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This article makes a psychoanalytic contribution to therapeutic mediations through theater. The authors start from the clinical observation that any act of theatrical improvisation in a group setting can play out anew the very invention of the tragic theatrical setting, and they seek to examine this enigmatic structural similarity. To this end, the first part of the article synthesizes historical and anthropological elements that show the transition from the dithyramb to the tragic form, by the appearance of the dialogical and fictional tension between the protagonist and the choir. These elements are then linked to clinical questions that are central to therapeutic mediation through theater: 1) the challenges of the invocative drive linked to the appearance of the tragic form; 2) the difference between the group and the theater company; 3) the subjectivizing effects of a theatrical staging of the difference between the Ego and the I. All of these points allow the authors to propose a clinical identification of what, in theatrical fiction, could be termed “f(r)iction.”