Hacking

That makes sense, the first lesson of theater however is that the audience always knows when you are trying to lie to them, they might not be able to put it into words like you will be able to as a practicioner of theater when you get better at directing and understanding why some performances flop and others soar, but the audience will feel a hollowness and become bored and anxious at the unreality of the emotions they are being asked to inhabit by the story falls flat to them.

Theater and especially improv is about establishing trust with your fellow performers and with the audience, the objective of "social engineering" as far as theater is concerned with it is as a vehicle to bringing an audience into contact with truth, not as a means to manipulate, steal or undermine.

You simply cannot trust any community that seeks to become good at changing people if it is not dominated by artists who possess an immense power to change others and desire to wield it only in the destruction of hateful, reductive, oppressive and segregating narratives, never with a desire to construct them.

What honestly studying theater or improvised theater does is make you aware of how to establish trust with good people and in the process the gift you get is a better awareness of how you are perceived by others in ways that might surprise you and you could have never realized all by yourself. It might be as simple as a common phrase or physicality you use feels more intimidating than you intend, or an affirmative statement comes off a bit hollow when you don't intend it.. not big things but a rising awareness of this forms most of what people refer to as "charisma". Usually it is much more nuanced and broadly applicable to the ways in which you pretend and act in your everyday life without consciously even realizing it.

https://archive.org/details/improforstorytel0000john

A good book by one of the best improvised theater teachers/directors.. ever?