Using Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" as an anchor text, the authors argue for applied theatre strategies as vivid and viable tools for exploring challenging texts and applying critical lenses in an embodied way. Readers are guided through a series of theatre-based, English-classroom accessible improvisational frameworks to help students and teachers penetrate important but challenging texts with a sense of agency. These research-based frameworks foster artistic explorations of prior knowledge, enliven the idea of multiple perspectives through role-taking, connect past and present through games and simulation to humanize/personalize the "antique text" by honoring present-day text generation through theatre. In using applied theatre to help students open and embody ideas and perspectives, accessibility increases alongside students' belief in their own rights and abilities to speak back to a canonical text in a complex, inquiry-driven context. Enlivening a critical lens through theatre short-circuits the potential for "critical" being code for a distanced "critic" creating a "critique," aiming instead for a space of sharp-edged, shared inquiry.