The Values Americans Live By: a piece of theater is a reaction to and is inspired by L. Robert Kohls 1984 work of cultural anthropology, The Values Americans Live By, which was originally intended as an introduction to American culture for foreign visitors. LECs piece of theater hands the text to the audience in the guise of a college syllabus and offers them access to some of the things that the creators found missing from the academic document: poetry, confusion, yearning. Audience and actors together traverse the familiar and the foreign through a distinctly American lens. Space travel, Frank Sinatra, the open market, self-help gurus, the bureaucracy of academia: participants find themselves morphing from audience members into students, consumers, self-improvement devotees, and back again. The LEC takes as its task the exploration of this document and its implications, exploring a place between traditional theater and educational exchange, locating in each the impulse to explore, to dominate, to imprint the other with our understanding, our yearning and our interpretation.