How Progressives Killed American Theatre.

The first in a 3-part series covering the predictable self-immolation of America's theatre industry.

When King Oedipus learns, to his horror, that the prophecy he once scorned was accurate, his abrupt reversal of fortune—a moment in classical tragedy known as peripeteia—is followed by a painfully pathetic denouement. In the end, the best that the once-beloved ruler can hope for is dignity in death.

If the American theatre is not yet dead, at best it is undead: a rotting, zombified husk, shuffling on in a form that was once human. Incidentally, its fate hews so closely to classic Greek tragedy that it’s as though Fortune used Aristotle’s Poetics as a handbook in crafting the institution’s demise.

After four years of rabid anti-Trumpism and three years of pandemic-driven hysteria, the American theatre industry is now experiencing its own peripeteia. Broadway has failed to match the luster of its record-breaking 2018-2019 season. Regional theatres across the country are either truncating their seasons or are closing outright. Other forms of live entertainment, such as popular music and professional wrestling, serve as an embarrassingly stark contrast, thriving in the post-pandemic “New Normal” that theatre professionals demanded.

It didn’t take a prophet to predict the industry’s self-immolation. But much like Sophocles’ Tiresias, anyone who dared raise alarm bells about the continued implementation of failed strategy during 2020 - 2022 was condemned by an industry which never fails to see itself as on the “right side” of history. Such haughtiness is unsurprising, considering it is now beyond question that the theatre’s tragic flaw—or, as Aristotle terms it, hamartia—is hubris.

Encyclopedia Britannica elaborates (emphasis added):

Often the tragic deeds are committed unwittingly...an apparent weakness is often only an excess of virtue, such as an extreme probity…It has been suggested in such cases…that [the tragic hero] is guilty of hubris—i.e., presumption of being godlike and attempting to overstep his human limitations.

It’s also worth noting that, within the context of Greek tragedy, hubris also means “excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis”: the inescapable agent of one's downfall… or, “retributive justice.”

There is one important difference between the archetypal tragic hero and the American theatre, however:

The actions of the former elicit pity, and even compassion in onlookers.

Given its behavior over the past decade—especially in the past three years—the latter will not be so fortunate.

FALLING DOMINOES

Theatre-lovers across America were shocked when Los Angeles’ Tony Award-winning Center Theatre Group—one of the most prominent regional theatres in the country—released the following statement (emphasis is mine):

Center Theatre Group (CTG)—along with arts organizations across the country—continues to feel the aftereffects of the pandemic and has been struggling to balance ever-increasing production costs with significantly reduced ticket revenue and donations that remain behind 2019 levels.

We are still facing a crisis unlike any other in our fifty-six-year history. It is in this environment that we have to take the extraordinary step of pausing a significant portion of CTG programming beginning this summer and continuing through the 2023/24 Season.

But as the LA Times notes, a “pause” isn’t really a “pause”:

Center Theatre Group might be calling this a “pause”…but that word is a euphemism for a closure — what the entire theater ecosystem had to endure when the COVID shutdowns hit in March 2020. The hard lesson learned — during closures that in some cases lasted close to two years — is that audiences won’t quickly return in nearly the numbers needed to make budgets.

And it gets worse:

The result is a painful, and unprecedented, contraction of regional theaters nationwide. Vibrant, essential leaders of the industry including New York’s Public Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Dallas Theater Center and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, among many others, are experiencing various levels of pain — fighting to keep doors open despite dwindling ticket sales, increased production costs and hesitant, recession-wary donors.

The result: drastic cuts to programming, layoffs, candid pleas to subscribers about an industry-wide emergency and, in L.A., the indefinite shutdown of what for decades has been the city’s most prominent and important home for drama.

Worse still, theater management experts claim “25 percent to 30 percent of theater audiences have not returned since the pandemic shutdown of March 2020 that lasted until late 2021.”

The Washington Post’s veteran theatre critic Peter Marks continues:

The cutbacks and closings have been so regular of late that a document circulates among leaders of the field, listing recent “permanent closures” — such as Triad Stage in North Carolina, Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, New Ohio Theatre in New York — and staff and program downsizings.

Dire as that sounds, it’s even worse considering the success of other forms of live entertainment:

• As “vibrant, essential leaders” of the theatre industry flood email inboxes with requests for money, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) continues to explode in popularity and profitability.

• As playhouses experience an “industry-wide emergency,” World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) reports “skyrocketing ticket sales” and “live event attendance.”

• As theatre business professionals warn “the industry will shrink by half,” the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL) are reportedly breaking attendance records… even in the midst of declining ratings and viewership.

