Volume 12

#ENOUGH: Confronting Gun Violence through Community-Engaged Theatre Practices

Samantha Briggs

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Marissa Barnathan

ROCKFORD UNIVERSITY

INTRODUCTION

Gun violence is unfortunately endemic in the United States, increasing steadily each year, with 61 active shooter incidents on record in 2021 compared to only 3 in 2000 (Gramlich, 2023). Within just two weeks of initially drafting this article in May 2022, two particularly tragic mass shootings occurred: on May 14, 2022, a White gunman killed 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, NY (Thompson, 2022), and on May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX (Bleiberg & Murphy, 2022). In 2024, there were 515 mass shootings in the United States (Boschma, Merrill, & Murphy-Teixidor, 2025), and in 2025, firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2025). These facts illustrate the major increase in gun violence in the United States in the last several years.

In 2019, as a response to the Parkland shootings that took place in February 2018, Chicago-based theatre artist Michael Cotey created #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence, a theatre project that aims to “harness the current generation's spirit of activism by promoting playwriting as a tool for self-expression and social change and supplying a platform for America's future playwrights to develop their voices today” (ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence, LLC, 2022). Since its inception, #ENOUGH has produced three nationwide reading projects, with many theatre companies, schools, and community organizations simultaneously presenting the plays - written by youth playwrights - in a staged reading format on one selected night of the year. For each project cycle, a selection committee, currently including Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames (Fat Ham) and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, chooses six to eight short plays out of over 100 submissions by youth playwrights to be featured as part of the #ENOUGH annual reading. The current #ENOUGH advisory committee for the fourth annual reading in 2025 includes applied theatre artists like Michael Rohd, founder of Sojourn Theatre Company, Bill Rauch, co-founder of Cornerstone Theater, and playwrights like Lauren Gunderson (You and I) and Idris Goodwin (This is Modern Art).

While in graduate school at Arizona State University (ASU), we, Marissa Barnathan and Samantha Briggs, organized and directed a 2022 production of #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence in an ongoing effort to expand our applied theatre toolkit and inspire positive social change. As theatre artists concerned about the gun violence epidemic, we recognized #ENOUGH’s impact as an intervention to this pressing issue – one that offers an opportunity for youth to practice artistic activism as part of a national movement. We used the project to experiment with different modes of community engagement surrounding a theatrical production and activate audiences around the topic of gun violence prevention. With support from the #ENOUGH leadership, we built upon the one-night-only reading format and organized a larger production consisting of multiple performances, as well as engagement opportunities before, during, and after the production. These additional engagements were heavily inspired by the fields of participatory democracy, Legislative Theatre, and futures studies. This paper describes our engagement efforts and outcomes, with particular attention to how we drew from and integrated the aforementioned disciplines.

INSPIRATION FOR THE WORK

Throughout our graduate study, we actively developed our skills as applied theatre artists, with a particular interest in engaging audiences around important sociopolitical topics. At ASU, we were fortunate to learn from experts in the field, such as Michael Rohd and Dr. Stephani Etheridge Woodson, whose work in civic practice and community-cultural development was impactful in the development of our values and aspirations as community-engaged artists. At the same time, we looked to scholars outside of the arts to expand our understanding of democratic processes and civic participation. In the spring of 2022, we enrolled in a class with Dr. Daniel Schugurensky, a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Global Transformation at ASU. In Schugerensky’s “Participatory Governance and Civic Engagement” course, we were introduced to participatory democracy, which describes a model of governance in which citizens have the power to directly decide on policies, and politicians are then responsible for implementing those policy decisions (Fung, 2006). This model of democracy emphasizes broad involvement of people within politics and has been successfully utilized in many communities around the world. Most notably, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, citizens have used participatory democracy since 1990 to effectively allocate their city’s budget for needs such as road building and access to sewage (Kingsley, 2012).

