Research-based Theater Research Articles

Audience Response to COVID Monologues: Research-Based Theater on the Societal Impact of COVID-19.

Research-based theater uses drama to communicate research findings to audiences beyond those that typically read peer-reviewed journals. We applied research-based theater to translate qualitative research findings on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on different segments of U.S. society. Theater artists and public health researchers collaborated to create a collection of eight monologues from systematically sourced, peer-reviewed publications. Following three virtual performances in Spring, 2021, audience members were invited to complete a survey. Audience survey respondents (n = 120) were mostly U.S.-based and were diverse in terms of age, race/ethnicity, gender, profession, and experience attending theater. We summarized closed-ended responses and explored patterns by demographic characteristics. We synthesized themes of open-ended responses with inductive coding. Audience members somewhat/strongly agreed that COVID Monologues increased their knowledge (79.4%), represented the reality of the U.S. COVID-19 epidemic (95.7%), and offered new perspectives on what people had been experiencing (87.5%). Most also agreed research-based theater is an effective means of understanding health research (93.5%) and can promote community resilience in times of public health crisis (83.2%). Mann-Whitney U tests suggested less positive reactions from demographics that were not well-represented in monologue characters (cisgender men, Hispanics). Qualitative comments suggested audience members valued monologues that offered self-reflection and validation of their own COVID-19 experiences through relatable characters as well as those that offered insight into the experiences of people different from themselves. This work adds to evidence that research-based theater can help build knowledge and emotional insight around a public health issue. As these elements are foundational to pro-social, preventative health behaviors, research-based theater may have a useful role in promoting collective response to public health crises like COVID-19. Our method of systematically-sourcing research for theater-based dissemination could be extended to target more specific audiences with actionable behaviors.

The Return: Research-Based Theater With and for Ex-Military Personnel Experiencing Posttraumatic Stress

This article discusses The Return, a research-based theater project about posttraumatic stress, performed by actors and ex-military personnel. The objective of the project was to address the stigma of mental health in the military and encourage psychological help-seeking in the veteran and military population. The play combined verbatim text and dramaturgical re-authoring of material to explore the lived realities of mental health experiences of posttraumatic stress (PTS) in the military. Part of the ethical entanglements encountered lay in calibrating the risk–safety nexus, specifically in relation to questions of authenticity, narrative structure, decisions relating to casting actors and ex-military personnel, and how to negotiate the performance of a personal story of trauma. The article argues that performance is innately a process governed by “edgework” as much as safety, and therefore part of the ethical entanglement lies in the negotiations between risky aesthetics, “safe” spaces, and frameworks that enable critical vulnerability.

A Landscape of Ethics in Research-Based Theater: Staging Lives of Family Members Who Have Passed

Blending academic and theatrical worlds in research-based theater (RbT) requires balancing academic demands of institutionalized research and aesthetic demands of theater. This duality becomes particularly significant regarding ethics. With so much possibility, it becomes imperative for practitioners to share, and learn from, vulnerable and challenging ethical experiences. This creates landscapes of ethical possibilities for RbT and guideposts for navigating them, established by the field, highlighting well-worn paths, pointing out pitfalls, and noting where few have yet to trod. Contributing to this cartography, we consider ethical questions encountered during development and production of three RbT projects involving family members who have passed: Homa Bay Memories, Brothers, and Unload. In doing so, we question which stories might be best left untold and the evolution of relationships throughout the research. Exploring these together helps to develop a landscape of ethical possibilities and establish guideposts to help illuminate challenges for future RbT projects.

Road Trips and Guideposts: Identifying and Navigating Ethical Tensions in Research-Based Theater

Research-based Theater (RbT) combines research and theater to create novel opportunities for inquiry and knowledge translation. Ethical tensions are part of this process. We explore some tensions that can emerge through three types of ethics: professional ethics, institutional research ethics, and everyday ethics. We then propose a series of ethical guideposts developed by engaging RbT practitioners in reflecting on their practice. Like signs on a highway, ethical guideposts do not mandate a destination but rather flag that an approaching decision needs consideration. These guideposts seek to encourage greater attention to ethical aspects of RbT projects and to support ethical decision-making.

