This chapter will serve as a detailed outline and of how I and my company of nine undergraduate students at California State University, Sacramento wrote, rehearsed, and performed an original Joker Play in thirteen weeks in early 2023.

In addition to the practice of making this play, this chapter will delve into the theoretical frameworks used both in the inception of the work and in the pedagogical process of collaborative writing. As a practitioner of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) for nearly twenty years, I had studied everything I could get my hands on but had never read, seen, or staged a “Joker Play.” It was an abstract concept I had read about, but never engaged with though I knew I wanted to create one of my own. It is a style of play "meant to be a spectacular discussion, something of a trial, in which diverse ideas and feelings about a historical character or event are presented, scrutinized, and revised" (Schutzman: 2019, 7).

When I was offered the opportunity to create a devised play in Spring of 2023 I jumped at the chance. Thus, on January 23rd of 2023 I greeted my “Devised Project” students for the first time, telling them; “Welcome to the devised project! We are going to make a Joker Play, but I don’t know how yet, so for today... let’s play!” And play we did.

“Play” can be many things. It can be, as Stephen Nachmanovitch writes in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (1990) “the free spirit of exploration, doing and being for its own joy,” (43) in essence play is a verb, it is a doing; but in the theatre it also a noun: “The play’s the thing.” It is a script, a text, an object that be (re)produced, (re)imagined, and (re)lived.

One of the great joys of creating devised theatre is having the opportunity to play with making a play. This ensemble of ten (and I count myself as a member) spent several weeks becoming an ensemble—we played together. Through that play we discovered topics of interest rooted in history, whose ramifications we could trace into our own lives now in 2023. We arrived at the broad topic of “mental health,” though I was unsure where that topic would take us.

With the consent of the company, I began preliminary research based on my own prior knowledge regarding performances in a hospital in France during the late 19th century. I brought it all to the company and we divided up the primary and secondary documents and I asked the company to play with outlining scenes from their research. Each day two or three company members would serve as directors and stage scenes they had outlined based on their research. I recorded their improvisations, transcribed them, made edits, and then incorporated primary and secondary research sources into the text, thus arriving at Women in STEM: A Pre-Hysterical Show which opened with great success on April 19th 2023.