Can theater change the world?

When I was a young theater student, almost every teacher I ever had repeated at some point the staggering statistic that the acting profession has a 90% unemployment rate. I don’t know if that statistic is true or not—I suppose it depends on you count it, but regardless it’s a warning sign used to deter young actors from entering. Beware! There is no future here! Certainly, theater is a tough market to try crack. If your dream is to make a living wage performing in Equity houses, then you’d better make some room because so many have the same dream and the competition is fierce. But maybe, just maybe, there’s another path for theater majors besides just sitting on their butts in audition rooms waiting for their chance to get discovered. If we can just loosen up our definitions a bit, perhaps we’ll discover that there are other possibilities out there to use the tools we learned in our acting classes, in our voice and movement classes, in our theory of theater classes, etc, that might actually provide both pay for the artists and also do some good for the world as well. After all, theater, in essence, is communication. It’s telling stories. But do those stories need to be told on a stage to be called theater? Could they instead be used, as they have throughout history, to call upon the Gods, to teach, to heal, and to inspire? This month I’m going to be talking about some of the ways theater, and also arts in general, can do just that. I’ll be talking about some organizations—such Kulture Klub, who use arts to give hope to homeless youth, and The Society for Arts in Health Care, which use arts to both give comfort and to find healing for patients suffering anything from cancer to mental health problems. I’ll also be looking at the numerous organizations in town using arts and theater to teach kids how to read, to write, and even about other subjects such as science and math. I’m interested in starting a dialogue about ways that theater and arts can be used outside the conventional performance space—specifically to make the world a better place. I welcome your ideas on the topic, particularly if you work for an organization that uses theater techniques to teach, heal or for some other purpose besides selling tickets. Feel free to comment here where I can see it.