Upon learning about participatory democracy, we recognized a natural connection with Augusto Boal’s Legislative Theatre, which we identify as another strong influence on our work. Inspired by participatory democracy efforts in Brazil, Boal created Legislative Theatre in 1992, an offshoot of his previous method, Theatre of the Oppressed (People Powered, n.d.). Legislative Theatre invites legislators and community stakeholders to a Forum Theatre style performance where community members act out possible solutions to community issues in order to impact a change in governmental policy. The community members then work with legislators and stakeholders to transform their ideas into new laws or changes to existing laws (People Powered, n.d.). Through Dr. Schugurensky, we had the opportunity to meet with Legislative Theatre expert Katy Rubin, founder of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Founded in 2011, Theatre of the Oppressed NYC successfully uses Legislative Theatre methods to address houselessness and criminal justice reform, among other topics (Kelly-Golfman, 2018). Rubin offered helpful guidance in the structure of our post-production workshop, specifically in terms of how to gain information regarding the most accessible policy changes and how to strategically engage our legislative stakeholder, Arizona State Representative Jennifer Longdon.

The final inspiration for our community engagement work was the field of futures studies, introduced to us by our then-classmate Ben Gansky, a multi-faceted PhD student in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society in the College of Global Futures at ASU. Prominent futures studies scholar Sohail Inayatullah (2012) defines futures studies as “the systematic study of possible, probable and preferable futures including the worldviews and myths that underlie each future” (p. 37). Dator (1998) explains that the field of futures studies seeks to help people “invent and try to move effectively toward their preferred futures” (p. 302). We drew from futures studies because we believe that, as artists and citizens, we must first imagine the changes we want to see before we can effectively create them, and we recognized futures studies as one method for such collective imagining.

Each of these individuals, art forms, processes, and schools of thought were swirling in our minds when we began developing the community engagement components of our #ENOUGH production. Thus, we are not claiming to have developed an entirely new mode of audience engagement, nor are we simply replicating a pre-existing framework. Rather, we see our efforts as interdisciplinary and experimental—a conglomerate of “best practices” and hopeful “what ifs” all aimed at making positive social change via expanding and enhancing the theatrical audience experience.

THE WORKSHOPS

With the support of the #ENOUGH leadership, we expanded upon the one-night-only reading format and organized a larger production consisting of five performances over five days, plus a pre-production workshop, post-show debrief sessions after each performance, and a post-production workshop with a panel of expert stakeholders. Our intention with these additional components was to offer multiple opportunities for individuals to connect, reflect, and brainstorm solutions around the issue of gun violence. We hypothesized that these additional engagements would leave audience members more inclined to take action than if they simply watched the #ENOUGH plays in isolation. In the following sections, we outline each step in the process—the pre-production workshop, post-show debriefs, and post-production workshop—and discuss the responses and engagement from participants.

Pre-Production Workshop

The pre-production workshop took place on the Monday preceding the week of performances and was attended by over a dozen ASU graduate and undergraduate students from multiple disciplines, as well as local community members. The main goal of the pre-production workshop was to collectively consider ideas about community safety. After leading a short icebreaker to promote trust and comfort among group members, we invited participants to create “community safety murals” on chart paper hung on the walls. Inspired by futures-thinking exercises, which can help find narrative framings of issues that avoid partisan political road-blocks (Inayatullah, 2012), we encouraged participants to think imaginatively beyond their current reality, offering the following prompt to guide their creation: “Imagine a future where all communities are safe. What does it look like? What happens there? Who is there? How does it feel? Express it on the chart paper. You can use words, pictures - whatever feels right!” Participant responses included phrases such as “no guns,” “free healthcare,” “good education,” “economic equality,” “no fences,” “exposure to difference,” “no white collars,” and “local government transparency.”

