Why Drama Belongs in a Catholic Classroom

I have spent about twenty years as an actor and a writer, and I came to teaching drama with a strong sense of what the art does. What I did not expect was how naturally it sits inside a Catholic understanding of the person.

Drama asks a student to imagine their way into another life. To play a character honestly, you have to stop judging them long enough to understand why they do what they do. That is not far from what we are asked to do as Christians: to look at another person, including the difficult ones, and try to see them with something closer to mercy than to contempt. Every time a student steps into someone else's situation on the classroom floor, they are practising a kind of empathy that the Gospel keeps asking of us.

There is also something incarnational about theatre that I am only now putting into words. Our faith is not abstract. It is God taking on a body, a voice, a life. Drama is the one subject that refuses to stay in the head. It happens in the body, in the room, between people. When my students build a scene about someone being left out and then have to stand in that loneliness, the lesson reaches them in a way a worksheet never could. That is why I think drama is not a break from formation. It is part of it.