Tamizdat – Тамиздат

[The article reposted below, about books banned in the Soviet Union (and now also in Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation), caught my attention for two reasons.  One, it’s about Russian literature, and, as many readers of Rick On Theater will know, I studied Russian in college and then in the army. 

[Two, I am utterly opposed to censorship for political or religious reasons.  As I’ve said many time on this blog, I am pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  I’ve blogged on various kinds of censorship, mostly in this country, on ROT, and, having read “Banned by the Soviets,” I knew I had to add it to my coverage of this act.]

“BANNED BY THE SOVIETS, AVAILABLE IN NEW YORK”
by Sarah Chatta

[This article ran in the print edition of the New York Times on 1 March 2026 in the “Metropolitan” section.  It was posted online as “The Kremlin Banned These Books. You Can Find Them in a New York Library” on 23 February.]

A professor has built a collection of contraband books from an earlier era.

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper.

Soviet tourists visiting Western Europe brought mini-volumes of “Doctor Zhivago” [Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), 1957 in Russian (Milan, Italy); 1958 in English (New American Library)] back home with them. Members of the Moscow Philharmonic were said to have lined their sheet music with book pages. From balloon-launching sites in West Germany, copies of George Orwell’s [1903-50] “Animal Farm” [English; 1945] were lofted into Eastern Europe.

Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world.

[Hunter College at Park Avenue and East 68th Street is a division of the City University of New York (CUNY).]

The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

[White Rabbit Books at 200 West 86th Street, Manhattan, New York City, is a bookstore with Russian, English, Ukrainian, and Hebrew books designed for various children’s ages.  It hosts book club activities and cultural events for children and teenagers. (White Rabbit Books in the United Kingdom is a prominent music and literary publisher based in London and Essex, not associated with the NYC shop.)]

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through.

[Chatta is a little free with her English renderings of samizdat (самиздат) and tamizdat (тамиздат). They’re two Russian portmanteau words formed by joining two words (or parts of two words, to coin a new word that combines their meanings (English examples: ‘televangelist’ = ‘television’ + ‘evangelist’; ‘cockapoo’ = ‘cocker spaniel’ + ‘poodle’).

[The Russians, and especially the Soviets, were very fond of acronyms (GUM [ГУМ]; Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazín [Государственный Универсальный Магазин], or State Universal [that is, ‘Department’] Store; since 1991, Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin [Главный Универсальный Магазин], Main Universal Store) and portmanteaus (Soviet: Comintern [Коминтерн]; Communist International [Коммунистический интернационал; Kommunisticheskiy internatsional]; post-Soviet: Zomboyashchik [Зомбоящик], Zombie [зомби] +  Yashchik [ящик; ‘box’] = “Zombie Box,” slang for a television).

[In this instance, the second part of the portmanteaus is from the word izdatel'stvo (издательство), which means ‘publishing house’ or ‘publisher.’ The portmanteau use was meant as a pun on the name of the official Soviet state publishing house, Gosudarstvennoye izdatel'stvo (Государственное издательство), known as Gosizdat (Госиздат).

[Sam (сам) is the Russian word for ‘self’ (samoubiystvo [самоубийство]: ‘suicide,’ literally ‘self-murder’), so samizdat is literally ‘self-publisher’ (as if there were publishing company with such a name) or, more colloquially, ‘self-published.’ Unfortunately, in the more comfortable English term, the wry pun is lost—but it probably wouldn’t really connect with an English speaker in any case.

[Tam (там) is Russian for ‘there’ (the opposite of tut (тут; ‘here’), so tamizdat (тамиздат) is literally ‘there-publisher’ or ‘over there-publisher’—meaning, of course, somewhere other than the USSR.  Again, we’d more likely say ‘published abroad.’

Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle [b. 1954; U.S. Ambassador to Russia: 2008-12].

With this collection, the story of the “significant intellectual effort of both Soviet creators and Western partners — the publishers and funders and whoever else, smugglers — it is all in one place,” said Alla Roylance, New York University’s Slavic studies librarian, who donated some of her own books to the Tamizdat Project. “That is incredibly relevant these days,” she added, as the Kremlin unleashes a new wave of censorship.

Page by page

Mr. Klots grew up with contraband Russian literature in the Soviet city of Perm, near the Ural Mountains. His mother, he said, “would take a train to Moscow just to stop by an apartment of one dissident who would give her Solzhenitsyn.” Then she would stay up late into the night duplicating the borrowed book, page by page.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident, best known for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Russian, 1962; English – censored, 1963; uncensored, 1991), August 1914 (Russian, 1971; English, 1972), and The Gulag Archipelago (Russian, 1973 by a Parisian publisher; English, 1974).]

“One of my childhood memories is my mother typing something at night and me falling asleep to the sound of the typewriter,” he said.

Countless Soviet households have similar stories of treasuring contraband literature — hiding “Doctor Zhivago” under a grandmother’s mattress, making a copy of the poet Anna Akhmatova’s masterpiece, “Requiem.”

[Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian and Soviet poet who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She is best known for Requiem, an elegy about the Stalinist terror (published in Russian in Munich in 1963 and in English in 1973).]

In the winter of 2022, Mr. Klots had just finished writing a book about the history of Cold War censorship [Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023)]. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the Kremlin began a crackdown on free expression at home at a scale unseen since the Soviet era. Russian officials targeted authors, arrested publishers and censored fan fiction websites. The police raided bookstores, and officials drew up lists of objectionable literature, requiring librarians to pull works by Vladimir Sorokin [Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright; b. 1955], Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Russian novelist and short story writer; b. 1943], Haruki Murakami [Japanese novelist, essayist, and short story writer; b. 1949], Truman Capote [American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright; 1924-84], Susan Sontag [American critic, essayist, and novelist; 1933-2004] and Danielle Steel [American romance novelist; b. 1947], among others.

“All of a sudden it became no longer history, but the present and reality again,” Mr. Klots said. “I just couldn’t stand in front of my students and only teach and only tell them about the peculiarities of Russian literature.”

[It’s also not confined to the former Soviet Union! On 6 February 2025, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, the Pentagon agency responsible for planning, directing, coordinating, and managing pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade educational programs), announced it would remove books related to “gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” from its schools. See “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025). 

[An order to remove certain books from service academy libraries was issued on 29 March 2025. The action was directed at the U.S. Naval Academy before being expanded to West Point (9 April) and the Air Force Academy (15/16 April).]

He founded the Tamizdat Project, through which he built the library, raised money to help students fleeing war and persecution, and archived oral histories of literary repression. When the Tamizdat Project announced it was publishing a book by an author critical of President Vladimir Putin [Linor Goralik, Exodus-22 | Исход-22; 2025], Russia branded the organization a “foreign agent.” Now, anyone in Russia who so much as shares the Tamizdat Project’s website without a disclaimer could be penalized.

Mr. Klots shrugged off the threat. The Tamizdat Project plans to publish five new titles this winter and spring. If history is any indication, he said, the impact of a tamizdat book could be like a stone thrown in a lake: “Wherever it falls, the waves get much bigger.”

A pure detective story

New York City is a fitting locale for the work of the Tamizdat Project. For most of the 20th century it was home to the publishers, academics, activists and philanthropists who saw the potential of contraband books during and even before the Cold War.