After participants shared their observations of the murals, two cast members performed a short excerpt from one of the #ENOUGH plays, In My Sights (Leonard-Peck, 2022), which depicts a young lesbian couple discussing the purchase of their first gun. We chose this excerpt because the two queer female characters explicitly voice concerns for their physical safety due to their identity, offering a clear connection to our community safety murals. Our intention in sharing this theatrical excerpt was to hold a mirror to our participants’ communities and demonstrate how audience members can make connections between a performance and their own lived experience. To this end, after the performance, we asked participants to identify the objectives and obstacles for the two characters in the scene using a dramatic analysis framework (Stanislavski, 1989; Alberti and Gister, 2012). The group then discussed obstacles and barriers to their visions of community safety, and how to address them. In the responses, participants mentioned barriers such as a distrust of law enforcement and a lack of mental health resources, with the latter being especially prevalent in education.

As a final activity, participants collectively authored potential questions to ask audience members after the #ENOUGH performances. Participants crafted 15 different questions, including: “How does race intersect with how we talk about gun violence and mental health?”, “Is legislative action around access to guns in Arizona possible?”, and “What assets can we tap into to promote broader support for mental health in education?” (see Figure 1). Inspired by deliberative democracy voting sessions (Cohen, 2000; Russon Gilman, 2012; Pimbert & Wakeford, 2001), a type of participatory democracy where citizens decide on government priorities through deliberation and polling, we introduced an easy-to-reproduce voting method where each participant received two stickers, which they placed next to the questions they felt were the most meaningful. The two questions that garnered the most votes were “How would you allocate funds to create a safer community?” and “In an ideal world, what gates exist around access to firearms?” (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Questions generated at Pre-Production Workshop, 2022; Photo credit: Barnathan

By incorporating a deliberative democracy voting session into our pre-production workshop, we intended to demonstrate how deliberative democracy can produce real actions. In this case, the actions produced were the questions for use in the post-show debriefs. By allowing participants to generate and vote on questions to ask audience members, we increased community and civic engagement across time and space, connecting workshop participants to audience members of our performances.

Performances and Post-Show Debriefs

The second phase of the process involved the performances and post-show debriefs. We intentionally used the word “debrief” in an attempt to get away from the more traditional post-show talkback, which, in our experience, can quickly digress into audience members talking at or over each other. Given our specific artistic goals and values, we were interested in exploring options for more substantive audience engagement after the performances. We wanted to foster a space where audience members could not only discuss the performance content but also take a deeper dive into the topic of gun violence prevention and generate action steps for the future.

Many theatre companies in the US have similarly pivoted from the traditional talkback format, including Cornerstone Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Baltimore Center Stage. One notable example is Michael Rohd’s Sojourn Theatre, which is now a subset of Rohd’s Center for Performance and Civic Practice. Sojourn’s work focuses on civic dialogue and often incorporates dialogue between actors and audience members, as well as between audience members themselves. Examples of such work include Don’t Go, How to End Poverty in 90 Seconds, and BUILT. Through specific, thoughtful prompts and creatively facilitated opportunities to converse with others in the room, Sojourn’s work promotes critical thought and interpersonal connection.

While highly inspired by Sojourn, our attempt to pivot from the traditional talkback was limited because we were working with scripted material that could not be changed. We identify this as a potential challenge for individuals who desire to merge their artistic practice with activist pursuits. To address this challenge, we created what we believed would be a step towards a more interactive experience within the confines of a show with a set structure and written text. At the beginning of the post-show debrief, instead of the audience remaining in their seats and the performers on stage, we invited audience members to form a circle on the stage to create a more equitable and inviting atmosphere. We started with a think-pair-share activity that asked participants to consider the different ways gun violence affects our society, as depicted in the show. Pairs were instructed to share in the order of who woke up the earliest that day. We started the post-show debrief this way—with audience members talking in pairs and casually discussing their wake-up routines—because we wanted to build trust within a group made up of many strangers and we believe that “trust is built one to one” (brown, 2021, p. 138). Next, we engaged the whole group in a conversation using the questions created and voted on during the pre-production workshop. Building on the rich discussions that emerged, we concluded by providing index cards and asking the group to write down one action that needs to be taken to prevent gun violence. The index cards were collected at the end of the night and included a plethora of distinct responses, which we discuss below.