• Despite equipment shortages, live music is also doing brisk business, with artists like Taylor Swift literally igniting earth-shaking fervor among fans. Axios even makes a point to note: “live events and concerts may be booming, but live theater and opera shows are not.” (One can also add symphony orchestras to the list of failing fields.)

• Even influencers are packing venues these days. Those bitching about “outdated subscriber models” and “donor fatigue” might be surprised to learn that popular YouTubers and livestreamers get donations of tens to hundreds of dollars from individual, loyal subscribers on a daily basis. Some online creators have even amassed multimillion-dollar fortunes by crowdfunding their own projects.

Scapegoating the economy or the pandemic—as theatre industry leaders seem intent on doing—is a copout. Americans are obviously still happy to donate to artists and entertainers they enjoy, despite economic woes. They obviously still crave live entertainment, clearly understanding (unlike theatre professionals) that SARS-CoV2 is not the plague.

What Americans obviously do not want, however, is to see live theatre.

To understand why, we can begin by examining the culture of the industry, and recent sociopolitical developments which have and will continue to relegate the industry to cultural irrelevance.

FAILURE TO READ THE ROOM

Normal people do not pursue careers in theatre.

The field is a collection of outcasts and misfits, who generally forgo wealth and stability to devote themselves to a vocation that brings magic and meaning into their lives. It is a difficult life where unemployment is the norm, and the source of the next paycheck is always in doubt. For this reason alone (let alone the egos and outsized personalities that dominate the profession), conservative-minded people, more drawn to the career-to-marriage-to-family life model, tend to steer clear of the profession.

Moreover, as with many artistic fields, the theatre generally trends (or used to trend) more liberal in its disposition. It arguably needs to be so, as slavish devotion to strict moral codes or social mores would render it too inflexible to mine the nooks and crannies of the human condition which form the basis of great drama and comedy. In the last decade, however, the American theatre has done exactly this, shooting past liberalism and zealously embracing a virulent, religious “Progressivism,” whose chief accomplishment has been isolating the industry from the rest of the country.

Even among registered Democrat voters, recent Pew research suggests that only 15% describe themselves as “Very Liberal,” with another 32% describing themselves as “Liberal.” But comprising over one-third of Democrat voters are self-described “Moderates,” weighing in at 38% of Democrat voters. The remainder describe themselves as “Conservative” (11%) or “Very Conservative” (3%), suggesting that even among registered Democrats, “Very Liberal” individuals only outnumber “Conservatives” by a slim margin.

Also noteworthy, further Pew data suggests that “roughly two-thirds of Progressive Left (68%) are White, non-Hispanic,” and that the “Progressive Left are also highly educated, with about half (48%) holding at least a four-year college degree, making it one of the two most highly educated groups overall.”

(Laypeople are keenly aware that “highly educated” and “highly intelligent” are not synonymous.)

Furthermore, after trending upward for a decade and a half, the number of people calling themselves “Socially Liberal” leveled off after 2016, suggesting that even during Donald Trump’s polarizing tenure, when Blue America worked tirelessly to convince America that the 45th president was Hitler, few were persuaded to that point of view.

In fact, despite overwhelmingly negative media coverage, the incessant ire of celebrities, and even censure by Silicon Valley—Donald Trump managed to earn 12 million more votes in 2020 than he secured in 2016. Intriguingly, many of those voters were from minority groups supposedly reviled by the divisive Republican former president. These groups continue to be a question mark for the 2024 election.

Another fascinating data point is that Fox News, reviled by the left, has remained the top-rated cable news network for two decades. According to The Wrap—far from a beacon of far right radicalism—the network “also commanded the largest number of Independents in the key news demo during primetime and total-day hours: 55% of those 25-54 watched the network in primetime, compared to CNN’s 23% and MSNBC’s 22%.”

Even Tucker Carlson—erstwhile host of the highest-rated cable news program—not only garnered the majority of Independent viewers in the coveted 25-54 aged demo (55%), his popular primetime show “was top among Democrats in the demo across all of cable news [in October 2021] and ranked third place among Dems in total viewership, too.”

YouTube, one of the world’s most popular platforms, reports approximately 197 million active users in the United States. CNN (the most trusted name in news) boasts a respectable 15.5 million subscribers with 14.6 billion total views. But the Fox News YouTube channel has a higher view count (15.2 billion) with a lower subscriber base (10.7 million) than CNN, and that base is still larger than the other two most-favored news outlets of entertainment professionals, MSNBC (6 million) and the New York Times (4.36 million), combined.