Yarning Up Relations: Enacting a Relational Ethics in Cross-Cultural Research-Based Theater

This is a reflection on The Score, a Research-Based Theater (RbT) project that has just begun, and some emerging ethical entanglements surrounding the work. The Score is a collaboration between First Nations and non-Indigenous artists and researchers, produced by ILBIJERRI Theatre Company—a leading First Nations theater company based in Melbourne, Australia. The goal is to create a community-engaged, participatory model for theater in health education that addresses sexual health for First Nations young people, to be delivered in schools, prisons, community centers and community health settings. Drawing on Indigenous and applied theater research methods, our article situates the discussion of ethics in RbT within the concept of relationality. Through a process of yarning (discussion), we explore the complexity of relations within the project and how relationality infuses all aspects of the project design. We argue that this approach is essential in ensuring respectful, accountable, and decolonial theater-research praxis.

No Bull Here, Please: Ethical Demands and Expectations of Audiences

This article is based on a 2007 conference presentation that used Research-Based Theater (RbT) to identify and articulate the ethical questions facing playmakers and audiences, not to provide answers, but to challenge the participants to address them. The authors pose issues of purpose, power, ownership, permission, and audience participation, addressing ethical problems of RbT for performers, audiences, and informants. In the second part of the article, the authors refer readers to the literature to further explore how these issues have been addressed in a range of contexts worldwide . . . and the further questions they raise.

Romance, Relationships, and Rights: Ethical Considerations and Dilemmas in a Research-Based Theater Project With Self-Advocate Co-Creators and Actors

Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are often excluded from conversations about sexual health; when included, well-meaning researchers and support workers often speak for individuals instead of creating opportunities for their voices to be heard. To support the sexual agency of people with intellectual disabilities, who refer to themselves as self-advocates (SAs), we embarked on a Research-based Theater (RbT) project, Romance, Relationships, and Rights, with the goal to address misconceptions of individuals with IDD and sexuality. Throughout the project, ethical tensions percolated from ableist assumptions about “legal capacity,” consent both on and off stage, and conflicting perspectives on aesthetics. Throughout this article, we discuss these ethical dilemmas and offer recommendations for future work with SAs in co-creating RbT through the lens of disability justice and critical disability studies.

Ethical Implications of Using Research-Based Theater to Challenge Hegemonic Narratives About Mental Health

Many health researchers have started to see the benefits of partnering with playwrights to use theater as a tool to analyze and present complex findings. Such projects about mental health, however, remain few and far between and are especially fraught. This article argues that research-based theater can be an ideal tool for exploring and sharing counter-hegemonic “mad stories”—especially if the plays created can help interrupt, among other things, problematic biomedical narratives about individualized approaches to supporting those who are suffering. This article also incorporates excerpts from the script the author wrote as part of her doctoral thesis project about military trauma to highlight how, guided by mad theory and mad aesthetics, she has creatively woven some of the weightiest ethical conundrums encountered during the research and development process into the play itself, so that, their nuance and magnitude become a critical component of the story being presented.

Relational and Aesthetic Accountability: Considerations of a Research-Based Playwright

Research-based Theater (RbT) is shaped by both the form of theater, as an embodied, gestural, spatial, imaginative multi-dimensional art form, and traditions of research surrounding knowledge production, specifically qualitative research. When ethical tensions and questions arise in RbT they are often framed as a dichotomy, such as the ways aesthetic or artistic interests of creating a compelling piece of theater for audiences contrast with responsibilities to research. By drawing on the frame of an aesthetic of relationality, and an example from my work as an RbT playwright from the project Cracked: new light on dementia, I consider the ways both theater and research might be more clearly aligned. This includes how relational and aesthetic accountabilities can offer an important foundation for considering how RbT might be rooted in caring practices and might influence theater-making and the traditions of scientific research more broadly.

