UC Irvine

This dissertation investigates the therapeutic potential of devised theatre as a means of ameliorating affective overwhelment in adolescents. Drawing from case studies of the UK National Theatre’s Speak Up program, Company3's Brainstorm and Manhattan Class Company’s Uncensored series, among others, it examines how collaborative, embodied, and process-driven theatrical creation enables young participants to articulate and renegotiate overwhelming affective experiences that often resist verbal expression. The study situates devised theatre within a liminal “third space” between creative expression and therapeutic practice, foregrounding the role of play, fragmentation, and transversal movement across temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries. Through analysis informed by theorists including Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, and Jung, it argues that theatrical processes—particularly those privileging openness, multiplicity, and participant agency—facilitate the externalization, exploration, and reframing of distressing affect without reducing it to fixed meaning or narrative closure. The research further contends that maintaining processual openness, resisting premature codification into script, and fostering dialogic performance sustain ongoing therapeutic engagement beyond the staged production. Ultimately, collaboratively created theatre emerges as a dynamic, participatory methodology for empowering adolescents to explore alternative subjectivities, exercise creative agency, and negotiate complex affective topographies in ways that affirm rather than constrain their lived experiences and the sense of identity they come to create.