The point is not to comment on the quality of the programing, nor the soundness of the views and opinions expressed on these outlets. The point is that these outlets resonate with a plurality of Americans in a way that the American theatre industry clearly does not.

Industry professionals claim they want to attract an audience that reflects the “real” America, in all its diversity. Such sentiments are hollow at best, for in reality the industry is now dominated by the social vision of a largely white and affluent bourgeoisie—or “Bluegeoisie”—which makes no attempt to hide its sneering contempt for those who do not share its progressive values (which is to say, the majority of the country).

A truly “inclusive” theatre industry would recognize and embrace that the United States is not only a mosaic of different ethnicities, but a nation with a complicated tapestry of views, values, and perspectives which ebb and flow over time. Had theatre industry leaders any knowledge of or respect for the American public it is charged with serving—particularly in an era where one can instantaneously access and survey a broad spectrum of news, views, and opinion to gauge the pulse of the nation—its programming choices would reflect such wisdom.

Instead the American theatre, for all its proclamations of anti-bigotry, are extreme bigots themselves with regard to political philosophy. But even that is only part of the problem: the industry’s woes are exacerbated by having been wholly seized by a cynical, nihilistic ideology, which is more concerned with revolutionary activism and social engineering than with creating timeless works of dramatic art.

Sadly, the cancer will continue to metastasize.

There is little hope of stopping it.

REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE

In an essay entitled What Shall We Ask of Writers, playwright and screenwriter Albert Maltz laid waste to the creative and cultural limitations imposed by left-wing orthodoxy:

”It has been my conclusion for some time,” Maltz wrote, “that much of left-wing artistic activity—both creative and critical—has been restricted, narrowed, turned away from life, sometimes made sterile—because the atmosphere and thinking of the literary left wing has been based upon a shallow approach”.

The remarkably prescient work is not the paranoid scribblings of a right-wing nut job. The publication in which the piece appeared, New Masses, was a proudly Marxist periodical.

Maltz himself was a Communist who was later blacklisted from the entertainment industry.

Even more astonishing is that the essay, which could easily have been written today, was actually penned in 1946. It is worth reading for anyone who cares about the current state of the arts in general and the theatre in particular, as it highlights the superficiality of politically-driven art, and how work is praised or condemned according to the correctness of its politics, and how such an atmosphere is to artistic freedom and growth what a lack of oxygen is to fire.

Notably, in the wake of Maltz’s essay both Hollywood and Broadway experienced Golden Ages which established America’s entertainment industry as one of the most lucrative and culturally significant institutions in the world.

Those days are long gone.

Adherents to the “Social Justice” sect of Leftism, colloquially known as the “Woke” (a term which was in use long before it became overused among right wing critics), believe they are blessed with a “Critical Consciousness” which gives them special insight into the past and present oppression of historically marginalized groups. They believe that they, and they alone, are aware of and care about these problems, and that it is their mission to solve them.

The ideology is heavily inspired by Marxist philosophy, transferring his ideas on class and economics to issues of identity. Anything from one’s race, sex, and sexuality to one’s immigration status, body-type, or disability is then crunched into a binary framework of “Oppressor” and “Oppressed”.

Such a view of history and society, in addition to its blanket refusal to acknowledge the uniqueness of the individual (what does the artist have to draw from other than their own specific talent?), is not only overly simplistic, but insidious in its intense focus on traits usually outside of one’s control. It’s possible to move from one economic class to another, even multiple times; but straight white males will always be straight white males, and thus permanently the “Oppressor”, while everyone else will always be seen as “Oppressed”, purely by accident of birth.

Proponents of such views proudly see themselves as revolutionaries on the vanguard of progress and change, as crusaders against the evils of white, European, colonialist, cis-gendered, heteronormative, patriarchal systems. Everything must be “problematized,” deconstructed, and torn down, replaced by systems that are more “just” and “equitable” for all—“all” in this case not including straight white males and those who reject the ideology… aka, “Fascists.”

Curiosity and empathy are essential traits for any theatre artist. But for all their demands that others be open to “change”, acolytes of Social Justice are deeply incurious about why others might reject their doctrine. For all their sanctimonious claims of empathy, they have none for objectors to their orthodoxy. Neither of these defects deters them from arrogantly presuming moral and intellectual superiority over their adversaries.

In their minds they are a bulwark against a dangerous and authoritarian religious right wing, but in their “extreme probity”, they are blind to the fact that despite laudable ideals they’ve become nothing more than the left-wing version of the puritanical and censorious religious conservatives they wish to destroy, replete with their own taboos, dogmas, and rituals.

