Theatre as Therapy for Impression Management Distress in the Contemporary United States: A Dramaturgical Model and Toolkit for Everyday Coping

This study uses a combination of qualitative and ethnographic methods to interrogate the phenomenon of “identity distress,” redefined here as a coping process initiated by a threat signal during social encounter to an individual’s objectives around identity and image. More broadly, this study is an investigation of the relationship between mental health and impression management in the contemporary, other-directed, image-oriented modern United States. This relationship is studied through examining performance pedagogies i.e. particular theatrical training methods aimed at cultivating specific performative skills. The dissertation analyzes non-stigmatized coping in theatre spaces where psychologically-oriented and therapy-like talk (open verbal exchange and analysis of emotional, psychological, and wellbeing processes) is normalized as part of the theatrical training, in response to the threat and suffering of everyday social encounter. Performance pedagogies necessarily confront the work of drama in everyday life, incorporate and therefore destigmatize psychologically-oriented and even therapy-like talk as part of the training, and thus offer useful sites for examining American identity distress as a dynamic and non-stigmatized process. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and case studies with students in these three performance pedagogies, this dissertation analyzes how individuals use dramaturgical tools to make sense of, navigate, and cope with identity distress in everyday life in America. I analyzed dramaturgical face-work and identity distress coping processes as both in-the-moment events and longer term threats and memories impacting identity distress-related meaning-making processes. Kay, a trans, non-binary individual and Neo-Futurism student, transforms into the paradoxical “helpless barista,” Zainab, a mixed race American Muslim woman, mobilizes distancing metaphors from improv and exposure therapy to reframe her sense of agency from “turf” to “yes and,” while Alex, an autistic, face blind clown play student, enacts an absurdist persona and stance that fits with the illogical nature of American interaction culture. A non-exhaustive set of coping and intervention tools centered on everyday, real-time, identity-threatening, mental health management are described in detail based on the ethnographic observations and case studies; this approach means understanding the relationship between identity and mental health as a process during and through the everyday dramaturgical work of social encounter. This everyday mental health process is fraught given the tensions between individuals’ strivings for successful self-image versus authentic identity acceptance within the socio-historical context of mental health, values, and image management in the United States. A six-stage model of how identity distress coping processes operate in everyday interaction is presented drawing on the case studies and participant sample to map coping trajectories which differ depending primarily on levels of authenticity, awareness, synthesis, dramaturgical distancing, and social communion; play and reimagining emerge as successful dramaturgical strategies for an identity distress coping process that leads to decreased identity distress and an increase in face-work-relieving conditions, or face-ease, as well as an enhanced dramaturgical toolkit and attunement for future coping