Why Theatre (and the People Who Teach It) Matter in 2025
by Zach Dulli, The Scene
The Scene
A student steps into a school theatre with a backpack, a beating heart, and a question that lives behind the eyes. Do I belong here? They are hoping to find their people in this room, and themselves on this stage. The room smells like dust and potential. The lights buzz. The sound board blinks awake like a spaceship that made it through the summer. You look up from a stack of scripts. You say hello. This is the first scene of the first act of the 2025–26 school year.
This is a stage. It is not a screen. It does not buffer. In here, we don’t swipe; we listen. We don’t hot-take; we re-take. In here, a sentence must be said to be believed, and a breath must be taken to be shared. That’s theatre. And it matters, not nostalgically, not sentimentally, but urgently, because it is the last unmuted room in a world of noise.
As the days turn into rehearsals, that student finds a mark on the floor and a line on the page, and begins to learn what this room really teaches.
The Case for Theatre
If you want a community that argues better than it shouts, you put more young people in rehearsal rooms. Theatre is democracy’s rehearsal: you stand, you speak, you hear the other side, you adjust. You learn that a scene isn’t won by volume but by objectives, stakes, tactics, and listening.
At a time when we’re told that attention is a commodity and empathy is a luxury item, theatre is the counterargument you can sit in. Thirty feet from you, someone is telling the truth – or, at least, an emotional truth., Sure, it’s fiction, but it rings truer than the headlines, and your mirror neurons can’t help themselves. They light up like the stage.
We need that. We need a public square with a dimmer switch and a script. We need stories that take longer than a reel and conversations that don’t end with “see more.” The play fights the algorithm with an ensemble, overcoming isolation through cooperation.
The Case for Theatre Education
Theatre education is not extracurricular; it’s essential curriculum, teaching the three literacies we keep pretending are optional:
The literacy of empathy: reading another person’s face and hearing the line under the line.
The literacy of collaboration: building a world where everyone’s good depends on everyone’s good.
The literacy of courage: standing in a light with your name attached to your choices.
It is a lab for failure (the non-fatal, feedback-rich, try-again kind). It is a gym for the heart and a workshop for the voice. It’s where a quiet kid learns that “Thank you, five” is not just a call; it’s a contract. We meet at five, we try it at five, we become us at five.
The Case for Theatre Educators
Theatre educators’ superpower is making something from nothing—budget, time, space, support—and calling it a season. They are public servants, choreographers of courage, carpenters of confidence, custodians of the culture. They know how to say, “Take it again,” like a blessing and “That’s it,” like a benediction.
They are the ones who look at a roomful of teenagers and see a cast list and a crew grid and a future. They teach objectives because life requires them, subtext because politics hides them, breath because anxiety forgets it, and eye contact because we’re losing it. They are not manufacturing stars; they are cultivating citizens. And yes, occasionally the citizens become stars—but always, they become better citizens.
A theatre educator knows where to place the chair so the story lands and where to place the mirror, so the body belongs. They defend the script and the student with equal ferocity. They are the grown-ups in the room who believe you can do it and the artist in the room who knows you must try.
They build up this miracle with warm-ups, with the rule that we clap for courage, with the ritual of checking prop tables and checking in on each other. They build it the way we build any show worth watching: by showing up.
What Theatre Does That Nothing Else Does
Because truth needs an address, and the box office is still open. Because the public square is fracturing, and the stage is still a square with room for everyone. The work of rebuilding trust cannot be done by a push notification. Because the antidote to isolation is a rehearsal schedule with your name on it. Because the future will belong to those who can collaborate across differences, speak with precision, listen with humility, and tell a story that invites the rest of us in.
Because at a moment when machines can imitate our voices, it’s on us to use them more honestly.
A student steps into a school theatre with a backpack, a beating heart, and a question that lives behind the eyes. Do I belong here? They are hoping to find their people in this room, and themselves on this stage. The room smells like dust and potential. The lights buzz. The sound board blinks awake like a spaceship that made it through the summer. You look up from a stack of scripts. You say hello. This is the first scene of the first act of the 2025–26 school year.