The first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union, “We” [Мы, romanized: My] — a dystopian vision of totalitarianism by Yevgeny Zamyatin [Russian author of science fiction, philosophy, literary criticism, and political satire; 1884-1937] — was published twice in New York before it could be released at home. Mr. Zamyatin managed to send his manuscript abroad, and E.P. Dutton released it, in English, in 1924. More than 60 years later, when Soviet authorities lifted the ban, some of the country’s citizens had already read it. Mr. Zamyatin’s Russian-language original had already been printed in 1952 by Chekhov Publishing House in New York.

“It was just a pure detective story, how every single book got published as tamizdat,” Mr. Klots said.

Chekhov Publishing House received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency through the Ford Foundation, writes the British journalist and historian Frances Stonor Saunders [British journalist and historian; b. 1966] in “The Cultural Cold War,” and was one of numerous literary ventures in the city supported by the agency. The C.I.A. also had a banned-book dissemination program, known for years as the International Literary Center, headquartered on Park Avenue. Under the stewardship of the exiled Romanian aristocrat George Minden [1921-2006], the organization ran a vast international book distribution network that smuggled some 10 million books and magazines into communist countries, often by mail and in diplomatic pouches.

At its height, the Cold War project of printing literature banned in — and very often destined for — communist countries explicitly involved more than a dozen New York publishing houses.

Government analysts described Cold War book distribution, probably one of the least expensive of the C.I.A.’s covert operations, as a “demonstrably effective” way of reaching the Soviet elite and influencing their attitudes “toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.”

Newly relevant

As the scope of Russian censorship has widened in recent years, the history of New York’s Soviet-era banned-book publishers has gained new relevance. “Even if these people are no longer around,” Mr. Klots said, they “laid the foundation for a project like the Tamizdat Project to exist and to build on their legacy.”

One of the Tamizdat Project’s most significant donations came from the family of Edward Kline [1932-2017], a philanthropist who led a double life in New York. Most knew him as the millionaire chief executive of the Kline Brothers department store chain, but the Soviet human rights movement knew him as a chief advocate and underwriter of its publishing work.

The Tamizdat Project has started to reveal the extent of Mr. Kline’s activities. Among his many endeavors, he acquired and revived Chekhov Publishing House, releasing what became canonical 20th-century Russian literature: original works by Nadezhda Mandelstam [Soviet writer, translator, educator, linguist, and memoirist; 1899-1980], Lydia Chukovskaya [Soviet and Russian writer, poet, editor, publicist, memoirist and dissident; 1907-96] and Joseph Brodsky [Russian and American poet and essayist; 1940-96].

Mr. Kline’s daughter, Carole Feuer [b. 1960], spoke with the Tamizdat Project about the years when Soviet exiles like Mr. Brodsky frequented her family’s Park Avenue apartment. During one visit, a leading dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexander Godunov [1949-95], defected to the United States in her living room [1979]. “He was somewhat cute,” she said, “and it was the day I was supposed to go to college.”

Several years earlier, Mr. Kline started Khronika Press with the Soviet dissidents Valery Chalidze [Soviet author, publisher, dissident, and human rights activist; 1938-2018] and later Pavel Litvinov [Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident; b. 1940]. Khronika produced a bimonthly magazine in Russian and English that regularly broke news of arrests and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union [A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (1973-82); Хроника защиты прав человека в СССР (Khronika zashchity prav cheloveka v SSSR)]. For a time it served as the main voice of the Soviet opposition.

Without Mr. Kline, his old collaborator Mr. Litvinov told the Tamizdat Project, Khronika Press “wouldn’t have existed.”

A growing movement

Today Mr. Klots is one of many in a growing community of Eastern European immigrants picking up where the Soviet human rights movement left off. A new group of Russian dissidents recently created a new Kronika in New York, this time backed by PEN America [nonprofit organization whose goal is to raise awareness for the protection of free expression in the United States and worldwide] and Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], with a more expansive mandate than its predecessors: to preserve independent media from places where journalists are persecuted, including Russia and Guatemala. It calls this work “digital resistance to state censorship.”

In Brooklyn, Anya Morlan-Stysis opened Kvartira [731 Washington Avenue], a nonprofit bookstore that caters to Eastern European exiles and their supporters. Against bright yellow walls and a wide array of children’s literature, Kvartira hosts talks with dissident authors and evenings for participants to write letters to political prisoners. It is the only brick-and-mortar shop listed in New York City as a vendor by the banned-book publisher Freedom Letters. (Last September Russia added the store’s website to a register of proscribed sites, citing unspecified “extremist information.”)

In 2024 Knopf published “Patriot,” the memoir of the late opposition leader Aleksei Navalny [1976-2024], which Russia has since outlawed for inciting “hatred and enmity” toward the government. Last summer Abrams [Books; U.S. publishing house] released an English translation of “Pioneer Summer” [by Ukrainian-Russian duo Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova], the gay teen romance that the Kremlin banned after it became a popular sensation. This represents only a small fraction of the global output of contraband titles, some 600 or 700 by Mr. Klots’s estimate, produced since 2023.

[The Pioneers (Пионеры) was a children’s communist organization in the USSR. Children joined in elementary school and remained until around the equivalent of our middle school/junior high; adolescents shifted over to other organizations.

[On the surface, the Pioneers resembled the Boy Scouts and other similar organizations, but along with the scouting activities, community projects like collecting scrap metal, and sports, the Pioneers also went through ideological indoctrination and military simulation games and basic military instruction.

[Membership was virtually mandatory as the Pioneers and the Pioneer Palaces were the only outlets for any kind of programs for children and youth. Inducements, such as preferential admission to universities and especially to the top schools, made membership attractive. Children who chose not to join were often marginalized by their peers as well as the party apparatus that controlled access to both amenities and necessities.]

“I can’t help thinking about what will actually remain from this new time of tamizdat that’s so exponentially growing today,” he said. “I can’t imagine anyone reading Solzhenitsyn as their bedtime reading, can you? But everyone was doing it not so long ago.”

The Tamizdat Project hopes to help a new generation rediscover such books. “It’s enough for a text to find itself elsewhere for it to become a new book,” Mr. Klots said.

[Here’s a list of past posts on the topic of censorship: 

•   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)

•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)

•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)

•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)

•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)

•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)

•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)

•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)

•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)

•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)

•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)

•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)

•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)

•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025)

•   “More on Censorship of School Theater” (12 December 2025)

[Sarah Chatta is an editorial assistant in the Opinion department of the New York Times.  In addition to her editorial work, she writes for the paper.  Before joining the Times in October 2024, Chatta held several diverse roles in journalism and education, including fact-checker at the New Yorker, where her writing and translations were also published; freelance editor for Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian newspaper published in Riga, Latvia; investigative story coordinator for the syndicated tabloid television newsmagazine Inside Edition; and international reporter for the Daily News in Sri Lanka and the Chilkat Valley News in Alaska.  Chatta studied Russian and creative writing at Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio), which informs much of her current reporting on Russian literary and cultural history.]

