Andy Warhol was being an asshole. At least Ron Whyte thought so when the two artists crossed paths at a Soho gallery opening in the early 1970s. It's unclear what offense Warhol committed, another incident whose details have been lost to the historical record. But if Warhol had not behaved badly that fateful evening, Whyte—a queer and disabled playwright—might never have removed the “cosmetic glove” covering his “withered” left arm and hurled it at the visual artist, enabling the glove to make its own “contribution to modern art.” The famed artist, Whyte claimed, would go on to copy this assault by prosthesis in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973).

In performances in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Rio de Janeiro; Chicago; and Denver in 2012, Ms. Lauryn Hill carved out space to voice black rage. In videos uploaded to YouTube, Hill sings, raps, talks, and riffs varied renditions of the song “Black Rage (Sketch),” a remix of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's “My Favorite Things.” During her November performance at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, drumbeats punctuated Hill's rapping and singing. Her performance took the audience on a journey meant to leave no one behind; it moved from the highly choreographed rendition of the song with musical accompaniment and Hill acting as lead vocalist and band conductor to her slowly speaking the lyrics of the song and occasionally offering analysis of her words over the shouts and applause of audience members. She explains the line “when I'm feeling sad,” saying “that's a depressive mood.” As the title of her song suggests, in each reiteration Hill issues a different draft of the song, sketching her sound, mood, tempo, and emphasis with each new audience. Although renditions of the song shift, the lyrics consistently recount the physical, psychic, economic, and environmental vulnerability of black people in the United States. The lyrics transform the original song's references to beloved objects—“blue satin sashes” and “snowflakes”—into ironic things such as “Black human packages tied up in strings,” which Hill described in her Philadelphia performance as a reference to bureaucracy but which also resonates with familiar images of lynching. Shifting from the original song's depiction of the curative capacity of things to offset feeling bad, Hill explains that her set of things prevents fear: “I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don't fear so bad!”

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll revolves around the story of the Plastic People of the Universe (1968–88), an underground Czech rock band best known in the United States for their connections to Václav Havel and possibly for their ties to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern bloc. Often tangentially referred to in progressive Western journalism, the Plastic People have come to signify a kind of subcultural capital for mainstream bourgeois writers, a way for moderate Western liberals to appear edgy and cultured. Stoppard's play draws on this popular consumption of the Plastic People, fetishizing them both for their grungy, underground lifestyle and for their status as underground rock legends. After all, the play seems to ask, how many rock bands can claim to have started an actual revolution? The play's twin narratives dramatize the clash between rock music and philosophical Marxism in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. The stories are linked through the protagonist, Jan, a Czech intellectual who abandons his studies at Cambridge to return to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. He is determined to “save” rock music, socialism, and his mother. Jan soon discovers the Plastic People of the Universe, whose music he holds up as a positive ray of light in the dreary decades preceding the Velvet Revolution. Placing the Plastics’ music and story alongside the work of male rock megastars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Stoppard celebrates the Plastic People as a band that preserves the revolutionary roots of rock music.

The past sixty years of theatre studies recall the travels of Odysseus. It had a narrow escape from being devoured and digested by the Gallic Cyclops that dwelt in the Cave of Theory. It lingered in the Lotos-land of performance studies, gorging on a bottomless buffet of human activity. It hearkened to siren songs luring it to seductive but slippery shoals of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and neuroscience. Some of its crew has suffered a Circean transformation into omnivorously rooting cultural critics. Its vocabulary has been inflated by Aeolus, king of winds. Meanwhile, back home there languishes its consort, History, knotting and unknotting a tapestry of documentary material and archival research while urged to bed by suitors from foreign realms.

The moment when the actors’ sweltering bodies shed their crumbled costumes in the dressing room, the breakdown of the inseparable begins—the actors’ bodies and the costumes that presented a seamless portrayal of a character onstage now enter two separate realms. Although the living bodies will most likely appear onstage again, what about the costumes? Pickled with sweat and smeared makeup, they might be sprayed with alcohol before the next performance, or go through some chemical treatment and enter the shop to collect dust, or they might be sold off to those who want to make a big impression at the next Halloween party. But more often than not, they end up as landfill—those cheap, colorful, shiny shreds of garbage that were not produced in Mother Nature's belly, but were made in sweatshops by underpaid textile workers and draped by some overworked costume shop employee.

That's right, sicker. At least insofar as sick is a social construct (more on that later). I'm speaking specifically about declining mental health, and for this short essay I focus on our most emergent of theatre and performance-studies scholars: our graduate students. Few of us would disagree that there has always been a significant amount of depression and anxiety among our masters and doctoral students. Recent studies, however, find that more grad students are reporting significant mental health issues today than in any past generation. Perhaps these higher numbers are simply a matter of different and better diagnosing. More likely, those entering graduate programs today have more stressors outside academia: family responsibilities, financial concerns, and culture-related anxiety (more minorities and other historically disenfranchised groups and international students are entering graduate programs than ever before). Moreover, the increase in treatments in the past decades has enabled more students with a history of mental health issues to make it to higher education. It's not the purpose of this short piece to suss out the kinds of student in our programs more likely to be mentally and emotionally distressed. Instead, I look at what we should be doing not to make it worse for the students we have in the years ahead, actions that will benefit the field as a whole and all of us individually.

