Research Findings: What I Learned
Since establishing my initial inquiry space, I’ve pursued a focused research trajectory that has significantly shaped my understanding of participatory performance, therapeutic theater, and the tension between spectacle and genuine emotional engagement.
Drama Therapy and Applied Theatre: A Critical Distinction
Following my advisor Luisa’s feedback, I explored the drama therapy field, which led me to Robert Landy and David Montgomery’s Theatre for Change: Education, Social Action and Therapy. This book crystallized a crucial distinction I hadn’t fully appreciated before. As Landy and Montgomery explain, “Unlike the public nature of Applied Theatre praxis, Drama Therapy is a private practice…In Applied Theatre the group consists of performers, facilitators and spectators…In Drama Therapy the clients within the therapeutic process are both the performers and the spectators.”
This distinction matters deeply for my work. Applied theatre creates “spect-actors” (Boal’s term) in public performances open to communities, while drama therapy operates in smaller, closed groups of six to ten participants. The question of audience versus participant isn’t just semantic—it fundamentally changes the power dynamics, safety considerations, and goals of the experience.
What particularly intrigued me was a passage about a conference led by Boal where drama therapy and educational theatre practitioners collided: “Theatre, we all agreed, has the power to unlock the richest treasures available: emotion and knowledge. Something, however, seemed amiss during our shared travels. Safety, it seemed, was at the crux of all our disagreements.” This tension between collective emotional breakthrough and an audience prioritizing safety with strangers is central to what I’m wrestling with in my own work.
The Limitations of Current Practice: Playback Theatre
To understand drama therapy in action, I watched Hudson River Playback Theatre’s Stories of Our Time performance at NYU. The experience was revelatory—but not in the way I expected. Landy writes that “Much of the actual practice of Drama Therapy is not very dramatic, in the sense of being exciting,” and this performance exemplified that. The performers expressed emotions given to them by audience members, but in what felt like an overly sanitized way.They would act out dread from the current political climate as spooky things that the performers acted scared at like someone in a Scooby Doo cartoon would.
While I understand the therapeutic value of this approach (take a big feeling and make it silly/approachable), something felt fundamentally dishonest about how it confronted deeper conflicts in 2025. The performance remained too performer-centric; the audience’s role was to supply stories but still mainly spectating as others peformed. This confirmed my intuition that I need more direct audience input—moreso than just phones or computers as engagement pathways, but a more radical reimagining of who holds agency in the space.
Boal’s Emotional Restraint: A Point of Departure
Returning to Augusto Boal’s work, I moved beyond Theatre of the Oppressed to explore Rainbow of Desire, which was mentioned in other Drama Therapy literature. Boal was clearly open to drama therapy as part of his practice of activating audiences in the world. However, I found myself disagreeing with his resistance to clear emotional release for participants. While I appreciate his concern about audiences becoming too content after catharsis from a performance—thus losing the impulse to take action in the real world—I believe he underestimates how emotion and thought are interconnected. People need emotional breakthroughs to reconfigure their thinking. Restraining emotional release may actually prevent the cognitive shifts necessary for real-world action and unnecessarily cloud people processing the world.
This has become a key tension in my inquiry space: How do I create experiences that allow for sharing genuine emotions while avoiding the complacency Boal feared? How do I promote a new way of looking at each other and the world rather than just cheap satisfaction?
Spectacle and Scale: Max Reinhardt’s Maximalism
To explore the production design possibilities for large-scale participatory experiences, I also researched Max Reinhardt’s 1934 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl (documented in Charles McNulty’s writing). Reinhardt’s maximalist approach—staging hundreds of people in larger-than-life environments—offers a compelling model for the kind of scale I’m drawn to. His staging influenced the 1935 film adaptation, which I’ve long admired.
