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Improbable Players (IP) has been creating applied theatre for substance use disorder prevention since 1984, training more than 200 sober actor/teaching artists to perform plays and facilitate workshops addressing addiction, alcoholism, and the opioid crisis. The company operates, for its actors, as a long-term arts- integrated peer recovery support service and mutual support group for recovery from substance addiction, increasing their recovery capital. This essay examines the ways Improbable Player's applied theatre programme operates to build recovery capital and support individual behavioural changes in its artistic staff.

This article explores prevailing rhetoric in published scholarship in the field of educational drama and applied theatre, responding to O'Toole's call to investigate if researchers in the field are "missing something vital by staying in our comfort zones". He noted a "serious need for more usable, broad-based, and reliable base-line data to use for policy change and as starters for our research" after reviewing the abstracts of the 86 sessions presented at the International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) 2009. To explore if his findings were a microcosm of broader trends in the field, we reviewed over 400 peer-reviewed, English-language articles published over the last decade that addressed applied theatre or drama education. We asked the following: (1) What research methods do authors utilise to conduct their studies?; (2) What types of results do these studies report?; and (3) Do scholars based in certain geographic regions influence the field's discourse disproportionately? We share the data we collected from each article in light of these questions through a series of charts. We then analyse the data and detail how the field's self-imposed research paradigms create comfort zones that encourage certain types of research while creating conspicuous gaps and silences by limiting the modes of inquiry we employ and regulating what data we report. We conclude by discussing the difficulties that arise when we work within these safe confines while simultaneously striving to impact the discourse in the broader fields of education, theatre studies, performance studies and/or cultural studies, as well as legislation and policy beyond academia. We argue that these disciplinary boundaries are permeable, but that we must be able to translate our work into a variety of scholarly and lay languages.

Theatre of the Oppressed was conceived by Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal as a "rehearsal for revolution"; it hinges on participants' power to select material for inquiry and frame, shape, script, and perform stories of problems/oppressions in their own lives and communities. In a 12-week-long study I co-facilitated in the drama classroom of an urban charter school in the Autumn of 2007, six girls and two boys framed problems from their lives and communities, scripted and staged anti-model scenes, and performed a wide range of Forum interventions. As a facilitator, I struggled with the tension between my own desire to intervene in discourses in embedded assumptions I found problematic and my fears that by doing so, I would be colonising the workshop with my own privileged agenda. This article is about that struggle, and about the problem that "popular" positions and ideas are not necessarily "progressive", and while Theatre of the Oppressed is usually utilised in support of politically progressive agendas, the work participants initiate and the choices they make do not automatically orient towards social justice. (Contains 2 notes.)