Unlike religious fundamentalists of yore, however, “Woke” zealots do not use archaic language like “heretic” or “infidel” to chastise non-believers. Instead, they answer violations of their doctrine with terms like “Far right,” “bigot,” “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” “transphobe,” or “Nazi.” Such charges are often spurious and inaccurate, but it matters little in show business, where relationships and reputation are essential to the growth and maintenance of a career, where employment is scarce, and where merely following the “wrong” people on social media can arouse the ire of Neo-McCarthyists.

Theatre professionals are thus heavily incentivized to pledge allegiance to the cult, whatever they may truly believe, or risk excommunication and penury.

Consequently the American theatre is no longer a liberal institution which thrives on the emotional maturity and intellectual acuity to engage with a range of ideas and perspectives. It is now an explicitly illiberal entity, wholly ensorcelled by a cynical outlook which sees and assumes the worst in all things and in everyone. It has been taken over by faux-revolutionaries who are too ignorant to realize that their struggle to disrupt and dismantle oppressive “whiteness” is built on ideals popularized by white European intellectuals, which led to systems of not just oppression, but of mass suffering and death.

The OG Critical Theorists look an awful lot like Colonizers

And the revolution will only metastasize, as unlike in Albert Maltz’s era the theatre industry is now flooded year after year with maleducated graduates of BFA and MFA programs, young people who’ve been indoctrinated for anywhere from 16 to 20 years into a singular view of the world, and who are so coddled that even our most rigorous and elite training institutions produce graduates who crumble in the face of basic facts, or whose race-based hysteria ends up “cancelling” even black Tony-winning instructors.

It is these individuals who will be the stars, writers, directors, producers, composers, artistic directors and so on, of the future. The adults match the youth in gross ignorance, fully embracing the “Cultural Revolution” with zero understanding of what it means:

It means a future of professionals—be they administrators or teachers or performers or backstage crew—chosen not for their ability, but for superficial identity markers and loyalty to “the cause.”

It means a narrowing of the scope of work produced as it must conform to the evermore rigid demands of activists, while the work itself will be lackluster as it must increasingly reject “old”, Western ways of story-making which served as the foundation for timeless classics (does anyone believe anything produced now will hold up in 1,000 years?).

It means rehearsals conducted on eggshells for the “safety” of an ever-expanding coterie of individuals whose narcissism is only outdone by crippling inferiority complexes, who take industrial-grade offense at terms which were completely innocuous five minutes ago.

It will mean a industry of (even more) spineless men, emasculated beyond recognition by rabidly feminist colleagues (the majority of American women do not identify as feminist). And women—who already face stiff competition for acting roles—may want to ask themselves how much competition they’re willing to withstand from sexual minorities.

It will mean an increasingly divided, race-conscious industry where whites (“colonizers” and “oppressors”) will be dehumanized for sake of “equity.” Racial minorities who balk even slightly at being doted on like defenseless children will either be ignored, or met with racist vitriol.

My life in the theatre

The sensible people who care about equality and about creating great art but who are not on board with radicalism—and there are a lot—will be (and already are) cowed into soul-killing silence, if they’re not already planning their exit from the industry. And the quasi-Bolsheviks, for whom art is not a priority, will have the floor.

In an era where YouTubers, podcasters and influencers now compete with the entertainment industry for consumers’ time, attention, and money, the above developments ensure that the theatre will continue to isolate itself from the rest of society... which means even fewer ticket sales, further declining revenue, fewer shows, even fewer jobs, and, ultimately, total cultural obsolescence.

Ironically, this movement would have no teeth if most theatre professionals were not already empathetic people (except toward Republicans). But no one in the industry dares push back, not just because of their innate tendency toward kindness and openness, but also because of their desperation to remain among the “in” crowd.

It is very difficult to break into the circle of regularly working theatre professionals. Careers are built and sustained on relationships and reputation, and “woke” progressives weaponize and armor themselves with the moral authority of standing up for the vulnerable. As such, any challenge to the orthodoxy—no matter how careful one is about focusing not on the ideals themselves, but on the negative consequences resulting from how they are exercised—carries the risk of career-damaging character attacks that industry professionals would rather avoid.

Overall this creates an atmosphere in which discourse can only occur within very strict parameters. As a result internal dissent is discouraged, external feedback is ignored, and consequent course correction is made impossible.

And that—along with the self-righteous hubris of an industry that is immovably certain of its perpetual place on “the right side of history”—is why the American theatre thoroughly embarrassed and disgraced itself with its suicidal response to COVID-19.

NEXT: COVID-19, Group(non)think, the abandonment of logic, foresight, and principle.