Telling Stories Through the Lens of Theater
Mark Lewis, Professor of Communication
I was a grateful participant in the Spring 2025 CACE Seminar and specifically grateful for the ‘location’ of the Seminar in Wheaton’s Theater program. Our colleagues were generous in their willingness to welcome theater (and more specifically acting) as one disciplinary lens through which to consider how to responsibly consider and tell the stories of others (which was the organizing question behind our time together.)
The discipline of theater is, of course, a natural environment for this discussion. It is impossible to act (in the theatrical sense) without making a bold leap into a narrative not your own. In an opening exercise for the Seminar, participants took turns “acting” in front of one another, speaking memorized pieces of text that were written by another seminar participant, and then reassigned anonymously. These pieces, biographical and first-person in construction, were not assigned with age, gender, race, or life-experience in mind. We all knew rationally that this was true- that the pieces had been created without the speaker in front of us being present in the mind of the writer.
And yet, we also realized collectively and instinctively that we were being asked to picture the actor in front of us as having experienced the events of the story we were being told. This adjustment of ‘belief’ occurs naturally for us as an audience in the theater as it always has. For a play to meaningfully occur, this kind of empathetic response in the audience is essential.
When Hamlet advises his actors on what theater means (“the purpose of playing, both at first and now…”) he uses the analogy of a mirror to get at theater’s purpose. Shakespeare clearly believed that theater is meant to reflect us, to somehow show us ourselves, but he is explicit in his view that this is not in any ordinary, literal, one-to-one sense. Instead, acting is meant to reflect us in a deeper and completely non-literal way. It is meant to show us our own ‘worthy’ traits (in the Philippians 4:8 sense), as well as our own character defects. The mirror can work individually and powerfully in a society. (In Hamlet’s words, it is meant “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image…and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”)
Remarkably, we can catch our ‘reflection’ in any good play and in ways that are quite surprising. We are meant to see ourselves in characters who have little in common with us on the surface and even in those whose values we reject. Our greatest playwright knew this; it’s one reason why his villains so especially captivate us. Tim Keller once said (in a conversation with professional actors in New York) that “there is no way to attach meaning to anything unless you put it into a story.” Whether or not one can go as far as Dr. Keller does in making this observation, stories are inarguably central to our shared humanity; when we watch acting we are co-creating a story- one that is, paradoxically, both a fiction and a strictly boundaried reality. In the theater these paradoxes continue-actors are ‘lying to tell the truth’. When engaged in live performance of a text, they are repeating a thoroughly rehearsed series of moments while experiencing them with an audience in ways that are brand new and happening in the present. Acting is both endlessly repeatable and endlessly new.
In May’s Seminar, we focused together on the care and discernment one must practice when ‘standing in’ someone else’s story and how an ethical Christian understanding of representation can be empathetically applied in navigating the stories of others. This conversation is a timely one, and the opportunity to gain the insights of my colleagues who stand in various places in these questions was both informative and challenging. Thanks CACE!