When I was a younger, somewhat more ignorant and headstrong college student, my directing mentor and I had a conversation about musicals. We both loved them and had many favorites in common. We were sitting in The Retreat — the secondary, more junk-food-based cafeteria in Vassar’s Main building — chewing the proverbial fat, literally and figuratively.

I mentioned in a voice positively dripping with disdain that I thought A Chorus Line was just garbage. Chris said to me the following, unintentionally teaching me an important lesson about theatre on the spot: “You have to forget the awful movie, or even the soundtrack, or any videos of the production you might have seen. You have to imagine what it was like to see that show when it was originally produced. You have to imagine being a gay, closeted teenager who had never met an openly gay person before seeing that show, with those characters, in Ohio with my parents. Then you’ll understand why it’s important.”

This month in California, gays and lesbians have been stripped of their rights by Proposition 8, a measure amending the California constitution to forbid extension of legal rights to homosexual couples. In the wake of Barack Obama’s historic election, a lot of questions are being asked about how this nation could take a giant leap forward while stepping backward simultaneously. This has lead, in many places, to questions about people’s motivations in the voting booth. What makes them pull a level for a cause that doesn’t affect them?

On the weblog run by the amazing Ta-Nehisi Coates, a fascinating conversation about morality, self interest and people’s motivations has sprung up. One thing Coates writes inadvertently raises the nature and value of theatre in a society. He writes:

“I don’t think people really do things — en mass and maybe even individually — that isn’t in their interest. I don’t believe whites began supporting Civil Rights in the ’60s strictly out of an attack of moral conscience — they were not interested in being a member of a community which sanctioned the fire-hosing of children. It’s clear that Jim Crow and segregation worked to the immediate advantage of some white people, but I’ve never believed that it worked to the long-term advantage of most white people. The price of international embarrassment, of essentially shrinking the middle-class, of destroying valuable brain-power, of sowing resentment amongst a substantial minority of the populace, of creating ghettos is high.”

The above is true, but it involves a limited definition of “self-interest” which should be expanded to include “people I care about.” I became a passionate advocate for gay equality and AIDS awareness after appearing in the musical Falsettoland in Washington, D.C. at the age of 12. This is no doubt because I met, for the first time, openly gay adults while in a show that tackled issues of homosexuality, family, and HIV. Witnessing first-hand how the oppression of gays and lesbians affected people I cared about made me care about ending it.

It goes deeper than this, however, because of the human capacity for sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is our ability to feel pity and sorrow at someone else’s plight, while empathy is our ability to imagine ourselves in their position and feel what we feel. Both are important motivating factors to human beings. We are social creatures by nature; although being social causes near-constant levels of discomfort and conflict ranging from minor to explosive, we still persist in our socialness. This leads to constant provocation of our sympathy and empathy. This enlarges our circle of “self-interest” to include not only “people we care about” but “people we feel bad enough for” and “people whose plight we can imaginatively inhabit.”

Sympathy and empathy are also primary channels that most traditional theatre uses to affect audiences, stretching back to Ancient Greece. Theatre is the most human of art forms. It involves a group of people gathering together to watch other people in real time in shared space. This act of communion is key to theatre’s power. The performers and the audience make an unspoken social compact that the audience will use their imagination and suspend their disbelief, and the actors will reward them with a fulfilling experience. This means that the audience must work along with the actors to ensure the night is a success. Part of the audience’s side of the bargain is that they will empathically bond with the characters on stage, to some extent, and part of the actor’s side of the bargain is that they will, to some extent, engage the audience’s empathy.

This is part of why watching bad theatre is so excruciating. Not only are you being let down by the guy on the other side of the bargaining table, but you also, on some level, feel bad for him that he and the show around him are failing so miserably. Soon, this pity will turn into anger at him and at the show for making you feel bad when they couldn’t get their act together in the first place. Before you know it, you are in for a long, maddening night.

When theatre works the way it’s supposed to, however, we are transported. We are transported into different worlds, into different lives, into different ways of being. This is true regardless of whether the play we’re seeing is naturalistic; non-naturalistic theatre can evoke states of mind and spirit in ways that more literal theatre cannot, while realistic theatre literally shows you a different aspect of life.

Part of the transformation that our consciousness undergoes while watching theatre is allowing us to identify with and understand the other. Sometimes the other is a lot like us. Most theatre is written by, directed by, performed by white people, and much of it written by, directed by, performed by men. As a white male, the other on stage frequently resembles me. Theatre still enlarges my humanity by allowing me access to this other.

This identification is even more vital when the other does not resemble us very much at all — when the other is racially or sexually or physically very different from us. Here our sympathy and empathy engage to allow us to see people as more than stereotypes, as fully realized, complex human beings.

This, ultimately, is what is wrong with the lack of diversity on our stages. Yes, it is troubling that in a city where white men make up less than 15% of the population, roughly 80% of plays produced are by them. Yes, it is close to suicide for nonprofit theaters to not reach new audiences and look beyond their trusted stable of playwrights to do so. Yes, Theresa, we don’t produce enough women and we don’t allow women to direct enough plays. Beyond these issues is another problem, however: the all-white, male-focused fantasy world that we have created on stage is not only inaccurate, it’s enfeebling. It keeps our souls small and dumb. By limiting actors of color to only race-specified parts, we limit our vision of what people of color are capable of, thus we make a world where, ultimately, what matters most about an African American is that she is black. By not integrating our casts, by not insisting on a diverse depiction of the world around us, we limit who gets access to our empathy and our sympathy and what roles they have to play (recovering drug addict, hooker with a heart of gold, victim, noble savage…) in order to get it.

We theatre artists like to wax nostalgic for the time of the Ancient Greeks, when attending the theatre was a religious duty and theatre was deeply wound into the fabric of society — a time when theatre had a vital role to play to society’s health. What we do not realize is that, even though society has by-and-large moved on to other art forms, we still have a vital role to play and we should not be careless with that duty. We have an opportunity, every time we perform, to touch people on a level that few can; we need to honor the solemnity of that when we think through the ramifications of our choices.

Isaac Butler is a director, a writer and the author of the blog Parabasis. He strongly suggests that if the subject of art and one’s humanity interest you, you read the late David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College from 2005.