This article problematizes the notion of 'transformation' in socially engaged theatre practice. A more nuanced understanding of the impact of theatre practice in marginal contexts is constructed from narrative analysis of the theatre workshop experiences of adolescents in a rights reparation program and men serving long prison sentences. In these contexts of double exclusion (poverty combined with the condition of being prisoners and homeless or violated adolescents), the participants' long-term remembrances make constant reference to the theatre experience having signified a transit from one space or place to another. The theatre space was identified as a place of discovery, a place of validation and a place of relocation. Their theatre experience drew meaning from its implicit contrast to their everyday reality. It was a place they decided to make their own, because within it they truly experienced feelings of wellbeing not present in the marginal spaces they were inhabiting.