Steppenwolf Theatre Company

 

[Arguably, the theater capital of the United States is New York City; I doubt anyone would dispute that.  But the second spot on the rollcall of U.S. theater towns might be debatable.  My vote goes to Chicago, which probably has the oldest standing as an active and supportive city in the country as far as theatrical activity goes.  Chi Town is the most recognized city in the country by the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, with four theaters receiving the prestigious Regional Theatre Tony Award, awarded on the recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association. 

[Chicago’s institutional theater, the Goodman, named the number one regional theater in the U.S. by Time magazine, has made a significant national mark, having supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics and nurtured important new dramatic voices (24 plays since 1978; 25 Tonys, 24 Drama Desks, 4 Pulitzers).  The Goodman received the Regional Theatre Tony in 1992. 

[Among the many smaller theaters in the Windy City, however, is possibly one of the best-known troupes in the business: Steppenwolf.  Founded in 1974, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is justifiably nationally (and internationally) famous not only for the well-known actors who’ve come out of the ensemble—John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, and Gary Sinise, among several others, who have made contributions to film and television as well as the stage—but because of the often starlling and impressive work the company has created and then shared with the country.  Among Steppenwolf’s national honors are the Regional Theatre Tony in 1985 and the National Medal of Arts in 1998.

[My first contact with Steppenwolf was in Washington, D.C., when I was there during the summer of 1985 (see Rick On Theater’s “‘Stages in DC' (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011]) to write a survey of Washington theater for the New York City publication Stages (vol. 2, no. 3 – September 1985).  Kennedy Center artistic director Peter Sellars (b. 1957) had just launched his ill-fated American National Theater at the Kennedy Center, part of which was the presentation of productions from regional theaters. 

[The inaugural program was the Chicago Season, presenting productions from the Wisdom Bridge Theatre and Steppenwolf.  I saw Coyote Ugly by Lynn Siefert with Metcalf, directed by Malkovich (12 June-6 July 1985 in the Terrace Theater).  Neither artist was well known yet.  (Interested readers can check out my brief report on the performance, as well as the Wisdom Bridge piece I saw, in the above-referenced link.)

[The next Steppenwolf show I saw was 1990’s Broadway transfer of Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which he directed with a cast that included Gary Sinise, Lois Smith (probably the first time I saw her on stage; I’ve praised her work many times on this blog), and a huge cast that included many members of the Steppenwolf Ensemble.

[Then I saw Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow at the Barrow Street Theatre in Greenwich Village in April 2005.  It wasn’t a Steppenwolf production, but the play had originated at that Chicago theater in 2000.  Pendelton’s a member of the ensemble, and so were many of the cast (including Tracy Letts, when he was still an actor; his name will come up again as the Pulitzer Prize-, Tony Award-, and Drama Desk Award-winning playwright of August: Osage County).  I’ve reported on Orson’s Shadow in “Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives” (16 April 2020).

[In June 2009, I caught Letts's multiple award-winning play, August: Osage County, at the Music Box on Broadway, where the play had moved from the Imperial in April ’08.  (It opened there on 4 December 2007 and ran for 18 previews and 648 regular performances.  Its run in Chicago was 28 June to 26 August 2007.)  Some of the cast was still from the original Chicago company, but I caught Phylicia Rashad (not an ensemble member) a little more than a month after she took over the part of Violet Weston, the family matriarch. 

[(At the performance I saw, the Weston patriarch (who disappears at the beginning of AOC) was played by John Cullum.  In an unusual bit of New York casting, Cullum was also performing Off-Broadway on Theatre Row—a half mile west and south from the Music Box—in Heroes.  For this reason, the curtain for the French comedy, which I’d seen about three months before AOC was at 8:30 p.m.; I had seen the actor arriving at 8:05 while I waited in the Clurman Theatre's small lobby and wondered why he was cutting it so close,)

[Over the years, I’ve seen many Steppenwolf actors and the work of Steppenwolf directors—not to mention several plays by writers who were or became Steppenwolf playwrights—but AOC was the last Steppenwolf production I’ve seen to date. (I’ve been to Chicago several times and seen some theater while I was there, but I’ve never seen anything on Steppenwolf’s home stage.)] 

“INSIDE CHICAGO’S INNOVATIVE
STEPPENWOLF THEATRE COMPANY
AS IT MARKS 50 YEARS”
by Jeffrey Brown and Ryan Connelly Holmes 

[This transcript is from PBS News Hour of 9 April 2026 in recognition of the troupe’s 50th season.  The Steppenwolf Theatre Company produced its first full season of plays in 1976, hence the discrepancy suggested by its founding date two years earlier.

[The troupe’s name comes from the novel Steppenwolf (German, 1927; English, 1929) by Hermann Hesse (German; 1877-1962), which original member Rick Argosh was reading at the time of the theater’s inaugural production in 1974.]

Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies. It’s known for the actors it has launched and the groundbreaking work it has produced. It’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters. Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz[, Co-Anchor, “PBS News Hour”]: Steppenwolf Theatre Company has long been one of the nation’s most influential ensemble companies, known for the actors it’s launched and the groundbreaking work it’s produced. Now it’s marking its 50th season at a moment of real uncertainty for theaters across the country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown traveled to Chicago for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actress [Kathryn Erbe (in a scene from a play)]: Think if I had stayed in the theater.

Jeffrey Brown: A production of “Dance of Death” [1900], a play by August Strindberg [Swedish; 1849-1912] being presented in a modern adaptation. [Adapted by Conor McPherson; directed by Yasen Peyankov; 29 January-22 March 2026; Downstairs Theater.]

Actor [Jeff Perry (in a scene from a play)]: And growing old, it’s horrible, but it is interesting, I’d imagine.

Jeffrey Brown: For actor Jeff Perry [a founding member], it’s yet another opportunity to do his thing now 50 years on at the theater company he helped create.

Jeff Perry, Co-Founder, Steppenwolf Theatre Company: It feels like wishes fulfilled.

Jeffrey Brown: It does.

Jeff Perry: Yes. A place built of artists, by artists and for artists is an exceedingly rare experiment.

Jeffrey Brown: Rare to start, rarer still to last. Steppenwolf Theatre’s roots go back to the early 1970s, a group of teenage friends in a Chicago area high school, then at Illinois State University [Normal, Illinois], and then a do-it-yourself theater company co-founded by Perry, Terry Kinney, and Gary Sinise, putting on shows in a church basement in Chicago.

Jeff Perry: Here’s what we thought simultaneously I think is the truth [sic]. We’re going to change the face of American theater. And we will probably fall apart within – within a month or two.

John Malkovich, Actor [in a video clip]: You tell him that I got a couple projects he might be interested in.

Jeffrey Brown: It would become an important incubator of American theater, actors, including John Malkovich, here with Sinise in a groundbreaking 1984 production of Sam Shepard’s “True West.”

[The statement above is incorrect, or at least misleading. The stage production of True West at Steppenwolf was in 1982; it opened at the company’s then-home theater, the Jane Addams Hull House, on 31 March. It transferred to the Apollo Theatre in Chicago for a commercial run, and then to New York City’s Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, where it ran from 17 October 1982 to 4 August 1984 (762 performances).

[This was the first Steppenwolf production to go to New York. Malkovich won several acting awards and Sinise won an Obie for his directing.

[The production proved so popular that it was recorded and aired on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse on 31 January 1984. (It was probably from that recording that the clip seen on the News Hour broadcast was excerpted, and why the year 1984 was attached.)]

