Getting through it: The three-act play and performance as means of transforming the distressed doctoral graduate

This article illustrates how performance can help doctoral graduates struggling with their identity outside of the academy. The heuristic of the three-act play developed by Bradford and Hillary Keeney (2014) is offered as a means of breaking the scholar’s addiction to understanding before acting. By playfully performing upon the uttered phrases and habits of the stuck graduate, new frames of action and possibility are opened up that can carry him or her into more expansive and resourceful ways of being that transcend the academy. The author offers an account of his own distress and the ways in which absurdity, metaphor, movement and song opened him up to the sacred.