American theater has flourished largely for the last 120 years by combining American-style ambition, technical know-how and institutional capacity with European radicalism, intellectualism and bravery. American theater, roughly from 1900 to 1990, successfully internalized lessons from Russian, Polish, German, Yiddish, British and Japanese theatrical traditions, while providing safe havens and financial resources for dissident and refugee theater-makers.
But that exchange has calcified, as radical external traditions have become part of the larger and very expensive American theater education and prestige system, which deliberately suppresses any appetite for change that is natural to real (that is to say, working and therefore evolving) artists.
The absence of wide and organic opportunities—places where you can just show up, find a community and work without a long and surreal process of passing through the bowels of a large institution—is not just demoralizing. It incentivizes theater artists to seek symbolic and therapeutic victories: cultivating Instagram personas and networks that convey importance in the vacuum of challenging texts and engagement with critical audiences. Self-conscious vanity replaces artistic self-confidence (for all except the very lucky and very few who have snuck through the upper echelons of the Master of Fine Arts programs, or been scouted as children or teenagers and made it onto TV early).
The absence of organic opportunities incentivizes theater artists to seek symbolic and therapeutic victories, like cultivating Instagram personas.
The American theater-maker lives to be plucked up by TV, and secondarily film, or to get a job teaching how the giant bureaucracy of theater-making works, or, failing a teaching job, an administrative job, helping funnel and shepherd young people through the system.
Meanwhile regional theater has aged and died with its audience. Broadway produces live-action cartoons and other forms of slop. Off-Broadway caters to PMC millennials and Gen Z who want to see the “good” ideology.
There is an absence of risk, the pressure that comes with taking risks, and the evolution that pressure and risk combined produce. There is a sense that plays are written and produced now to maintain market share, to give theater institutions something to justify why they still exist, and to maintain the illusion that the MFA system feeds into something. And while a similar analysis could apply widely across different domains of American culture, theater has a far smaller independent ecosystem (relative to even film or music) that, consequently, cannot put pressure on hegemonic tendencies and ideological zombification. Independent theater, in other words, is not powerful enough to challenge the rigid groupthink that is inculcated in university training systems and cultural institutions (or in pop culture, which influences contemporary playwrights more than classical art or canonical literature or music).
Broadway produces live-action cartoons and other forms of slop. Off-Broadway caters to PMC millennials and Gen Z who want to see the “good” ideology.
And yet now there is an opportunity for American theater, if it breaks out of its addiction to institutional and generational mores: to hold a humanistic mirror up to the radical, in-progress transformations wrought by AI and bioscience. As the human slides and slips and upgrades itself away, as the class that owns assets separates from the classes that don’t, there is a moral and possibly psychological demand for dramatized representations of (a) the immense pressure that these changes place on people with expectations for life in line with the 20th, not 21st century (and who are thus largely unprepared for what is to come); and (b) the transhumanist/tech class that is prepared to pull their assets and technological capacities behind walls and moats.
Thus, because, in its bare essentials (dramatic text, speech, movement) theater can be created by almost anyone, and because classics are universally available, and because there is no barrier to the creation of new, timely texts (other than cultural paradigms which enforce ideological slop), theater represents a useful (and ancient) counter-technology for making sense of social acceleration, and for presenting a crystallized expression of the aspects of the human soul that are rapidly being left behind.
Theater represents a useful (and ancient) counter-technology for making sense of social acceleration.
The American theater has been in survival or careerist mode, when it has a real, existential role to play. We do not need any more stage versions of fantasy movies, but intelligent, talented people of all ages writing and rehearsing stories that cut closer to the germ of life as it actually is lived and felt—stories that are something other than vanity projects and projections of the urban elite.
There should be theater in garages and churches; the monopoly of theater professionals needs to be challenged and broken so that institutions are forced to present stories and writers who are not afraid of reality.
As we slide towards an oral culture again, theater has the opportunity, if it wants, to serve as it did during the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James: as a bridge between the educated and the uneducated, as the germ of the symbolic realm, the crystallization of an entire civilization’s verbal ingenuity, for the sake of helping the polis make sense of the rapid transformations it is undergoing. The playwright then—as in the case of Shakespeare, of Goethe, of Ibsen—creates a linguistic identity of the future to inhabit.
American theater should seek Elizabethan roots: fast, cheap, rowdy, staged close enough to power that the powerful (who should be induced to sponsor representations of their own hubris) end up in the audience watching thinly veiled versions of themselves. There needs to be more theater in San Francisco (and other tech hubs like Austin too), to challenge and toy with and mirror the rationalist, accelerationist class that controls more and more capital every week (see the coming IPOs for OpenAI and Anthropic).
American theater should seek Elizabethan roots: fast, cheap, rowdy, staged close enough to power that the powerful end up in the audience watching thinly veiled versions of themselves.
My own experience in the independent theater world has shown me that some subversion, some counter-institutional effort, can be successful in the short term, and that this also entails contending with the at-times vicious inner programming of actors, writers and directors who have passed through the undergraduate and MFA system (and who still spend most of their free time on Instagram, watching each other rather than practicing their craft). Even smaller new institutions struggle to start clean, to start at the roots of theater: the body, the voice, the relationship to the audience, the vestigial ghost of ritual.
The professionalization of theater has turned, over the last fifty years, what should be a very basic and essential human art into a collective narcissistic revenge fantasy against those who have made it, or are perceived to have made it, or have made it a little further. The social type known as the theater kid (the self-celebrating, self-dramatizing child of the upper middle class who does everything for attention, fueled by a sense of powerlessness and victimization, fascinated by their own smallness) is ill-equipped, by function of this deep egoism, to create art that does anything more than impress audiences with the same needs.
Then there’s the problem of money, which is either trapped in old institutions and non-profits, circulating to prop up and protect boomer cultural authority from delegitimizing challenges; or is tech money, which is new, uncommitted, and willing to be radical, but entirely alien to anything approaching humanistic sensibility and complex intellectual taste.
Our tech overlords seem more interested in super yachts, islands, bunkers, and political power than high culture and aristocratic patronage of impoverished artists with the courage to criticize everything – including themselves and the hands that feed them. But they are missing an opportunity to understand themselves and the world they are bringing forth by not cultivating private theaters in their “courts”.
In the coming years, as music, film and literature become further enmeshed in AI-generated simulation of simulation, the digital space will be choked with the fake and the inhuman. Our attention might then return to what people can make in a room: the cottage and the craft, the folk.
Assuming there is some resistance to the growth of the slopverse, live performance will find itself under greater pressure. The performing arts, long in the grip of institutions, Boomers, formulas and ideological hymns, will have to wake up and ask if they can still provide paying customers with the rudiments of ritual and the sacred. Live art might have to be good again, if it is to set itself up as an alternative to the artificial, digital, algorithmic and ultra-mimetic. It will have to prove that if AI can copy all of its formulaic structures, live art can still invent new structures and new iterations that machines cannot offer. The next few years, therefore, promise to be both beautiful and terrifying for theater-makers.
