This article discusses how film and theatre storytellers—actors, directors, designers—ideologically and semiotically scaffold their productions and the effect this has on how audiences engage skills of feeling, discerning knowledge and responding to everyday reality. Media, near ubiquitous in our digital age, provide proxies for how to gather and interpret information so that the act of consuming it serves as rehearsal, which reinforces particular skills of how we feel and know “real life.” Conventional storytelling reinforces normative regimes through which reality is then observed, expressed as the life-imitating-art-imitating-life cycle. Certain skills become routinely relied upon while others are left neglected. However, narrative projects could seed a more diverse bounty of embodied sensemaking skills in audiences if storytellers used a framework articulated throughout life itself—such as in a forest. By foregrounding Timo Maran’s ecosemiotic forest model in Anne Washburn’s play 10 out of 12, this article exemplifies ecosemiotic theatre as a pedagogical tool to expand story-making potential for theatre companies that strengthen audiences’ skills of discernment without compromising on a viable narrative model.