It was a hot, sweaty day in Newport News, Virginia, in 1986. Cornerstone Theater's designer, Lynn Jeffries, was building a set for the company's first community-based production, Our Town, cast in part with local participants. Three kids rode up on bikes and drawled, “What y'all doin’?” Jeffries responded that they were building a set for a play, noting that she felt like she was “speaking Chinese.” The boys sat for several more minutes. “Do you need help?” And that, according to Jeffries, was “where it all kicked in.”

Audience members sit at tables and desks in an interactive classroom, an immersive performance space designed to evoke a K–12 classroom. Blackboards are covered with homework assignments and test reminders, posters with test-taking tips and motivational quotes such as “For success, attitude is as important as ability.” Collaboraction's production of Forgotten Future: The Education Project begins as an interracial, intergenerational ensemble of actors enters the space chanting and waving signs reading “Support our Schools: Don't Close Them” and “Save our Schools” in protest of Chicago's dysfunctional public school system. They wear red T-shirts, and several are clad in the real-life protest T-shirts worn during the school closure protests and the teachers' strike during the 2012–13 school year. The audience soon claps and chants along: “There's no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don't stop” (clap, clap). Adult actors playing parents and teachers give speeches in between the chants. The kids in the ensemble try to speak, but the adults run right over them. By the end of the rally, the kids are standing off in a corner of the space, forlorn and ignored, while the adults yell on their behalf without ever asking for their perspective.

For the 2013–14 and 2014–15 seasons at Steppenwolf Theatre I edited a series of essays we called First Person. These essays appeared in our program and were personal reflections on the plays in production at the theatre. When I was asked to write for Theatre Survey about “how theatre can change lives and impact underserved communities,” I thought of that essay series, now on hiatus. Anecdotal evidence informed me that people in our audiences emotionally responded to the series, just as they often emotionally responded to our plays. But does eliciting an emotional response rise to the level of “chang[ing] lives?” I suspect not, especially if that notion of change is meant to be on a par with “impact[ing] underserved communities.”

Muriel Naessens, feminist militant and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, died in France in February 2016, at the age of 67. After training with Theatre of the Oppressed founder Augusto Boal in his early days in France, Naessens founded the organization Féminisme-Enjeux, which “acts to prevent the oppression of women.” A feminist activist for over forty years, Naessens used Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) as one of her primary methods. She was a longtime activist with the French Family Planning Movement (MFPF), in many ways the French equivalent of the US organization Planned Parenthood. “As a member of Augusto's TO group in Paris and at the same time a militant in the Family Planning Organization,” wrote Naessens in 2006, “I was able to develop the use of TO on a regular but punctual basis within the MFPF, where it quickly found its rightful place on a national level.”

It is hard to say if and how the experience of theatre might change lives or serve a community. Has theatre ever done so? Thinking of the effects of contemporary possibilities of ritual performance—a lifetime attending Catholic mass, yearly pilgrimages to Burning Man festivals or Disney World, an annual subscription to a regional theatre season, yearly participation in Mardi Gras, habitual involvement in political demonstrations, attending Red Sox games every season, following the Grateful Dead for years, or regular exposure to wayang kulit shadow-puppet shows in a Javanese village—one imagines that it's not so much that change takes place but that existing values are reinforced and community and personal identity are confirmed in live, shared experience. The live, in-time realization during a Donald Trump rally that one is not alone in feeling rebuffed and abused and that enemies can be identified, named, and vilified in a collective catharsis might change a life in the sense that both buried fears and suspicions and hopes for a “better” future might just be realized (in this case through the embrace of an authoritarian, if not fascist, spirit). This kind of transformation is not so much a doorway to change—a new direction—as it is a confirmation of convictions already deeply held.

No matter the precise definition, whether it includes beauty and imagination or even the creation of an identifiable artifact, art has long been a measure of the health of any given civilization or epoch.