Creative Explorations for the Theatrical ‘Age Turn’: Toward a New Dramaturgy of Older Age

This chapter offers a hybrid approach to both aging and theater studies through a case of practice as research aimed at the creation of an anti-ageist dramaturgy. Departing from my own experience as a theater artist and an aging-studies scholar, while at the same time acknowledging my own limitations in the two fields as a middle-aged academic working intermittently for the theater, the practice as research presented is based on a small-scale study with 12 older professional actors, whose views on older age and the theater inform the dramaturgical sequence developed in the creative part of the project. Framing the small-scale study within the interdisciplinary field of theater and age studies, the chapter offers an opportunity to develop work on older actors as both critical sources of inquiry and exemplary figures in anti-ageist discussions and representations of older age. Through the examination of the process of writing the dramaturgical sequence derived from the small-scale study, the chapter underlines the capacity of the theater and, in particular, of dramatic writing, to generate transferable knowledge while simultaneously developing mechanisms of artistic inquiry through which the complexities of older age can be explored.