In short, the CPMLE standards and the National Standards for Theatre Education go hand in hand.  They can easily be combined, and when they are, it quickly becomes apparent that each is enhanced by the other.  Both standards can often be fulfilled when teaching theatre, and in my opinion, the lesson is augmented when the Media Literacy standards are taught as well.  Three examples of how the standards go hand in hand are as follows:  

1.  MLE Principle 1:  Media Literacy Education requires active inquiry and critical thinking about the messages we receive and create.
Theatre Education Content Standard #2:  Acting by developing, communicating, and sustaining characters in improvisations and informal or formal productions

Media is all around us and is constantly sending messages; it is inevitable that theatre will send messages as well.  By teaching these two standards together, students will develop a greater understanding of what possible messages they are sending when they create a character using different acting techniques (which can and often do include media).  Often students are unaware of the messages they are sending when they are acting or participating in a production.  It is imperative that they are, at the very least, aware of this.  This awareness will enable them to create deliberate messages in a production, or create opportunities for different messages to be received by the audience.

2.  MLE Principle 4:  Media Literacy Education develops informed, reflective and engaged participants essential for a democratic society.

Theatre Education Content Standard #7: Analyzing, critiquing, and constructing meanings from informal and formal theatre, film, television, and electronic media productions

Media Literacy helps students prepare to engage and interact in a society constantly bombarded with media. Theatre teaches how to analyze, critique, and construct meanings that are found in media.  Could there be a more perfect combination?  I submit that there cannot.  Students today live in a world full of technology and media; they need to be able to interpret it, and theatre can provide a way to do so.  

3.  MLE Principle 6:  Media Literacy Education affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences toconstruct their own meanings from media messages.

Content Standard #1:  Script writing through improvising, writing, and refining scripts based on personal experience and heritage, imagination, literature, and history

Media Literacy encourages students to use themselves and their experiences when constructing  meanings from the media around them.  Theatre encourages students to not only interpret, but to create new meanings.  These meanings will inevitably have media within them, as it is a part of each students heritage and culture.  

The list of how media and theatre are compatible (and often one and the same) could go on and on.  For theatre teachers in particular, combining the Media Literacy standards and the Theatre Education standards is exceedingly necessary because today, media is often incorporated into theatre productions...... and if not incorporated deliberately, someone in the audience will undoubtedly be using media at some point or another during a production.  By educating students using both standards, the students' resources will be doubled, and their knowledge expanded.  More options become available to them, and invariably they will end up enriching their own lives and the lives of those around them through what they have learned, and what they will create.