In looking forward to the important issues of this coming decade, we need only turn to the events of the past year for a sense of what is at stake for theatre, performance, and performance pedagogy. Last year, student activists protested racism on college and university campuses across the United States. At Yale, students protested the hostile racial climate on campus following several incidents, including a professor's dismissal of concerns about racist Halloween costumes, numerous swastika graffiti, and the explicit exclusion of black women from fraternity events. At the University of Missouri, the student group Concerned Student 1950—named for the year the first black students were admitted to the university—called for the resignation of university president, Tim Wolfe, citing the administration's inaction in the face of numerous racist incidents on campus. At Ithaca College, Claremont McKenna University, the University of Kansas, and many other colleges and universities across the United States, students held rallies, performed die-ins, and signed petitions in support of students at the University of Missouri and Yale and to call attention to inequality on their own campuses. Set against the backdrop of Ferguson and an increased awareness of institutionalized violence against black and brown bodies, these events remind us that colleges and universities have always been sites where racial discrimination and inequality have been both perpetuated and protested.

I'm still interested in theatre's potential for protest, resistance, emancipation, subversion, critique, howl, hope, lament, whimper. … This often leads me to focus on my least favorite things, drawn like a moth to performances that normal people (those who aren't theatre scholars) find depressing.

“Where do we find ourselves?” We ask some permutation of this question in response to life events, as Ralph Waldo Emerson does to open his haunting essay on the death of his young son, the magisterial “Experience” (1844). Commemorations also compel us to make such accountings, to break from the requisite, often monotonous routines of everyday life to assess our evolutions. The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Society for Theatre Research offers such an occasion, and this forum's invitation to imagine and, perhaps, sway the direction of the organization's discursive and institutional practices over the next decade or more requires, first of all, estimating where we, as scholars of theatre and performance culture, find ourselves. Although these inspections would certainly reveal actions and innovations worthy of commemoration, the more important task is to lay bare and come to grips with those assumptions, ruts, and shibboleths in our respective fields of inquiry that have become so ingrained that they have achieved a kind of sacrosanctity. We must contest and, in many cases, abandon these conceptual and analytical habits: such efforts, though to the detriment of ideology, will be to the good of the discipline and the enrichment of our individual scholarly sensibilities.

In many disciplines where it has become apparent that scholarship has been one of the key technologies of colonization, complicit in the exploitation and decimation of the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, there has been a (re)turn to ways of knowing that are not about power/knowledge—naming, disciplining, categorizing, objectifying, and isolating elements—but about relationality, reciprocity, respect, and what Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson discusses under the principle, shared across many Indigenous cultures, of “relational accountability.”

There are many things related to the practice of theatre research (both scholarly and creative) that are presently pulling at my psyche. These matters, predominantly concerned with issues of diversity and inclusion, are not new or novel. Rather, they are ever lingering; frequently talked about, but still requiring a talking through. Inspired by public discourse and practice, my ruminations are also informed by my own politics of location (as a dramaturg/scholar of color), and thus contestable—yet potentially consequential. Given the time and space allotted, here are a couple of “things that make me go hmmm”:

I study the history of actors, emphasizing the historical conditions of their working and creative lives amid the ever shifting cultural and performance conventions guiding which bodies are privileged in the telling of which stories. My research expeditions have routinely prompted me to follow a given actor from the stage, often to screens large and small and, just as frequently, to the ostensibly nontheatrical realms of politics, community organizing, or education. Sometimes these actors return to the theatrical stage, but not always. But I go where actors go, no matter the industry, enterprise, or discipline. If they're an actor, and they're up to something, I'm interested. That's what I call my actor alibi.

Ten Thousand Things Theater performs plays for as many different kinds of audience as we can. We are a strictly professional theatre company that works with the best actors in the Twin Cities (our home for the past twenty-three years), performing Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, Brecht, American musicals, and contemporary plays, taking each production to seven or eight correctional facilities (men's, women's, and juvenile), nine or ten low-income centers (homeless shelters, adult-education centers, housing projects, detox centers, immigrant centers, Indian reservations, rural areas), as well as doing twelve to sixteen shows for the paying general public. That's it—taking a play directly to extremely diverse audiences in order to engage with as many different kinds of people as possible. We do not work with individual marginalized communities over stretches of time to create theatre pieces, nor do we integrate community members as actors or writers or designers in the process. This is of course very valuable work, and such work may indeed change people's lives—it's just not what we do. We have never set out to try to change anyone's life. We never will begin with that intention. We simply try to tell stories as well as we possibly can, engaging with each audience as deeply and strongly as possible.

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.