You may wonder how theater could possibly teach anything about conflict management. After all, theater is just actors playing pretend on stage. Mediators and peacebuilders deal with serious real-world conflicts. As someone who studied, both fields, I was discovered they have surprisingly much in common. I have also learned that utilizing theater practices in conflict management can positively shape how we practice conflict management. In this article, we are going to explore how drama on-stage can help solve drama off-stage. Along the way, I will share some personal anecdotes, as someone who recently earned a double major in theater directing and peace and justice studies (a path my parents were not expecting). By the end of this article, you should gain a new perspective on analyzing and managing conflicts, and maybe you might even want to take an acting class! 

Script Analysis and Conflict Analysis are One in the Same

I remember in undergraduate when I took script analysis for my directing major and conflicts analysis for my peace and justice studies major. One class was breaking down the plot, themes, and characters of a script and the other was studying war and other armed conflict. What could these classes possibly have in common? Well, I was shocked when I was given a sheet of paper in both classes that practically had the same text on it. 

In my conflict analysis course, we were given a paper asking us to think about the wants, interests, and desires of parties in a conflict. The sheet asked questions like:

• Who are the actors in the conflict? 

• What do they want out of this conflict? 

• Who are they fighting and why? 

• Where did they come from? 

These questions are essential in analyzing conflict from any scale, and foundational in a conflict analysis course. 

In the script analysis course, I took for my theater directing major, I was handed a sheet of paper with Stanlayiskis's Seven Questions. Anyone who has had to take an intro acting class has come across these questions. 

The questions put you in the character's shoes:

• Who Am I?

• Where Am I?

• When Is It?

• What Do I Want?

• Why Do I Want It?

• How Will I Get It?

• What Do I Need To Overcome?

As you can tell the questions listed above, from both conflict analysis and script analysis, are remarkably similar to one another. That is because both ask the same quintessential question: What is the story of this conflict? 

I was relieved to have taken script analysis before conflict analysis because when I had to write a thirty-page paper on the complexities of an armed conflict I often used the tools and skills I learned in script analysis. Understanding the perspectives of conflict actors using lessons from script analysis helped shape my understanding of conflict immensely. Mediators and peacebuilders of all kinds can use the tools of script analysis and frame them in the context of their work. By melding the two fields, one could begin viewing conflicts through questions such as:

• What's the story of the conflict? 

• What’s driving the actors to make the decisions they're making? 

• Not only what are the facts of the conflict, but what are the emotions behind it?

• What will it take for each of them to get what they want? 

In mediation, we often are taught to understand the interests behind a position. By adding this script analysis perspective, mediators may now think of a disputant's interests as the story they are telling in this conflict. It might help you better understand a conflict and see it in a new light.

The base of any script, or for that matter any story, is the conflict. Therefore, theater artists are exceptional at analyzing conflict. We study these scripts to inform us of the intricacies of conflict, external and internal. As theater artists, we create a map of the story through script analysis of a story’s characters, their positions, their interests, and how they work to resolve a conflict.  

Acting, Active Listening, and Empathy Building  

Script analysis is an integral part of any production, but when it comes time to finally put that script on stage, actors must use a whole different set of skills to bring their character and the story to life on stage. This is where active listening and empathy become powerful tools. When actors study their characters they are told never to judge them and look at them in a neutral light; however, actors must have deep empathy for their characters to understand their emotions and needs. This might sound paradoxical, but both neutrality and empathy are needed to create a compelling performance on stage. 

Mediators might relate to this sentiment. They must be fully present with their disputants, remain impartial, but be emphatic in their understanding of the disputants and their conflict. 

This notion of “presence” brings up another similarity between acting and mediation: active listening is key to both. Actors must be completely available to respond to their scene partners during a performance. This means being fully in the present moment, listening to both verbal and nonverbal cues from their scene partners, and remembering their dialogue and rehearsed blocking while performing. This is a tough balancing act! 