This is a stage. It is not a screen. It does not buffer. In here, we don’t swipe; we listen. We don’t hot-take; we re-take. In here, a sentence must be said to be believed, and a breath must be taken to be shared. That’s theatre. And it matters, not nostalgically, not sentimentally, but urgently, because it is the last unmuted room in a world of noise.
As the days turn into rehearsals, that student finds a mark on the floor and a line on the page, and begins to learn what this room really teaches.
The Case for Theatre
If you want a community that argues better than it shouts, you put more young people in rehearsal rooms. Theatre is democracy’s rehearsal: you stand, you speak, you hear the other side, you adjust. You learn that a scene isn’t won by volume but by objectives, stakes, tactics, and listening.
At a time when we’re told that attention is a commodity and empathy is a luxury item, theatre is the counterargument you can sit in. Thirty feet from you, someone is telling the truth – or, at least, an emotional truth., Sure, it’s fiction, but it rings truer than the headlines, and your mirror neurons can’t help themselves. They light up like the stage.
We need that. We need a public square with a dimmer switch and a script. We need stories that take longer than a reel and conversations that don’t end with “see more.” The play fights the algorithm with an ensemble, overcoming isolation through cooperation.
The Case for Theatre Education
Theatre education is not extracurricular; it’s essential curriculum, teaching the three literacies we keep pretending are optional:
The literacy of empathy: reading another person’s face and hearing the line under the line.
The literacy of collaboration: building a world where everyone’s good depends on everyone’s good.
The literacy of courage: standing in a light with your name attached to your choices.
It is a lab for failure (the non-fatal, feedback-rich, try-again kind). It is a gym for the heart and a workshop for the voice. It’s where a quiet kid learns that “Thank you, five” is not just a call; it’s a contract. We meet at five, we try it at five, we become us at five.
The Case for Theatre Educators
Theatre educators’ superpower is making something from nothing—budget, time, space, support—and calling it a season. They are public servants, choreographers of courage, carpenters of confidence, custodians of the culture. They know how to say, “Take it again,” like a blessing and “That’s it,” like a benediction.
They are the ones who look at a roomful of teenagers and see a cast list and a crew grid and a future. They teach objectives because life requires them, subtext because politics hides them, breath because anxiety forgets it, and eye contact because we’re losing it. They are not manufacturing stars; they are cultivating citizens. And yes, occasionally the citizens become stars—but always, they become better citizens.
A theatre educator knows where to place the chair so the story lands and where to place the mirror, so the body belongs. They defend the script and the student with equal ferocity. They are the grown-ups in the room who believe you can do it and the artist in the room who knows you must try.
They build up this miracle with warm-ups, with the rule that we clap for courage, with the ritual of checking prop tables and checking in on each other. They build it the way we build any show worth watching: by showing up.
What Theatre Does That Nothing Else Does
- It slows time to the speed of breath. We cannot heal faster than we can breathe.
- It turns an audience into a community. A room of strangers becomes “us” in less than two hours without anyone having to agree on anything except the rules of the story.
- It rewards attention instead of hacking it. The payoff is in the scene you lean into, not the ad you scroll past.
- It teaches consequence. Miss your cue, and the scene doesn’t work. Miss your cue in life, and someone else pays.
- It elevates dissent. Conflict isn’t catastrophe; it’s plot. We learn to argue with grace and to lose with dignity because tomorrow there’s another performance and we still have to be an ensemble.
Because truth needs an address, and the box office is still open. Because the public square is fracturing, and the stage is still a square with room for everyone. The work of rebuilding trust cannot be done by a push notification. Because the antidote to isolation is a rehearsal schedule with your name on it. Because the future will belong to those who can collaborate across differences, speak with precision, listen with humility, and tell a story that invites the rest of us in.
Because at a moment when machines can imitate our voices, it’s on us to use them more honestly.
