'Senior theatre' is a form of drama designed specifically for older adults, where seniors are actively involved.

In 1999, there were 79 companies in the US.[1] As of 2010, there are over 765 groups with many around the world.[2]

Many theatre performers want to be on stage when they are older. A good number have never acted before, others have performed when they were young and want to do it again. Some have acted all their lives and they know the joy of performing.[2] Seniors have time to explore the theatre.

There are many different types of Senior Theatre including acting classes, live theatre viewing, play reading,improvisation, storytelling or theatre productions that are readers theatre, short plays, variety shows, plays from life stories of participants, musical theatre, and topics facing seniors, among others.

Offstage, seniors also work as solo performers, playwrights, or they act in films and commercials. Many help backstage, as ushers, or in the box office. They also take classes in all elements of theatre in colleges, universities, and in the community.

Senior Theatre uses techniques that accommodate the abilities of older adults.[2] The most popular techniques in the field are readers theatre and script-in-hand performances. They allow actors to have easy access to their lines and blocking without having to be concerned about the fear of forgetting. Also, Senior Theatre can be intergenerational by including actors of all ages on stage or in the audience.

Performers range from professional to amateur in both rural and urban settings. Ages usually span between 50 to 90 years but most are in their late 60's and 70's.[2] There are many benefits derived from Senior Theatre including physical, mental, psychological, social, and cultural growth. It builds vital social connections for often isolated seniors.[2]

• Curtain Call — Senior Theater's Dramatic Growth, Aging Well Magazine

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Elizabeth Zelinski is the Rita and Edward Polusky Chair in Education and Aging Professor of Gerontology and Psychology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. She studies longitudinal changes in objective cognition and self-reported memory in healthy older adults, interventions to improve their cognition and health effects on cognition in aging.

Zelinski also has joint appointments in the Psychology Department, Neurosciences and the Study of Women and Men in Society (SWMS) Programs. She is the principal investigator of the Long Beach Longitudinal Study.[1] This study evaluates cognition, memory and language comprehension in older adults as well as the relationship between peoples' perceptions of their memory ability and their actual performance, and how these change as people grow old.[2]

She graduated summa cum laude from Pace University and received her graduate degrees in psychology, with a specialization in aging, from the University of Southern California. Zelinski was a postdoctoral fellow at Claremont Graduate School. She also served as the Interim Dean of the USC Davis School of Gerontology.[3]

Zelinski developed the first comprehensive standardized questionnaire of self-reported memory to determine whether people’s beliefs about their memory are echoed in their objective performance. The questionnaire, the Memory Functioning Questionnaire (MFQ), has modest concurrent validity with respect to memory performance and is a better predictor of performance than responses to a yes/no question about memory problems, as commonly used in medical history-taking. Correlates of memory ratings include age, memory performance, depression, health ratings, education, and personality, and these findings translate across my comprehensive longitudinal study of aging (the Long Beach Longitudinal Study) and a nationally representative sample of older adults. Changes in ratings up to 19 years after baseline measurement are modestly associated with increasing age as well as declining objective performance. The MFQ has been used in samples of older adults throughout the United States and other countries. Questionnaires similar to it are in wide use today.

About 25% of the American population over the age of 70 rate their memory abilities as fair or poor. Many older adults are concerned about developing dementia, and recent findings of brain plasticity throughout life have created much interest in brain training to improve cognition. Zelinski's current work shows that cognitive interventions involving repeated practice of simple cognitive skills are effective for improving cognitive abilities of healthy elderly. This is important for alleviating older peoples’ concerns about declines, but may help them to remain independent longer, a major goal of reducing the economic and psychological costs of care for an aging population. She has given many interviews on the subject of cognitive training and gerontechnology, including the popular video game Brain Age.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

• President, Division of Adult Development and Aging, American Psychological Association 2007-2009
• Study section member, NIA HUD-2 (1997-1999), NIH BBBP-4 (1999-2000), NIA-S (2010-2014)
• USC Mortar Board Faculty Member of the Month, September 2000

• Zelinski, E. M., Gilewski, M. J., & Anthony-Bergstone, C. R. (1990). Memory Functioning Questionnaire: Concurrent validity with memory performance and self-reported memory failures. Psychology and Aging, 5, 388-399.
• Gilewski, M. J., Zelinski, E. M, and Schaie, K. W. (1990). The Memory Functioning Questionnaire. Psychology and Aging, 5, 482-490.
• Zelinski, E. M., Spina, L. M., Yaffe, K., Ruff, R., Kennison, R. F., Mahncke, H. W., & Smith, G. E. (2011). Improvement in Memory with Plasticity-based Adaptive Cognitive Training (IMPACT): Results of the 3-Month Follow-up. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 59, 258-265.
• Hindin, S., & Zelinski, E. M. (in press). Extended practice and aerobic exercise interventions benefit untrained cognitive outcomes in older adults: A meta-analysis. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.