ABSTRACT
This chapter narrates how Latinx playwright Karen Zacarias adapted her 2013 play Just Like Us from white journalist Helen Thorpe’s autobiographical account of her time as a journalist and first lady of Denver (her husband was mayor), as she engages in long-term fieldwork studying the lives of four Mexican American college students, two of whom are undocumented. Zacarias’s stage adaptation problematizes the “white savior” implications of Thorpe’s memoir, and has also been an important engine for protesting President Trump’s campaign to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) that sought to “Dreamers.” When Trump’s plans to end DACA were announced in 2017, Zacarias announced that she would give free rights to anyone who wanted to produce Just Like Us to raise DACA awareness or raise funds to help undocumented immigrants losing their DACA protection. Since then, the play has been produced all across the United States, on and off college campuses.
I then summarize the theatrical turn on American university campuses by presenting the insights of interactive theatre practitioners from the University of Michigan and Cornell University, as well as insights from my own time as a theatre interventionist working with academic administrators and professors in the University of California system. Based on these insights, I conclude that the theatrical turn in academia is best understood as a Derridean pharmakon—both poison and cure—which requires that both performance scholars and theatre practitioners negotiate the complex interdisciplinary hierarchies of today’s academy in order to produce important stage interactions that help us imagine solutions to the demands of the theatrical professoriate and ways to redress the racial and disciplinary inequities that undergird it.