This research also led me to Boris Aronson, whose set design for Harold Prince’s Cabaret I studied extensively in an undergraduate research paper. Aronson’s giant mirror implicating the audience in the show’s descent into fascism remains one of the most powerful examples of set design as ethical intervention. The staging feels sadly poignant as we confront rising fascism in America today. This is the kind of work I aspire to—where the audience cannot remain passive observers but must confront their own complicity and agency as well as each other.
Reflections: How Sources Relate to Each Other
Several patterns have emerged across my research that are reshaping my inquiry space:
The Safety Paradox: Both drama therapy and applied theatre practitioners recognize that transformation requires vulnerability, but they disagree fundamentally about where the line falls between productive discomfort and harmful exposure. My sources suggest this isn’t a problem to solve but a tension to navigate carefully based on context, consent, and community needs.
The Performance vs. Participation Spectrum: From Reinhardt’s spectacular stagings to playback theatre’s intimate exchanges to Boal’s forum theatre, I see a spectrum of how much agency audiences actually hold. What intrigues me is that scale doesn’t determine participation—Reinhardt worked with hundreds but maintained sole directorial control, while Boal worked with dozens and gave them real decision-making power. I need to research cutting-edge productions that use phones, computers, networks, and other technologies alongside verbal participation to maximize audience input.
Handling Emotion: The throughline from Augusto Boal to JL Moreno to Robert Landy shows evolving attitudes about emotional catharsis. I’m positioning myself against pure cognitive approaches (Boal’s restraint) and pure therapeutic approaches toward something that honors emotional breakthrough as necessary for cognitive and behavioral change. This connects to my interest in restorative justice and conflict resolution, though I need to research these areas much more deeply.
Updated Inquiry Space
Based on these findings, I’ve added Drama Therapy as a new branch in my inquiry space diagram, positioned between my existing interests in storytelling/performance and social dynamics/ethics. This addition has created new connections—drama therapy links to my questions about safety, consent, and the boundaries between performer and participant.
I’m also preparing to formalize Restorative Justice and Conflict Resolution as its own research area, which will likely become another major branch connecting to drama therapy, audience agency, and ethical considerations. This feels like the natural next step as I investigate how collective decision-making in immersive experiences might start to address real social conflicts rather than just reference them.
NYU Expert Connections
I’ve identified Nisha Sajnani, head of NYU’s Drama Therapy program, as a crucial expert for my inquiry space. Her work directly addresses the tensions between therapeutic practice and public performance that I’m exploring.
Additionally, I’ve requested NYU archival permission to access Robert Landy’s materials, as his work on role theory and the Theatre for Change framework has proven foundational to my thinking. Landy’s name appeared repeatedly in my drama therapy research, and direct access to his archives will deepen my understanding of how therapeutic theatre has evolved.
My previously identified experts remain relevant:
- Aidan Nelson for interactive web development and hybrid physical/digital spaces
- Tom Igoe for networks and device communication
- Mia Rovegno for immersive storytelling and narrative forms
- Ami Mehta for motion capture, XR, and cultural storytelling
- Shariffa Ali for immersive theater practice and directing
Interview Timeline: I will reach out to at least one of these experts by the end of October. Given my current research direction, Nisha Sajnani and Mia Rovegno feel like the most urgent conversations, though I may benefit from speaking with multiple experts as my concept develops.
Next Steps
My research has revealed several gaps I need to fill:
- Cutting-edge participatory productions: I need to find contemporary examples that successfully integrate phones, computers, and other technologies to create genuine audience agency rather than superficial interactivity.
- Set design precedents: Beyond Aronson, I need more examples of set design that implicates audiences or transforms their relationship to the performance. Boris Aronson is one model; who are the others?
- Restorative justice frameworks: This is my next major research area. How do restorative justice principles translate to theatrical or immersive experiences? What does conflict resolution look like when it’s performed collectively rather than facilitated privately?
The emotional release question: I need to better understand the neuroscience and psychology behind catharsis, emotional regulation, and cognitive change. Is there empirical support for my intuition that emotional breakthrough enables rather than inhibits real-world action?
Ryan Rotella 
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