Ethics in Research-Based Theater: Why Stories Matter

Ethics in Research-Based Theater: Why Stories Matter

Research-Based Theater in the Pediatric Oncology Setting: Balancing Ethical Tensions

Research-based theater (RbT) in health care and medical education settings generates unique ethical discourses, particularly when involving pediatric patients. Ed’s Story: The Dragon Chronicles (Ed’s Story) is a verbatim play based on the journal of a teenaged oncology patient, and 25 interviews conducted after his death with his family and multidisciplinary health professional team. The development, dissemination, and evaluation of Ed’s Story will be retrospectively analyzed in order to highlight and discuss ethical tensions, with specific focus on tensions related to participants, including Ed and the interviewees; RbT practitioners and researchers; and audiences, namely, medical trainees who participated in mandatory curriculum viewing. Where applicable, similar projects described in the literature will be reviewed in order to highlight strategies to mitigate these tensions.

Out at School: Imagining a Slow Ethic of Care in Research-Based Theater

This article invites us to reconsider how we engage in ethical tensions and decision-making with the stories we are gifted as artist-researchers. Using a verbatim theater piece titled Out at School, we explore three moments of discomfort and growth that moved our collective approach toward a slow ethic of care. Within three ethical moments of dissonance, we investigate how to navigate a slow ethic of care in a project that is iterative and constantly shifting within and against our social and political world. By moving away from the desire for resolution, we argue for a process that understands the need to sit within ethical tensions as a way to commit to an ongoing slow ethic of care. We discuss our process, production, and performance as an invitation to critically reflect on ethical practices in research-based theater and reimagine ways to call in and move forward.

Research-Based Theater in Schools: Ethical Challenges, Conundrums, and Choices

This article focuses on the ethical challenges which may arise when a research-based theater (RbT) project is undertaken with students in a school or in another educational setting. It focuses on three case studies where I worked as an RbT practitioner with students in a single-sex boys’ school and Pre-Service Teachers (PSTs) in a Master of Teaching program. For over 15 years, I have worked as an RbT practitioner, and I have developed a set of ethical principles pertaining to the writing and the performance of the RbT piece. I discuss in this article that even with such ethical principles in place, unforeseen critical incidents of an ethical nature may arise in an RbT project that may lead the RbT practitioner to reappraise the effectiveness of these principles in their work.

Research-Based Theater and "Stigmatized Trauma": The Case of Suicide Bereavement.

BackgroundExisting research shows that family members who suffer the loss of a loved one through suicide often experience self-blame and shame, and that this limits their grieving process. It can also lock them into stigmatized positions and the notion that either somebody or a dysfunctional family is to blame for the suicide.AimThis article investigates from a narrative perspective how a theater play might counteract the stigma that surrounds suicide bereavement by contributing destigmatizing understandings of suicide.MethodsA theater play was performed in a churchyard theater in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2019. Audience members were asked to write down their free reflections on a form distributed at the theater. In particular, they were asked to assess whether they found the play related to their own lives and, if so, how; and to describe what they had learned. Their written reflections [N = 41] were analyzed from a narrative methodological perspective to investigate their responses to the play. Three categories of audience member were identified from their responses: people with their own suicide bereavement experiences; people with similar but different experiences of stigmatized trauma; and people who did not report any experiences of suicide or stigmatized trauma.ResultsThe suicide-bereaved generally reported familiarity with the thematic performed, in particular the “why question,” the blame and shame responses and the silenced family communication. Most of these aspects were also shared by those affected by other types of stigmatized trauma. Respondents from all categories emphasized how they had learned that suicide is a desperate rather than a deliberated act, caused by overwhelming emotional pain or depression. Ultimately, suicide was perceived as an involuntary death caused by complex interacting factors linked to both inner vulnerabilities and stressful life events, for which no one was to blame.ConclusionThe results show that research-based theater isa time-limited and cost-effective method of introducing alternative meanings and identities to both individual mourners and the broader cultural context from which stigma originates, and how it can have destigmatizing effects on a stigmatized trauma such as suicide bereavement.

Creating an Ethnodrama to Catalyze Dialogue in Home-Based Dementia Care.