Gary Sinise, Actor [film clip]: I never thanked you for saving my life.

Jeffrey Brown: Sinise himself would become best known as Lieutenant Dan in the 1994 film “Forrest Gump.”

Laurie Metcalf, well-known for her time on the hit series “Roseanne,” Joan Allen, Amy Morton, Martha Plimpton, more recently Carrie Coon [wife of Tracy Letts], playwrights including Tracy Letts, whose “August: Osage County” won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, and Rajiv Joseph and Tarell Alvin McCraney.

[I wrote about Metcalf in Lucas Hnath’s Ibsen sequel, A Doll’s House, Part 2, on Rick On Theater on 22 July 2017. My report on the Broadway transfer of Letts’s August: Osage County was posted on this blog on 30 June 2009. I reported on Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on 11 June 2011 and Gruesome Playground Injuries on 23 February 2011.

[There’s an article on Tarell Alvin McCraney by Carvell Wallace from the New York Times Magazine, “Connoisseur of Grief,” reposted on 4 February 2019 and an interview with the young playwright from American Theatre in “Interviews with Two Theater Pros,” posted on 4 October 2018. I also wrote about a Washington, D.C., production of McCraney’s Choir Boy on 24 January 2015.]

All of them and more, along with several directors, are to this day ensemble members of Steppenwolf, meaning they work together in different shows over many years.

Tracy Letts, Playwright: It sounds different every time you do it.

Jeffrey Brown: And whatever else they do in theater, TV, or film, they can and do come back to work at Steppenwolf.

In 2016, as he rehearsed a new play written for his Steppenwolf colleagues, Letts told me that the freedom and sense of security that comes with the ensemble approach is priceless.

Tracy Letts: I can afford to take chances. I can afford to make a fool of myself.

Jeffrey Brown: And they will keep you around anyway.

Tracy Letts: They will keep me around anyway, and they will tell me. They will tell me to my face, you didn’t get this right.

[This was probably Mary Page Marlowe, which premièred at Steppenwolf in April 2016. It also came to New York and opened 12 July 2018 at the Second Stage Theater. The play closed on 19 August after an extension of its scheduled run.]

Jeffrey Brown: Success can be counted in many ways, including the number of shows, 18, that have transferred to Broadway over the years, winning 14 Tony Awards.

Actress [Kara Young (as Aziza in the Broadway production of “Purpose”)]: You said your daddy was some sort of reverend, but not like this kind of reverend.

Jeffrey Brown: Among them, “Purpose,” a Steppenwolf commission, which also won a 2025 Pulitzer for playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He told me then what it meant to work directly with the theater company.

[The play ran in Chicago from 14 March-28 April 2024. It opened at the Hayes Theater on Broadway on 17 March 2025 with a largely new cast, and closed on 31 August, after 22 previews and 192 regular performances. It won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Tony for Best Play, another Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Kara Young, and 2025 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play for Young.]

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Playwright: I’m designing the game board for these incredible artists to every night find a new way through the story that might ping differently, create different emotions. Everything in this play was sort of inspired by the acting ensemble that emerged from it.

[I wrote up Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate on ROT on 31 March 2014 and Everybody on 6 March 2017.]

Glenn Davis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre [in a scene from “Purpose”]: You can’t be sneaking up on a man like that when he’s fresh out.

Jeffrey Brown: Among the “Purpose” cast, Glenn Davis, who now has an even more daunting offstage role, serving with fellow ensemble member, director and actor, Audrey Francis, as Steppenwolf’s co-artistic directors [since 2021].

Glenn Davis: Fifty years is a long time to keep a group of 17-year-olds together and still performing together and still liking each other and enjoying being in a room together. So that’s an accomplishment.

Jeffrey Brown: And then getting new generations of 17-year-olds.

Glenn Davis: Yes.

Audrey Francis, Co-Artistic Director, Steppenwolf Theatre: Yes.

Glenn Davis: And then adding new folks.

Audrey Francis: I think that when Glenn and I took the role on, it was really as we were coming out of the pandemic. Why would anyone take on a leadership role of a nonprofit arts organization, in particular live theater, at that time?

Jeffrey Brown: The answer, to keep a place that has nourished them and several previous generations alive and thriving.

But Francis and Davis, who both in a sense grew up as theater professionals here, face a host of challenges. Steppenwolf in recent years greatly expanded its theater and public areas, more space to use, but also to fill. And it’s not immune from the societal and other changes now roiling American theater generally.

Glenn Davis: The structural mechanics of doing theater today are very difficult. We used to do twice as many shows as we do now. So being able to employ the same number of artists becomes more difficult because you don’t have as many shows, you don’t have as many roles.

Those difficulties are all over the place. So we try as best we can to manage those and move through them as seamlessly as we can.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also the reality of American politics today. Chicago has been one center of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. Davis and Francis say the theater’s core values and programming won’t change.

[The Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of Operation Midway Blitz on 8 September 2025, the start of a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents onto the streets of Chicago. (Reports indicate that enforcement activities began as early as 6 September.) The initial surge occurred from September to November 2025, with thousands of arrests.

[After a brief increase in activity, the visible presence of large numbers of federal agents decreased during the winter months. DHS officials have maintained that “they aren’t leaving Chicago” and recent reports as of late March 2026 indicate that agents continue to carry out hundreds of monthly arrests in the Chicago area.]

Audrey Francis: I don’t feel necessarily a pressure to program something that is commenting on something that’s happening right now because everything is happening so fast. What I do feel is an obligation to our city to make sure that we’re providing a place that is thoughtful, intentional, can be fun, can be challenging.

Jeff Perry [walking down a hallway lined with production posters]: They all, every one of these bring up memories.

Jeffrey Brown: And so, 50 years on, Jeff Perry and his colleagues are still at it.

Jeff Perry: It’s almost entirely a nomadic profession. This held the promise at least of an ongoing family of choice. And it proved as the years went on how it really is that.

Jeffrey Brown: For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.

[In his more than 30-year career with the News Hour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.  As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists.  

[Among his signature works at the News Hour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the News Hour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Ryan Connelly Holmes is a producer and reporter for PBS News Hour.  Based in the Chicago area, he produces segments and digital content covering a wide range of national and international topics. He joined News Hour in October 2016.

[A note about this repost of the transcript: if you had cause to compare this post with the online transcript, you may have noticed a few small differences.  That's due to the notice PBS includes with the text: "Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy.  They may contain errors."  Well, this one did, and when I compared what was posted with what the audio actually said, there were discrepancies, which I reconciled.]

Career Prep for the Arts, Part 3

 

[This is the third and final installment of the “Career Prep for the Arts” series on Rick On Theater.  Parts 1 and 2 were posted on Thursday. 2 April and Sunday, 5 April, respectively; I invite you to read them if you haven’t already. 

[Part 3 consists of two more articles from the teaching issues of American Theatre magazine.  The first one, from 2026, is about the changes in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., since Donald Trump has assumed control—in particular, the effect his leadership has had on the educational and children’s programs at the Center and the consequences of those alterations,

[The second article, from 2025, is about the changes occurring in graduate academic programs across the country due to funding issues and shifts in the various administrations’ visions for post-graduate theater training and education.] 