While the five performances were well-attended, with about 130 total audience members over the course of the performances, including a standing-room-only final showing, the initial 20-minute post-show debriefs were not as highly attended as we had hoped. We anticipated an organic motivation towards substantive post-show debriefing after each of the shows, especially from individuals who attended the pre-production workshop; however, only the first post-show debrief on opening night was well-attended by about twenty participants. At the second post-show debrief, the group was much smaller and comprised largely of actors and theatre colleagues. One possible explanation for this outcome is the length of the performance, which included eight 10-minute plays, plus about 10 minutes of interwoven text piecing the performance together. The full performance from start to finish ran about 1 hour and 45 minutes without an intermission, and many audience members may have been at capacity attention-wise. To address this issue in future #ENOUGH performances, Michael Cotey has changed the format to only six plays instead of eight.

After the second night of the production, we pivoted towards asynchronous participation in an attempt to get closer to our goal of activating audience participation in meaningful, action-oriented ways. At the end of the third performance, after the scripted performance ended, we entered the stage and gave a short speech, elaborating on the goals of the production and inviting audience members to reflect on two key questions posed within the plays— “When are we going to wake up? When will it be enough?” (Odom, 2022, p. 10). Then, we prompted audience members to write down one action, large or small, that they would like to see taken toward community safety. To develop this new prompt while honoring the contribution of our pre-production workshop participants, we looked for commonalities between the two participant-created questions and our original post-show question about action steps (“How would you allocate funds to create a safer community?” and “In an ideal world, what gates exist around access to firearms?”). This collection of audience-generated action proposals parallels the iteration of community-driven policy change characteristic of Legislative Theatre (Kelly-Golfman, 2018).

Several actors handed out index cards and writing utensils while we prompted the audience to write down their answers and return the cards to the production team on their way out of the theatre. In this fashion, we collected over 70 individual proposals for gun violence prevention. This suggests that our adapted method of engagement was ultimately successful in eliciting more participation from the audience around the issue of gun violence prevention. We additionally displayed a QR code linking to a form letter in opposition to an Arizona campus-carry bill entitled HB 2447 (An Act…Relating to Firearms, 2022) and encouraged the audience to send the letter electronically, either in the moment or at a later time. Several cast members used their cell phones to do so on the spot, further encouraging the audience and modeling the ease of the action. With this pivot, we maximized the precious post-show moment, where audience members, freshly impacted by a performance, are most likely to take action before the sway of the performance wanes.

Post-Production Workshop & Final Actions

After the closing performance, we conducted the culminating post-production workshop. Over a dozen participants attended, including audience members, facilitators, and expert stakeholders Michael Rohd; ASU Professor Dr. Daniel Schugurensky, a participatory democracy scholar; and Arizona State Representative Jennifer Longdon, a survivor of gun violence.[1] Inviting these experts to both the final performance and post-production workshop allowed us to experiment with elements of Legislative Theatre and participatory democracy on a smaller scale. In Legislative Theatre, it is common practice to invite legislators to the theatrical event, who will then be held accountable for the policy ideas voted on by the group (Boal, 1998); the person who filled this legislator role in our workshop was Rep. Longdon. In participatory democracy, it is common practice to invite experts on the subject matter to educate the citizens before they vote on an issue (Pateman, 2012); Rohd and Schugurensky filled this role. By combining these practices, we provided participants with a unique opportunity to receive expert information and individual attention from their legislator, which guided the rest of the workshop.

Before the post-production workshop, our research team organized the over 70 action proposals offered by audience members for gun violence prevention inductively into nine categories and displayed them in the workshop space (see Figures 2 and 3). The categories were:

1.       legislation - access to guns

2.       legislation - background checks

3.       law enforcement

4.       conflict resolution

5.       community programming

6.       mental health

7.       education around guns and gun violence

8.       stories: “the power of narrative”

9.       miscellaneous.

