Final Scenes: Death Literacy Through Devised Theater

TL;DR

This paper explores how theater can help people better understand the challenges of dying at home through stories from hospice caregivers.

Contribution

A novel community-based theater project using hospice caregiver narratives to improve death literacy and foster public conversations about end-of-life care.

Findings

An interdisciplinary team created ten 10-minute plays based on hospice caregiver narratives.

The devised theater approach enabled joint examination of home hospice care challenges.

Public performances and discussion questions were developed to facilitate community conversations about death.

Abstract

Most people wish to die in the comfort of home, but few possess a realistic understanding of the challenges patients and families face when death occurs outside of a medical setting. Through well-established research practice partnerships with several hospice residential care homes, we have curated an extensive collection of caregiver narratives describing the day-to-day end-of-life journeys of over 350 deceased hospice patients. These care narratives provide a special lens to the dying experience in a raw, holistic, detailed manner, offering a rare opportunity to examine and interrogate the death and dying process when it occurs in a home setting. This presentation will describe a community-based participatory artistic endeavor through which an interdisciplinary team of students, faculty, local theater experts, and community caregivers examined hospice caregiver narratives with the goal of developing a series of ten, 10-minute plays capturing the diverse final journeys of terminally ill patients and those caring for them. This presentation will describe the collective creation process of devised theater and how a team-based approach for devising plays about death and dying provides an opportunity for joint examination of the challenges associated with accessing and receiving home-based hospice care. There will be a discussion of the use of caregiver narratives in developing public performances aimed at improving death literacy, and the presentation will close with a brief reading of a devised play and the play’s accompanying discussion questions developed for use in facilitating community conversations about death and dying.