“WHAT’S LEFT STANDING OF
KENNEDY CENTER EDUCATION AND TYA?”
by Daniella Ignacio 

[I’ve included the article below, posted on the American Theatre website on 9 February 2026, in my mini-series on “Career Prep for the Arts” because it reports on aspects of that topic even though it’s not part of either the 2025 “Teaching Issue” of the magazine or the 2026 “Learning Curves” issue.

[Under Roger L. Stevens (1910-98; theatrical producer, arts administrator, and real estate executive), the founding Chairman of both the National Endowment for the Arts (1965-69) and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (1961-88), the Center established a number of projects and offices concerned with the education of leaders in the arts, including theater and the performing arts, in the United States (see, for example, “Michael Kaiser: Man of the Arts” [21 December 2016]) and “A Master’s List” by Sofía Barrell in “Arts Administration, Article 6” (14 December 2020).]

The Center’s roles as an incubator of new work for young audiences, and as a generous host for the American College Theater Festival, will be hard to fill.

Among my community of D.C. artists, something that has always inspired me is our ability to place art and joy directly next to anger. That is life here. Our latest source of the fire: Come July 4, according to President Trump, the Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations for two years. In a gesture that coincides with America’s semiquincentennial, or 250th birthday, the president announced on Sunday, Feb. 1 via a TruthSocial post his plans to close the Center for about two years for unspecified construction (though it had an expansion and renovation as recently as 2019 [see “The Kennedy Center Expands” (5 December 2014) and “‘With Newly Expanded Campus, Kennedy Center Aims to Make Art an Experience for All’” by Jeffrey Brown (8 September 2019)]). This move comes after cancellations and internal discord since Trump’s takeover of the Center last year, including his rebranding of the building in his name.

[Donald Trump (b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; inaugurated as 47th President in 2025) was elected chair of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees on 12 February 2026, after Trump had dismissed the appointed board members and replaced them with his own. In May 2026, the board changed its rules regarding eligibility to vote, eliminating the ex officio trustees and permitting only Trump appointees to vote.

[This led the way for a long list of changes (including some that were unintentional, like cancellations of scheduled performances and appearances. On 18 December, the voting trustees authorized the change of the Center’s name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. On 1 February 2026, Trump announced that the Center would close on 4 July for two years of renovations.]

If the board approves the closure, it will be a disaster not only for the National Symphony Orchestra, which offers an average of 150 concerts a year at the Center, and for a slate of theatre, dance, and music tours, but also for the Center’s day-to-day staff and programs that employ local and national artists, including Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences (TYA), which has developed and produced more than 120 unique productions since 1986. 

Kennedy Center TYA’s staff had already downsized, with all its full-time leaders departing in October 2025, including David Kilpatrick, who’s now at Folger Theatre [founded in 1992; not to be confused with the former Folger Theatre Group, formed in 1970, which eventually became Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company], Maribeth Weatherford, now at Signature Theatre [an Arlington, Virginia, company, founded in 1989, that is unrelated to New York City’s Signature Theatre Company, founded in 1991], and Michelle Kozlak. The remaining staff are part-timers. The Center’s education department relies on Department of Education funding for $7 or $8 million out of its $13 million budget, as well as philanthropic and education grants. With that largesse, they managed to reach two million educators, administrators, and students across the U.S., Puerto Rico, and 12 additional countries in one year alone, according to a 2023 annual report.

If the program was already on life support even before the latest announcement, now the question is, what will happen to TYA shows that were scheduled to be developed at the Center during the planned two-year closure? One former staff member who spoke to American Theatre on background confirmed that, based on their knowledge of the contracts, artists might be able to take their shows elsewhere. But where? KCTYA was one of the only TYA companies in the U.S.—and the only one in the D.C. area—that solely produced new works, from commission to premiere to tours to national licensing, and its loss creates “a big void,” said the former staffer, who wondered what other sizable new-work incubator space could possibly take KCTYA’s place.

Of this year’s programming, a Seattle Children’s Theatre co-commission of Keiko Green’s Young Dragon already withdrew its Center run to focus on its Seattle premiere [12-29 March 2026]. Fishing for Stars, a theatre for the very young production by a collective that includes Megan Alrutz, Claire Derriennic, S. Elliot, Renita James, and Xinyue Zhang, comes up as a 404 on the website; another former staffer confirmed that the show, originally announced for a March run, won’t be happening at Kennedy Center. The same goes for a previously scheduled repeat tour of Sesame Street the Musical, which played the Center in summer 2025, as well as Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock. According to an interviewee on background, no budget is currently allotted for next season in TYA, and next year’s season “doesn’t exist.” A former staffer guessed that the focus would have been on bringing in groups or pre-existing scripts, prior to the closure announcement. 

There is one more TYA show scheduled to go up before the July closure, which one former Center staffer called “one of the most creative scripts I have read in a long time”: the world premiere of The Sea Beyond the Ocean by playwright Doug Robinson, who was raised in northern Virginia and is now based between D.C. and New York. Set to run Feb. 28-March 15 [2026; it did], it follows a boy who searches for the missing ending to his favorite unfinished book. Featuring an all-Black cast, it is a Black fantasy in a register akin to Octavia Butler [1947-2006; African-American science fiction and speculative fiction writer] that “allows for the possibility of something different” and “invites people to imagine a better world,” said dramaturg Gabrielle Hoyt.

Robinson said he wanted to write a play for his father, who read books to him over the phone when he went on business trips. It’s “a play for kids who like to read, who find that reading is the safest place for them to be,” Robinson said. “Working through imagination is a way to build the end of the story you want to have. Imagination is the key to seeing a future that has never wanted you there, right? So it’s a play that says a child’s imagination can create a whole world where the characters come out, they tell stories, they learn, and they move forward. They’re not static. They’re not like, ‘We had an adventure, and now we’re going home.’ The world is changed by the imagination. That matters.”

Robinson first pitched Ocean when former staffer Sean-Maurice Lynch introduced him to the KCTYA team. Since being commissioned in late 2023, Ocean received two Kennedy Center workshops: one with Ashleigh King, and another with KenYatta Rogers, who directs the world premiere. Over the years, what has deepened and grown the most is Robinson’s understanding of what endings mean to a child. As Hoyt put it, “It’s become a really moving discussion of how to talk to kids about endings.”

One real-life ending: the exit of Kennedy Center TYA staff. When Michelle Kozlak departed, Robinson said, she called him personally; his play was what kept her there for as long as she could stay. Conversations about who would take over her work were had. “Not gonna lie, it was scary to have that transition,” said Robinson. “But I have never felt those fears come to reality. I have never, for one second, felt a lack of intentionality or support from Kennedy Center TYA.”  

For now, the company is in rehearsals, and the room has been an “intentionally and actively joyous” place, Robinson said. For the actors, staying focused on the art is important. Many were reluctant to speak for this article prior to opening out of fear that the administration would retaliate against the show. Said Robinson, “Simply put: the Kennedy Center commissioned me to write a play, and they’ve paid me all my money before the first rehearsal. I can pull the play and I’m not missing a dollar. It’s not about that. It’s about what we as a group want to do.” 

