ABSTRACT
In “Empathy Is Essential,” Kristin Kundert celebrates empathy as a basic theatrical principle, what she calls “the uniting of heartbeats and breath” during a production. She traces her personal encounter with this empathy from her experience in high school plays, to her work with Karamu House, the oldest African American theatre in the nation, to her present role as Artistic Director of Theatre at the University of Georgia, where she teaches her students how “to see the ‘other’ as a living human being,” as a way out of our nation’s present malaise.