This article describes the development of a theater script derived from a critical ethnographic study that followed people living with dementia--and their family and professional caregivers--over an 18-month period. Analysis of the ethnographic data yielded four themes that characterized home-based dementia care relationships: managing care resources, making care decisions, evaluating care practices, and reifying care norms. The research team expanded to include a colleague with playwright experience, who used these themes to write a script. A theater director was included to cast and direct the play, and finally, a videography company filmed the actors on a realistic set. To contribute to the qualitative health research and the research-based theater knowledge translation literatures, this article describes and explains the creative decisions taken as part of our effort to disseminate research focused on home-based dementia care in a way that catalyzes and fosters critical (actionable) dialogue.

Grief, Anger, and Relationality: The Impact of a Research-Based Theater Intervention on Emotion Work Practices in Brain Injury Rehabilitation.

Therapeutic emotion work is performed by health care providers as they manage their own feelings as well as those of colleagues and patients as part of efforts to improve the physical and psychosocial health outcomes of patients. It has yet to be examined within the context of traumatic brain injury rehabilitation. To evaluate the impact of a research-based theater intervention on emotion work practices of neurorehabilitation staff. Data were collected at baseline and at 3 and 12 months postintervention in the inpatient neurorehabilitation units of two rehabilitation hospitals in central urban Canada. Participants (N = 33) were recruited from nursing, psychology, allied health, recreational therapy, and chaplaincy. Naturalistic observations (N = 204.5 hr) of a range of structured and unstructured activities in public and private areas, and semistructured interviews (N = 87) were conducted. Preintervention analysis indicated emotion work practices were characterized by stringent self-management of empathy, suppression of client grief, adeptness with client anger, and discomfort with reactions of family and spouses. Postintervention analysis indicated significant staff changes in a relationality orientation, specifically improvements in outreach to homosexual and heterosexual family care partners, and support for sexual orientation and intimacy expression. No improvements were demonstrated in grief support. Emotion work has yet to be the focus of initiatives to improve neurorehabilitative care. Our findings suggest the dramatic arts are well positioned to improve therapeutic emotion work and effect cultures of best practice. Recommendations are made for interprofessional educational initiatives to improve responses to client grief and potential intimate partner violence.

Improving Client-Centered Brain Injury Rehabilitation Through Research-Based Theater

Traumatic brain injury often results in physical, behavioral, and cognitive impairments perceived by health care practitioners to limit or exclude clients' full participation in treatment decision making. We used qualitative methods to evaluate the short- and long-term impact of "After the Crash: A Play About Brain Injury," a research-based drama designed to teach client-centered care principles to brain injury rehabilitation staff. We conducted interviews and observations with staff of two inpatient neurorehabilitation units in Ontario, Canada. Findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the play in influencing practice through the avoidance of medical jargon to improve clients' understanding and participation in treatment; newfound appreciation for clients' needs for emotional expression and sexual intimacy; increased involvement of family caregivers; and avoidance of staff discussions as if clients were unaware. These findings suggest that research-based drama can effect reflexivity, empathy, and practice change to facilitate a client-centered culture of practice in brain injury rehabilitation.

After the crash: Research-based theater for knowledge transfer

The aim of this project was to develop and evaluate a research-based dramatic production for the purpose of transferring knowledge about traumatic brain injury (TBI) to health care professionals, managers, and decision makers. Using results drawn from six focus group discussions with key stakeholders (consumers, informal caregivers, and health care practitioners experienced in the field of TBI) and relevant scientific literature, a 50-minute play was produced for the purpose of conveying the experiences of TBI survivors, informal care providers, and health practitioners and best practice for TBI care. A self-administered postperformance survey was distributed to audience members at the end of four performances in Ontario, Canada, to evaluate the play's efficacy. Two hundred ninety-one questionnaires were completed. The questionnaire had five questions scored on a 5-item Likert scale with space for open-ended comments. Consistently high mean scores from the questionnaires indicate that theater is a highly efficacious and engaging method of knowledge transfer, particularly for complex material that deals with human emotion and interpersonal relationships. Responses supported the effectiveness of drama as a knowledge translation strategy and identified its potential to impact practice positively.

Poster 32: After the Crash: A Research-Based Theater Approach for Knowledge Translation on Traumatic Brain Injury

Poster 32: After the Crash: A Research-Based Theater Approach for Knowledge Translation on Traumatic Brain Injury