He recalled a conversation with the company on the first day in which they spoke about their feelings and why they were choosing to stay. “That was heartbreaking, hearing the individual inner life that people had to contend with,” Robinson said. “But they all still came to the conclusion that telling this story in what is historically known as Chocolate City, to kids, in a time where people think representation is only in service of some DEI language . . . How could we not?”

The joy they’re finding, Robinson said, is also in direct relationship to a kind of resilient protest. “Do we stand up for our home? Do we stand up for a place that I went to as a child wearing ill-fitting dress shoes with my mother?” Robinson said, recalling his first visits to the Kennedy Center. “If, and I hope this is not true, if the last new work produced by Kennedy Center TYA is The Sea Beyond the Ocean, I am grateful that the last group on that stage is a group of homegrown actors, homegrown designers, and homegrown storytellers. Because, the Kennedy Center is, yes, a symbol, but it’s also a local theatre.”

On the day that it was announced that Center would be closing for two years, Hoyt said, the staff spent the day making sure that the company was getting paid in a timely fashion. “They were responding to emails of mine within 5-10 minutes, about my direct deposit details, when they didn’t know if they had jobs anymore,” Hoyt said. “What they were doing was making sure that the contractors and artists in their building were being, like, financially, taken care of and safe. It was wild. I do not know if I would have had the fortitude to do that that day, but they did.”

“It really has become an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Robinson said. “Everyone is stepping up in ways that both I appreciate and also wish that they didn’t have to. It is a both-and situation, right? It is brilliance in the face of difficulty—not that difficulty has made the place weaker, if that makes sense. The building is the people. The storm can rage around them and they’re saying, how do we keep as many people safe as possible? How do we ensure that this is not a place of more chaos, but the eye of the storm? That this place can be calm and still, and we are going to make it through?” 

Hoyt agreed: “The D.C. arts community has lost a lot of funding. Institutions have closed. Institutions are going to keep closing. For me, I did not want to cause more loss, just because I would feel a certain way going into a certain building. Doug’s play is beautiful, and kids and families should get to see it if they feel that they can go there.”

Another KC program for young people had already left the building: Last Dec. 22, American College Theater Festival (ACTF) suspended its affiliation with the Kennedy Center after 58 years of partnership with the Kennedy Center. KCACTF was the oldest program at the Kennedy Center (indeed it predates the Center’s official opening, in 1971). In a Facebook post, ACTF shared that “our affiliation with the Kennedy Center is no longer viable . . . We want to assure you that this change does not mark an end—but a new chapter . . . ACTF will continue to serve as a ghostlight—a beacon of joy, a sanctuary for all, and a place where every artist feels seen, safe, welcomed, celebrated, and beloved.”

[For those who’re not of the theater and don’t know what a “ghost light” (or “ghostlight”) is, see “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020).]

According to Kelsey Mesa, who has managed the national program with Gregg Henry for nearly a decade, ACTF held an emergency meeting the day after the “Trump Kennedy Center” name change announcement at which the national board voted overwhelmingly to separate immediately because “there was no way to move forward.” They had already cut Kennedy Center-run intensives for 2025 and 2026, after being told to cut $1 million with four months to go in the Education department’s fiscal year, and the intensives were the only budgeted item left. 

[The Kennedy Center offered various training intensives for young artists, though recent reports indicate potential significant changes or closures to these programs for the 2025-2026 seasons. Historically, these intensives have provided specialized, high-caliber training across a number of artistic disciplines.

[Intensives are high-speed, immersive training programs designed to make significant progress in a short amount of time. Unlike a standard weekly class or a one-off workshop, an intensive typically involves all-day training over the course of several days or weeks.

[The instruction by established professionals is usually highly specialized to hone technical skills and artistry, offering networking and mentorship opportunities. Many intensives require students to live on-site to fully immerse themselves in the professional lifestyle.

[At the Kennedy Center, these programs acted as career-development tracks for young artists, moving them beyond basic classroom learning into the essence of their chosen field. They were geared toward pre-professional students or emerging artists looking for a "gateway" into professional companies.]

One silver lining: The KCACTF National Committee and its regional conferences have operated under a separate nonprofit organization, ACTF Management, Ltd., so ACTF can continue in a different form outside of the Kennedy Center. Its regional conferences, run entirely by volunteers who work at universities and have their own artistic careers, continue to thrive, with four for 2026 already under their belt. 

The national festival presents a steeper challenge. Finding a space isn’t the issue; the biggest costs are travel, accommodations, and continued learning opportunities, which were covered by the Kennedy Center. ACTF had already planned to hold the national festival in Minneapolis, with Twin Cities theatres like Children’s Theatre Company, the Guthrie, Mixed Blood, and the Playwrights Center offering space, keynote artists, hotel recommendations, and more. But their split from the Kennedy Center means that the ACTF nonprofit doesn’t have enough funds and so will not host a national festival this year. (The decision was made before the recent ICE takeover of Minneapolis.) Also at risk in the shuffle: an ACTF fellowship that allowed budding theatre journalists to attend the O’Neill Critics Institute.

[The National Critics Institute (frequently referred to as the O’Neill Critics Institute) is a two-week intensive workshop for arts writers and critics held at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It’s designed as a “boot camp” in which mid-career professionals and emerging voices hone their skills through rigorous writing assignments, mentorship from veteran critics, and immersion in the O’Neill’s National Playwrights and Music Theater conferences. Through the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, top student critics from across the U.S. have been able till now to win a fully funded spot at the summer institute.]

In the future, said Mesa, we may see “a version of ACTF that omits the national festival but gives young people opportunities to bridge their careers.” It also may be possible to partner with other organizations to host the festival, but the price of putting it all together can run to half a million dollars, a big cost that is not always evident to potential hosts, Mesa explained.

Students are still showing up for local ACTF gatherings. In attending Region 1 [New England states] and 2 [Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania] this past January, Mesa said that one play that particularly touched her, during the National Playwriting Program’s 10-minute play event, was Plums by Sarah Galante, an MFA candidate at NYU. Mesa called it an “intense, grey-area, loving” conversation between two lesbian mothers whose 6-year-old daughter comes home with bruises on her arm, spurring questions about harm and protection. It was a quintessential ACTF moment: A Region 1 co-chair of the National Playwriting Program, Cassie Seinuk, had won the national 10-minute play award at KCACTF in 2015 with her play Occupy Hallmark, which was also Mesa’s first experience with KCACTF, in a reading she directed for the National Festival.

As ACTF still hopes to provide opportunities for community colleges, small arts colleges, and MFAs alike, they are actively accepting donations to stay afloat and sustain national opportunities. “This work is for students who do not come with privilege, and gives them the chance to be theatre artists,” Mesa said. “I want the field to step up for it.” 

Calls to action within the D.C. theatre community have been swift. In a statement, TheatreWashington executive director Amy Austin said the Center’s closure “will have widespread ramifications for the D.C.-area performing arts community and everyone who benefits from a culturally vibrant region.” The service organization urged folks to donate to its Taking Care Fund, which supports D.C. arts workers through tough times, and encouraged displaced arts workers to use the fund.

[From “The Story of Theatre Washington”: 

In the early 1980s, the Washington Theatre Awards Society was founded to recognize and encourage excellence in professional theatre in the Washington, DC region through the presentation of The Helen Hayes Awards,

. . . .