Organizing the action proposals in this way allowed us to more clearly identify patterns and commonalities in audience members’ thoughts about both the causes of and solutions for gun violence.

Figure 2: Audience-generated Action Proposals, 2022; Photo credit: Barnathan

Figure 3: Audience-generated Action Proposals, 2022; Photo credit: Barnathan

The proposals served as a catalyst for a group conversation about possibilities for collective action. Similar to the pre-production workshop, the post-production workshop incorporated a futures-thinking exercise to encourage bold and imaginative solutions. After participants reviewed the action proposals, we organized the participants into small groups and asked them to imagine a “headline from the future” that described a gun violence prevention success in approximately five years. The groups were asked, in addition to writing the headline, to describe (1) how this success was accomplished, (2) who was involved, and (3) the obstacles overcome along the way. Some headline examples from participants included:

• “Arizona Passes Bill on Digitally Encrypted Safe Storage”

• “Arizona Pilots New Bullet Tracking Program”

• “Arizona Hasn’t Experienced A School Shooting in One Year”

• “Second Amendment Rights Revised to Exclude Automatic and Semi-Automatic Guns”

We were particularly impressed by the participants’ creativity in generating their headlines, which fostered a rich discussion about who has the power to influence policy and the necessary resources (e.g. grants, technology, etc.) to make change.

In response to this activity and the 70+ audience-generated action proposals, Rep. Longdon spoke about realistic possibilities for gun violence prevention in Arizona. She reiterated and agreed with our opposition to the Arizona campus-carry bill, and she advocated for extreme risk orders of protection, where a person’s firearms are temporarily taken away under extreme circumstances (i.e. physical or mental illness, homicidal intent, etc.). Responding to the two headlines about technological advancements in gun violence prevention, Longdon shared information about available smart gun technology and the barriers keeping this technology out of the U.S. market. Throughout the conversation, participants had the unique opportunity to ask questions and share their thoughts with a state legislator.

Unlike Legislative Theatre, we did not ask Rep. Longdon to commit to any specific legislative actions as a result of our conversation. It became clear that Longdon was already fighting for many of the actions called for by our audience members. That said, providing a space for individuals to talk candidly and intimately with an elected official proved to be a unique and valuable offering afforded through our process. For example, at least three participants had never met Rep. Longdon before, despite her having represented their congressional district for three years.

We see this component as a first step in building an important coalition between citizens and their elected officials, and one way that our process deviated from Boal’s Legislative Theatre. Whereas some forms of Legislative Theatre position the legislator solely as a vehicle for turning citizens’ desires into law, we saw the relationship between citizen and legislator differently. From our perspective, forming relationships with one’s legislator is an important step to mobilize change by lessening the gap between those with power and those without.

Following the discussion with Longdon, the post-production workshop participants and the expert stakeholders collaborated to create a new list of possible actions to commit to, inspired by the 70+ audience-generated action proposals. Unlike some iterations of Legislative Theatre, where the proposals would indicate actions taken by the legislator only, we chose to brainstorm actions we could all commit to as individuals or as a community. Drawing again from participatory democracy, participants voted on the most impactful actions, as seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Action Items generated at Post-Production Workshop, 2022; Photo credit: Barnathan

The two actions with the most votes were (1) “organize bringing personal narratives to legislators” and (2) “tweeting at #AZLEG.” During our conversation with Rep. Longdon, she emphasized the effectiveness of using Twitter (now called X) to get the attention of state legislators in Arizona on issues like gun violence prevention. In addition, participants were drawn to sharing personal narratives with other legislators largely because of the intimate and informative conversation with Longdon, as well as their experience watching the narratives from the youth playwrights in the #ENOUGH performance. This correlation between attending arts events and increased civic engagement has been proven by other scholars in recent years. For example, Rabkin (2017) highlights two NEA studies which show that U.S. Americans who attend arts events are more likely to volunteer, vote, and take part in community events. Similarly, Chitiga (2014) created and studied an impactful program called “Performing Arts for Effective Civic Engagement” (PAECE), which acknowledges an increase in civic engagement as a result of watching an issues-based performance. As a culminating gesture in the days following the post-production workshop, we emailed the list of actions to all artists involved in the project, all focus group members, and all audience members, reaching over 150 individuals.

