Editorial: Look for the Helpers

Abstract

In this editorial, the editor reflects on the current political climate in the US and its impact on theatre education. The editor then introduces this issue, in which most of our contributors have reflected on their educational theatre practices with a range of communities. Amanda Dawson interrogates her experience as a white cis-gendered woman developing the course Contemporary BIPOC Plays and Playwrights at a majority-white university in a majority-white city. Evi Stamatiou, Eric Kildow, Freya Spearing, Georgia Nodding, and John-Paul Price analyze the rationale, application, and evaluation of an educational verbatim theater case study that involved British theater students and American nursing students, from the University of Chichester and Kent State University respectively. Lucy Kania sheds light on larger-bodied adolescent girls’ experiences of fatphobia in educational theatre. Finally, Jason P. Lotz proposes ways in which teachers might employ reaction videos as intervention, in service of decentering the theater audience and the theater classroom.