In 2011, with the encouragement of a wide range of stakeholders, a stronger and more robust organization evolved – theatreWashington (one word, lower case t, capital W). It was a call to evolve from an Awards presenter to a more layered organization to serve the community. Presently, working in tandem with the community, Theatre Washington (two words, capital T, capital W) is evolving into a full partnership organization in service to the community with multiple year-round, core programs.

[“Theatre Washington is an alliance of theatre organizations, theatre-makers, and theatre supporters that promotes and nurtures a creative, equitable, healthy, and diverse regional theatre community.”]

Last Tuesday, Kennedy Center Arts Workers United, representing Actors[’] Equity, SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the union that represents theatrical directors and choreographers], IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents stagehands, technicians, artisans, and craftspeople in TV, film, and stage], and more, spoke out. “A pause in Kennedy Center operations without due regard for those who work there would be harmful for the arts and creative workers in America,” the union said in a statement. “Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law. We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause.”

Hoyt, who lived in D.C. for five years as literary manager for Round House Theatre [Bethesda, Maryland], reiterated the respect that she has “for every artist who was supposed to come through Kennedy Center this year, who did come through Kennedy Center this year, or who did not come through Kennedy Center this year. Saying no is an act of profound bravery, and it’s really necessary. That we made a different choice, I think, does not negate theirs, and does not imply that theirs was wrong, or invalid, or created harm of any kind. The theatre community has to have solidarity right now. We have such respect for a lot of amazing artists who are faced with terrible choices. There are no good choices. This is a bad situation.”

It’s also true, she noted, that the DMV area [a local appellation for the “District (of Columbia), Maryland, Virginia.”]  “is a great place to be a kid who loves theatre,” citing education programs and productions at Imagination Stage [Bethesda], Round House Theatre, Adventure Theatre MTC [DC], Theatre Lab [DC], Educational Theatre Company [Arlington], Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, and many more. “It is hard for me to imagine that the Kennedy Center’s ability to serve young people is going to end this year,” Hoyt said. “I just, I don’t—that cannot be, under my personal cosmology.”

[Daniella Ignacio, a writer, theater artist, and musician based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing editor of American Theatre magazine.

[Ignacio’s report on the effects on the D.C. area of the changes being wrought at the Kennedy Center is very personal to me.  I was born in Washington and have often admitted to being something of a Washington chauvinist.  Even though I haven’t lived there since I went away for high school in 1961, my parents lived there almost their entire married lives (the exception being a five-year period when my dad was a Foreign Service Officer abroad). 

[I returned to D.C. frequently for the rest of their lives and, since they were theater-lovers, one of our frequent activities was going to the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, Arena Stage, and many of the small houses that arose in the area after 1980.  I watched Washington grow from an almost theater desert in the ’50s and ’60s into a thriving and vibrant theater town.  (I wrote a little about this in “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011] and “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction” [26 November 2011].)

[The Kennedy Center wasn’t even there until 1971 (I was out of the country in the army when it opened and didn’t get back to Washington until 1974), but the change it effected on the D.C. area’s theater was remarkable.  Within 10 years, our own little “Off-Broadway” burgeoned.  My parents and I were in hog-heaven.  To see it in jeopardy now because somebody’s sticking a monkey wrench into the works disheartens me—and makes me angry.]

*  *  *  *
“DEGREES IN THE SHADE?”
by KJ Sanchez

[This article appeared in American Theatre’s annual training issue, “Learning Curves” (Winter 2026 – volume 42, number 3); it was posted on the AT website on 16 February 2026.]

With some MFA theatre programs closing and others opening, an educator talks to colleagues about the state of the academy.

I never thought I would be a professor. And I never imagined I would live in Texas. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and—well, we New Mexicans had some opinions about the Texans who came to ski our mountains.

For 25 years I lived in New York. I ran American Records (my theatre company), wrote plays, and directed across the country. In 2015 I was invited to Austin to be a guest respondent for student productions at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The works were part of the Cohen New Works Festival, a biannual week-long festival where audiences can see up to 40 productions, tucked into every nook and cranny of the Theatre and Dance building, featuring work created, curated, and produced by students. On my first visit to UT Austin, I moved from show to show, gob-smacked—how had I never known about this magical land where the students were on fire and the teachers seemed to truly like each other?

Playwriting professors Steven Dietz [b. 1958; playwright, theater director, and teacher] and Kirk Lynn took me for a cup of coffee and asked if I’d be interested in spending a semester in Austin as a guest instructor. That semester turned into a teaching gig—and now here I am a professor, and I lead the school’s MFA in Directing program.

Yesterday was a fairly typical day for me: My first class was at 9 a.m. It’s called Spectacle as a Political Tool. Two graduate directors and I teach 60 undergraduates (most in their first year) from colleges across the UT campus about how spectacle has historically informed self-governance. After that, I had meetings with grad students to talk about the classes they’ll take next semester: One will take a sound design class, another is excited about a choreography course offered by our dance program.

In the afternoon I joined the graduate designers in their studio class to discuss the art of iteration. That evening I sat in on techs: a three-person all-femme adaptation of Macbeth [27 October-2 November 2025] and an all-the-bells-and-whistles-we-can-muster staging of Cabaret [30 October-9 November 2025].

A long day. But a wonderful day. Because I am feeling extremely grateful to have this job. Even though I never thought I would be what Kirk Lynn calls an “indoor cat,” every day I understand more deeply what the academy can offer . . . and every day I worry about what might happen to any one of similar graduate programs across the country.

I don’t think I’m alone in that when I hear of another MFA program closing or pausing, I fear a trend. Social media postings give us anecdotal information about these closures, but I am cautious about generalizations without comprehensive data about how many programs have closed versus how many have been created within a certain time frame. Perhaps this “wait until complete data is in” approach is simply an attempt to remain stubbornly optimistic. (Quite likely.)

That said, I reached out recently to two educators in the midst of great change: Luis Alfaro [b. 1961; Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist], associate professor of Dramatic Writing and director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing program at the University of Southern California (USC [Los Angeles]), and Seth Gordon, professor of Directing and Theatre Management at the University of Oklahoma (OU [Norman]). Maestro Alfaro posted recently that his beloved MFA program, which has been in existence for more than 30 years, will be “sunsetted” after this school year is done. Meanwhile, Gordon plans to reopen an MFA in Directing program at OU, which shuttered about 20 years ago.

The first takeaway I gleaned from conversations with both Alfaro and Gordon is that none of the three of us think graduate school is the only way to advance a playwriting or directing practice, nor do we think graduate school is for everyone. A perfect example is Alfaro himself, a MacArthur Fellow who is in a very special group of educators who have received tenure due to extraordinary commensurate experience. Not only did Alfaro never get an MFA himself—he never went to college.

“I went straight into the field in the ’80s,” he recalled. After studying with playwright María Irene Fornés [Cuban-born American; 1930-2018], Alfaro worked as a poet and performance artist. “The weird thing about being at USC,” Alfaro told me, “is I was raised in abject poverty in one of the poorest, most violent neighborhoods of L.A., which is where USC is.”

