2006 and was dissolved in 2023.]

Sanchez: Yeah. Isn’t it cool now that we have a tribe?

Doerries: Yeah, there’s a tribe.

Sanchez: You mentioned Adam, and there’s also Paula Vogel [b. 1951; Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright].

Doerries: Paula Vogel, and there’s a whole bunch of others.

Sanchez: What’s so fascinating about her is that early in her life, her day job was as a secretary for the Navy.

Sanchez: And now she’s offering herself to do workshops whenever possible for veterans, to teach, to give them tools to write their own plays.

Doerries: And she’s cultivating the talent of this next generation of veteran writers—Maurice Decaul [b. 1980; former Marine; poet, essayist, and playwright], all these other writers she has taken a personal interest in. She’s created space within TCG [Theatre Communications Group; non-profit service organization that promotes professional non-profit theater in the United States; publisher of American Theatre] for veterans, for theatres to come to a different orientation, to what it would mean to actually do something that might move people socially with regard to veterans. There are a lot of people in the space now, and as far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

Sanchez: I agree.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is an arts journalist and the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[In addition to “Feud for Thought,” in “Documentary and Investigative Theater,” playwright Sanchez figures in “Real Talk About Real Talk,” part 3 of “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (21 September 2017).]