At the end of the #ENOUGH process, we donated half of the proceeds from ticket sales to the Giffords organization, an organization dedicated to saving lives from gun violence and led by Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. This donation amounted to a total of $450. In this way, all audience members contributed to one collective financial action. In large part because of our additional efforts, we were chosen to be one of two flagship productions interviewed and filmed by PBS NewsHour, which shared the story of #ENOUGH: Plays to End Gun Violence with their approximately 882,000 nightly viewers (Brown, Jackson, & Staten, 2022; Pew Research, 2023). This further publicity vastly expanded the scale of our audience, sharing the impact of #ENOUGH well beyond our local community.

REFLECTIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PRACTITIONERS

We view this project as a work-in-progress and acknowledge that turning imaginative deliberation into action is challenging and complex. Aiming to contribute to the dialogue of community-engaged theatre artists focused on civic engagement, we offer the following reflections and ideas for practitioners interested in learning from our experience and building on this work.

Overall, we were pleased with the results and impact of this project. In particular, we recognized a correlation between the extended engagement of participants who attended all three events (pre-production workshop, post-show debrief, and post-production workshop) and more generative and thoughtful contributions during discussions and activities. This was echoed by one participant who shared that she was inspired by the pre-production workshop to do independent research on the topic of gun violence prevention policy, which she presented at the final post-production workshop. Such comments suggest that expanded engagement opportunities have the potential to spark curiosity and compel individuals to educate themselves on the issues being addressed.

We understand, however, that our process may have benefited from additional modes of engagement and follow-through. While recognizing the limitations of time, resources, and support, it is worth considering interactive elements in the lobby as another avenue for audience members to learn about the issue at hand and take action in real-time. Interactive lobby elements could include donating to a gun violence prevention organization, signing petitions for legislation that advances gun violence prevention, or signing up for a volunteer shift with an organization like March for Our Lives (MFOL). We could have additionally hosted gun violence prevention organizations to table and share resources in the lobby. It is worth noting that while we did connect with the ASU chapter of MFOL and discussed their efforts to oppose the Arizona campus carry bill (HB 2447), no MFOL volunteers were available to table during our performances. This points to the importance of coalition building; had our coalition of gun violence prevention organizations been larger, we could have recruited others for support. However, building coalitions takes time and people power. Thus, were we to repeat this process, we would attempt to recruit additional community organizers solely responsible for engaging community partners and designing lobby elements, as we were admittedly spread thin as both the directors of the theatrical production and the lead organizers of the civic engagement efforts.

Furthermore, we recommend developing methods for following through with actions in concrete ways. While we used the results of the voting process to provide actionable steps via email, in the end, this did not feel like a satisfactory conclusion to the process. We had quite a few performers who had lived experience with gun violence, who, if approached and willing, could have played a larger part in the process as a whole. For example, we could have trained these performers on how to lobby using their personal narratives and then worked with Rep. Longdon to facilitate a meeting with one or more of her Republican colleagues in the Arizona legislature. Both of these actions would have aligned with the top action of “organize bringing personal narratives to legislators.” Unfortunately, the timing of the production, which coincided with the end of the academic year, limited our capacity to plan any further events. We also admit the universal challenge of maintaining momentum after a theatrical production has culminated and are interested in exploring methods for energizing artistic participants (including ourselves) sustainably.

Upon reflection, we recognize other ways for theatre practitioners and artists to use audience-generated material for further artistic projects. For example, the action proposal cards could become fodder for a devised performance, multimedia exhibit, or other creative project. Such creative endeavors could be explored with existing ensembles or artist collectives outside of the production; we can also imagine a creative process that involves audience members, expert stakeholders, legislators, and other interested community members. Through such additional creative projects, artists can continue to raise awareness about social issues and ensure that the voices of the community continue to be heard, ultimately deepening dialogue, illuminating new perspectives, and creating more community solutions.

