Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

This study focuses on the liminal spaces between literature and civic engagement, education and activism, and fictional and non-fictional narratives. The entry is student responses to a pair of award-winning plays that I have written on homelessness in Hawaii, one a documentary theater piece based on hundreds of interviews, Houseless in Paradise, and the other a fictional play loosely based on the life of a homeless actor entitled The Unsalable Thing. For some students, the fictional/nonfictional status of the stories altered their impact on empathy for homeless individuals and their perspective on whether they were victims deserving community support or miscreants who were not. Documentary theater itself is a provocative blend of reality and imagination. Houseless in Paradise provided a thousand theatre-goers a safe, ritualized space to experience the gritty reality of homelessness. Some stories were performed by professional actors, others by the homeless themselves. One family in the audience learned from a professional actress’ performance that their niece had been sexually abused and tortured as a seven-year-old by her stepfather. A homeless actor with HIV requested we stop his interview, as he imagined “an actor or myself sharing all this on stage.” Months later, he performed the interview verbatim, but added the act of storming off stage after stopping the interview. At intermission, someone would invariably ask, “Was that real or just part of the play?” The confusion speaks to the epistemic power of marrying the real to the imagined and civic engagement to literature.