Care, Repair, and Alternative Futures in Community-Based Theater

Abstract

In this thesis, I attempt to answer the question: what does theater do for our world? Specifically, I interrogate how community-based theaters enact their values through their organizational and artistic practices and how that impacts the lives of artists and audiences alike, including the potential for broader change. I engage with anthropologists and theater scholars, drawing on theories of everydayness, reparative creativity, affect, utopia, and wayfaring. My writing remains grounded in my participant observation and interviews with members of two community-based theaters in Philadelphia, Theatre in the X and Applied Mechanics. I propose that community-based theater is best understood and used as a process to create a web of experiences and perspectives, embracing the messiness of life. I call this process affective wayfaring. I posit the heart of theater, demonstrated in a community context, lies in its reparative and affective potential for imagining alternative futures.