Well-trained mediators also juggle these priorities at all times. They must listen and be attentive, while also remembering their training and knowing the right timing in guiding the mediation process. With both acting and mediation, practice makes perfect.

Improv, Negotiation, and Mediation 

A great way to practice both acting and conflict management is through improv. In theater, improv is creating a scene, often humorous, from scratch on stage. Two or more actors are given the rules of a scene, and often the circumstances of the scene by the audience. They then create a scene by listening to each other, reacting, and saying “yes, and” to their scene partner.

Mediators in IMA’s courses participate in live, coached mediation simulations of real cases members of the IMA team have previously mediated. There is a good reason why mediators use simulations to prepare for real-life mediation. Through role-playing, even the most uncomfortable conflicts, participants not only observe how to meditate but also experience the power of the process in a safe and supportive setting.

In my first meditation class in college, in fact, our professor started off the unit by having us play improv games. I had done these games many times before in theater classes. Many of the students in the class were unsettled by the bizarre change from sitting in lectures where our professor would babble on about BATNAS and other negotiator jargon to suddenly getting out of our seats to play theater improv games. However, we eventually understood the benefits of the improv exercises for warming up our listening skills, which helped us later in our multi-party negotiations simulation. 

The lessons of improv lie in our ability to stay present while multitasking, to say yes to the situation at hand, and to try our best to overcome its obstacles, especially when we are caught off guard by a new development in the simulation exercise. Keeping cool and resilient when a curve ball is thrown your way is an important skill for mediators. 

Playwriting, Imagination, and Conflict Transformation

The essence of theater’s ability to resolve conflicts on stage lies in the playwright’s imaginative power of conflict transformation. The basis of every play (or any story) is as follows: the main character or characters’ status quo is ripped out from under them when something new happens. As a result, a conflict occurs, and the main character then must work to overcome their newfound set of circumstances and, in doing so, transform themselves and the world around them. Theater and all forms of storytelling ask us to imagine “what if…” scenarios to resolve the characters’ conflicts. Playwrights take us to imaginary places that are different from our reality. They poke and prod at the most difficult questions facing our contemporary world. Playwrights place imperfect characters in a difficult set of circumstances and then see what unfolds when they write the play. They transform the world on stage and challenge us to consider how we can transform ours. 

Creativity plays an essential role in all peace-building. Good mediators can help stimulate parties’ imaginations through techniques such as brainstorming, caucusing, changing the scenery, shifting the focus, seat-swapping, or offering a “magic wand.” Mediators can illuminate pathways to peace, led by the parties’ own ingenious ideas. Perhaps the single most important question mediators can ask of the parties is this: Can we imagine a way of being beyond our current state of conflict? This difficult and powerful question is something both theater artists and peacebuilders wrestle with often, training both to be better engaging with conflict. 

Applying Theater Practices to Mediation 

After studying both theater and mediation, what I hope mediators can learn from my experience is the potential power of imagination in their practice. With each mediation, I challenge mediators to consider incorporating some of the tools of theater, such as script analysis, improv, and imagination. The best mediators naturally work to facilitate a space where disputants transform the conflict in front of them through creativity. This is a daunting task, but if mediators utilize theater practice they can sharpen their skills in not only imagination, but also presence, analysis, listening, flexibility, and empathy. Mediation, like theater, is essentially an art form.

Thornton Wilder wrote "I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being" It's in human nature to have conflicts, it's what challenges us and transforms us. We have the difficult task of resolving the contradictions of conflicts we face daily. Therefore it is essential we build conflict management skills. Theater artists know this essential fact of life, and that's why they passionately create stories for audiences to view live on stage. We all have storytelling in us, it is built into human resolve conflicts. Mediators know this as well. Mediation works to transform our current conflicts, our current stories, into bright futures. How we choose to imagine our future, our new story is up to us. 

Whether or not you’re a mediator, I believe utilizing theater practices can cultivate conflict management skills in all of us. Do you agree? What other similarities do you see in the theater arts and peacebuilding? What are some other skills you bring to your work as a mediator from other fields? Share your comments below!