When contemplating the connection between theatre and social issues beyond gun violence, conversations with our participatory democracy expert Schugurensky lead us to believe that another approach to this work could be thinking about it in reverse: instead of bringing participatory democracy into theatre spaces, practitioners could bring theatre work into participatory democracy spaces. To achieve this, theatre practitioners would need to build authentic, non-transactional partnerships with community organizations already practicing participatory democracy. For example, Lieberman (2023) describes participatory budgeting as a popular form of participatory democracy happening in many high schools in the U. S. Theatre artists could build partnerships with local schools and consider bringing their theatrical practices into the participatory budgeting process.

Lastly, we admit that this process was difficult to enact using scripted work that couldn’t be changed. With this in mind, for the 2023 #ENOUGH annual reading, we collaborated with Cotey and the advisory committee to determine how to best scaffold audience interaction throughout the performance rather than only at the end. Rohd again served as an advisor and mentor for us in this process, given his success with scaffolding in his work with Sojourn. Scaffolding audience engagements, including at least two opportunities for interaction during the performance, trains the audience to engage with each other and hopefully builds deeper dialogue at the end of the performance (Leffler, 2018). While detailing the specifics of our 2023 process is beyond the purview of this paper, we recommend that theatre artists who attempt to incorporate civic engagement within scripted performances work with scripts and writers who are flexible and open to modifying the structure and content of the show to best serve the goal of meaningful audience engagement.

CONCLUSION

A major strength of this project was its ability to connect across time and space, creating and activating a new community of 150 individuals, including workshop participants, audience members, actors, industry experts, and legislators. By building upon the shared experience of the #ENOUGH performances, we maximized the possibilities of community participation and civic engagement around the topic of gun violence prevention. We believe civic engagement is like a muscle that must be exercised in order to stay strong, and through this project, we provided several unique opportunities for people to work this muscle, perhaps for the first time.

Throughout the process of working on #ENOUGH, we drew inspiration from the fields of participatory democracy, Legislative Theatre, and futures studies. By experimenting with a blend of theatre practices and methods from other fields, we had the opportunity to collaborate with non-artists such as Dr. Schugurensky and Arizona State Rep. Jennifer Longdon, with the shared goal of increasing civic engagement. This was an invaluable opportunity that helped us to grow as applied theatre artists and fortified our commitment to socially and civically engaged practice. We believe emerging artists and scholars would similarly benefit from looking beyond the confines of traditional theatre practices when creating audience engagement opportunities for issues-based theatre.

While we encourage more theatre artists to confront the issue of gun violence specifically, we also encourage practitioners to apply our recommendations to creative work on other social justice issues such as racial justice, environmental justice, and reproductive rights, to name a few. Social justice issues of all kinds require artists, activists, and community members to collaborate on innovating new methods for promoting sustainable, healthy, and safe communities. 

SUGGESTED CITATION

Briggs, S., and Barnathan, M. (2025). #ENOUGH: Confronting gun violence through community-engaged theatre practices. ArtsPraxis, 12 (1), pp. 1-22.

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Thompson, C., Wawrow, J., Balsamo, M., & Collins, D. (2022, May 14). 10 dead in Buffalo supermarket attack police call hate crime. AP News.

Note

[1] To note, in spring 2024, Longdon resigned from the Arizona House of Representatives and currently works at a healthcare non-profit.

Samantha Briggs (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Teaching at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She holds an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community from Arizona State University and an MA in English Literature from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English.

Marissa Barnathan (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Rockford University. She received her MFA in Directing from Arizona State University and holds a BA in Drama from Washington University in St. Louis. Marissa has trained in Theatre of the Oppressed and her research focuses on applied theatre.

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