How did he get from there to here? “I’m a child of the apprenticeships, the internships, the fellowships, all of that,” he said. “I wrote a ton of letters to people, and said, ‘Hey, I love your work and I would love to meet you.’”

One of those meetings was with Mark Russell [b. 1955; experimental theater producer/curator/”programmer” (his word)], who ran New York City’s P.S. 122 (and would later run the Under the Radar Festival), and who steered Alfaro to such spaces as DiverseWorks in Houston, Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, and Guadalupe Arts in San Antonio, Texas. “I went everywhere, right?” Alfaro recalled. “Instead of going to New York, I got to go around the country. And that circuit was full of amazing people.”

One of Alfaro’s favorite spaces was Boston’s The Theater Offensive, where artistic director Abe Rybeck [b. ca. 1956] would “pair me up on these double bills with these veteran artists that were extraordinary.”

As I listened to Alfaro describe his on-the-job training and apprenticeships, it dawned on me: The days of a broke emerging artist being able to afford to travel the country and learn from veteran artists are gone. The cost of living has made it essentially impossible. This is where some graduate programs are taking up the slack. Yes, graduate schools are cost-prohibitive for far too many, but where an artist like Alfaro once moved from city to city seeking mentorship, we now bring the elders and leaders of the field to our graduate programs to meet our students, to offer workshops, feedback, and mentorships. An additional benefit of this new model is that our guest mentors see the work of and also interact with our undergraduate student body. What once served one emerging artist at a time is now serving many.

Alfaro and his colleagues were told by USC leadership that the reason the MFA program was closing was due to a pivot to a “revenue-based model.” This news was particularly surprising, given that USC made their Acting and Dramatic Writing programs tuition-free starting in the 2024-25 school year. I asked Gordon about this: How would he respond if OU mandated that he create a program centered on revenue?

“We are a Research 1 University, as are you,” Gordon said. “So the fact that we will have the kind of impact on the field that I hope we’ll have is what we’re all about. I am assuming that if I am ever told we are switching to a revenue-based model, the subtext of that is, ‘We’re not an R1.’” The philosophy that guides both of our programs, as Gordon put it, is about “how we are going to contribute to our field: by providing it with the people that the field needs to lead it responsibly into its next chapter.”

Alfaro has trained many such leaders, with students going on to become the next generation of writers in live performance, TV, and film. He said he tailors each student’s program of study to best prepare them to lead in their own unique way. “I can see what each one means in the field,” he said. 

Because USC has been accepting two writers on average per year, Alfaro explained, “You can diagnose and build a program for them. ‘What do you need?’ What we’re doing is spending time to figure out how to find them the right mentors, to connect with the right people. Then every year, there’s one that’s sort of extraordinary, and you have to build something special for that one student. That’s what graduate school can do.”

That may sound shocking. In fact, one rationale Alfaro was given for the program’s end was that this model—of many instructors hired to serve a very small number of students’ needs—is financially untenable. The fuller picture, though, is that Alfaro and his colleagues teach and mentor all across campus.

“I teach undergraduate courses, I teach in acting, I teach in critical studies,” he said. “Right now, I’m teaching a Latinx course—packed—and I’m teaching the Playwriting 1 undergrad. So I’m teaching courses that are not in my MFA program, but that bring a lot of money into the program.”

Not only are we faculty teaching across degrees and areas of specialization, so are our graduate students, who teach many of the introductory courses that bring in large numbers of students. Another common part of our work as graduate faculty is to bring our research into STEM spaces. Here at UT Austin, I watch in awe as my colleague, associate professor Kathryn Dawson, area head of the Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities program, has been leading a cohort of theatre and dance faculty and graduate students who have been collaborating with UT Austin STEM researchers on a multi-year grand challenge involving over 100 Principle Investigators (project leads) across 40 departments, as they study various aspects of climate change and resiliency.

I asked Seth Gordon why he decided to lead the charge in restarting a long-dormant graduate program. “I don’t think we really understood at the time the degree to which we were filling a void that appears to be developing,” he admitted. “We just figured there’s a need in this part of the country.”

Gordon received a grant to study graduate programs in his region—which is larger than you might think. “Oklahoma, the states that touch Oklahoma, and the states that touch the states that touch Oklahoma—that right there is about 10 or 15 states,” he said. Even within that larger region, Gordon found only two comparable theatre directing MFA programs: UT Austin, where I teach, and the University of Arkansas.

His ambitions aren’t just that OU’s MFA students work in the theatre field. “I’m hoping that this program will allow people to find themselves as leaders as much as directors,” Gordon said. “My hope is to expose them to the field of directing, but also to the field of nonprofit leadership.”

Part of Gordon’s mission with this new MFA program is to nurture new companies that form among student cohorts, having already seen some success along these lines with former undergraduates, who have formed a theatre company called Co.Arts Theater Co. (formerly Collective Arts Productions). That company has also welcomed current students into its ranks, so that they’re “forging that first level of connections.”

Another gap in the field that the academy has taken up: providing space and resources to work and bridges to cultivate relationships. When I moved to New York in the early ’90s, not only was I able [to] work in theatre for next to nothing because my rent (in Chelsea, no less!) was $250 per month, but I and my colleagues could work in grungy but cherished hole-in-the-wall venues like Todo con Nada on Ludlow Street, because those venues were affordable to self-produce in. Emerging artists today are often priced out of similar opportunities to build their oeuvre and hone their craft. They may instead get that chance in graduate school. As Alfaro notes, at a well-funded university, those resources can be extraordinary.

“Last year, I had all the second-year stage managers, mostly women and people of color,” said Alfaro. In a single year they got to work on “a big, fat musical, and then Angels in America [1991; Tony Kushner; 18-27 April 2025], and Marat/Sade [The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade; 1963; Peter Weiss (German); 18-27 October 2024], and a site-specific space. Where are they going to get that training and that capacity, on that level, in the way that they’re doing on campus?”

[nb: USC staged only Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches in this season.]

Don’t get me wrong: Graduate programs are not perfect. I often reflect on the times I have not been the ideal mentor that a student deserved. And I am fully aware of how expensive graduate programs can be, even when tuition is waived and students get paid to teach or work as research assistants. With the cost of living, it’s still a massive investment.

But one thing I know to be true: Graduate programs are contributing to our field’s future in so many ways. Our biggest challenge at the moment is to make those contributions visible.

Though his MFA program will no longer be accepting new graduate students, Alfaro is not going anywhere. First he has his current graduate students to serve—and I’d lay down good money that these current students are going to get some of the best teaching of Alfaro’s career. He’s working every day, building new collaborations and devising new systems to keep serving all his students, now and into a new, if uncertain future.

What we all understand is that we have no theatre if we have no new plays. And Luis Alfaro—hands down one of our greatest living playwrights—has always been a mentor by nature. His dedication to passing the torch is true, and is sure to carry on in whatever form comes next.

“I feel like a drug dealer,” he quipped. “I’m gonna make you love writing a play. You won’t even realize we’re gonna write a whole play, but we’re writing a whole play.”

As Kimberly Belflower, a UT Austin playwriting MFA from 2017, put it, “What starts here changes the world.”

[KJ Sanchez is a director, playwright, and author of The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge, 2025).  She founded American Records and leads the MFA Directing program at the University of Texas, Austin.]