Theater Kids Revisited

 

[Last June, I posted “Theater Kids,” devoted entirely to “How To Tell If You’re a Theatre Kid,” an excerpt from John DeVore’s memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, Theatre & Cinema Books, 2024), published on the American Theatre magazine website.  This past January, a New York Times article caught my attention, so now I’m going to revisit the topic of “theater kids.”  I think the titles of the individual articles I’m reposting pretty well reveal what this collection is about.

[In the introduction to the 23 June 2025 post, I define what a theater kid is:

a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows.

[I go on to say, “I wasn’t a theater kid,” referencing my autobiographical post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010)—though I acknowledge that that label did fit me.

[The three articles below are the New York Times report that started off a little brouhaha in the theater world, the Playbill article that called attention to that to-do, and a management association article that lays out the insiders’ response.  If you were a theater kid, or you knew one, you might find the exchange interesting—perhaps even touching.] 

“HOW ‘THEATER KID’ MORPHED INTO A POLITICAL INSULT”
by Sopan Deb 

[The New York Times article ran on 8 January 2026 in “Arts” (Section C).  It was posted online on 21 December 2025 as “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult.”]

Used as a pejorative, usually by the right, the phrase tags ‘the outsiders, the weirdos.’

Move over Karen and snowflake. There’s a new go-to political put-down: Theater kid.

Last month, the comedian Tim Dillon referred to New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, as a “theater kid,” arguing that Mr. Mamdani’s victory speech was “a little cringe.”

[Tim Dillon (b. 1985) is a stand-up comic, podcaster, and actor known for his unrestrained satirical humor and social commentary. He hosts the popular podcast The Tim Dillon Show, which covers news, politics, and culture and airs at 9 a.m. (Pacific Time) Saturdays on YouTube (video) and Spotify (audio). The referenced show about Mayor-Elect Mamdani was broadcast on 8 November 2025, four days after Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.]

After Mr. Mamdani appeared in the Oval Office for a surprisingly cordial meeting with President Trump [Friday, 21 November 2025], Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, wrote on X, “Theater kids always crumble if you actually press them.” (He also released an episode of his podcast titled “MAGA vs The Theater Kids: Do You Want Drama or Do You Want Victory?”)

Mr. Mamdani, a former improv student, actually is a theater fan. But he’s not the only target.

When Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was forcibly removed from a news conference in June after trying to question Kristi Noem, the [now-former] homeland security secretary, The Daily Caller [right-wing news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C. and founded by political commentator Tucker Carlson and political advisor Neil Patel] published an article with the headline ”Democrat Theater Kid Learns He’s Not Above the Law.”

Weeks later, the conservative publication American Thinker [daily online magazine dealing with American politics from a politically conservative viewpoint] ran an article saying that Mr. Padilla and a Who’s Who list of prominent Democrats were, you guessed it, theater kids. After a group of Democratic lawmakers released a video last month reminding troops that they could refuse illegal orders, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center [U.S. government agency responsible for national and international counterterrorism efforts], described them as ”theater kids encouraging an insurrection.”

You get the picture, which raises the question: What did theater kids do to attract so much scorn?

It depends on whom you ask.

For Scott Jennings, a conservative CNN commentator, the increased use of the term is a result of “performance-based radicalism” on the left. As an example, he cited a video from 2019 that resurfaced in the final weeks before a special election for a House seat in Tennessee. It showed the Democratic candidate, Aftyn Behn, in tears, being dragged out of Gov. Bill Lee’s office during a sit-in protest, which called for the removal of a state legislator accused of sexual assault. (Ms. Behn lost by 9 percentage points in a district that Mr. Trump carried by 22 points last year.)

“These people are a sandwich board and a megaphone short of the loony bin,” Mr. Jennings said in an interview. “They think it’s actual politics. They think this is something good, and the rest of us are looking at it going, ‘Man, there go the theater kids again.’”

It’s not clear when the term gained currency, but an early example of its use as a pejorative dates to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign when the conservative operative Matt Whitlock said on social media that Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was “just a theater kid performing a sketch.”

Caricaturing political opponents with simple insults has become a hallmark of Trump-era politics. Think “Low Energy” Jeb Bush. Republicans, led by the president, have elevated name-calling to an art form, but Democrats have dabbled, too, with mixed results.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called Republicans “weird” and turned it into a calling card of his candidacy. More recently, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a leading Democratic critic of Mr. Trump who has worked to position himself for a possible 2028 presidential run, has taken to mimicking the president’s approach — calling him “Dozy Don,” among other insults.

Social media has made such put-downs catch on faster.

“In politics, just like in journalism, you’re always trying to make 10 words five, five words three, two words one, right?” Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, said. “The way to do that really effectively, and we’ve seen this for generations, is you find ways to short-circuit that through connotations.”

Using “theater kids” pejoratively is a way of tagging opponents as dramatic and performative without having to use those words, Mr. Gorman said.

Theater kids became an indelible part of the culture when television series and films like “Glee,” “High School Musical” and “Smash” [see “‘What I learned from Smash (if I didn’t know anything about theater)’” by RonAnnArbor (9 June 2013)] hit the airwaves, though the popularity of those shows set theater kids up as the subject of parody.

“We are a ton of energy and we can be chaotic, but I find that that’s not actually the qualities that people are pointing out when they talk about the theater kid,” said Zhailon Levingston, a director of the upcoming Broadway production of “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.” “What they’re talking about is the person who refuses to stay silent in the face of something that needs to be spoken to.”

For the last half-century or so, it hasn’t been considered “cool” to be a theater aficionado, said Julia Knitel, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in the musical “Dead Outlaw” [2025].

“‘Theater kid’ being the bullied party is a tale as old as time,” Ms. Knitel said. “We’ve always been the outsiders, the weirdos. It’s a quick cultural shorthand to treat us as the underdog.”

Some see a more harmful motive for deploying the moniker as a political insult.

“My initial reaction was just that it feels homophobic,” said Jacob Kerzner, an assistant professor of musical theater at Syracuse University. Mr. Kerzner added that theater is an unusual art in that “you couldn’t replace theater with any other art form in this context.”

“‘They’re all painters now’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it,” he said.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda [Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025)], said that using the term was part of a larger culture battle.

“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” Mr. Pollack-Pelzner said in an email. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.”

The dings against theater lovers have come mostly from the right, but not exclusively so. Dhaaruni Sreenivas, a data scientist who has worked for Democratic consulting firms, wrote on X that the perception of the Democratic Party “as a safe space for rule-following theater kids is really bad for our image.” She followed that up with a Substack post [Substack is an online, ad-free platform that enables writers, podcasters, and creators to publish content directly to subscribers via email, while offering options for monetization through paid subscriptions] titled, “Theater Kids and Playing Risk.”

“You know the kids in ‘Glee’? Super cheerful and go-getters?” Ms. Sreenivas, who was a delegate for Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, said in an interview. “They’re kind of despised by their peers. And it’s a problem because Americans kind of are nerdist. They do not like nerds.”

To Ms. Sreenivas, theater kids are “desperate for the approval of authority figures” and “really want to follow the rules and get rewarded for it.” Basically, she added, “they want to perform being good kids.”

Not everyone minds the moniker. Theater kids, Ms. Knitel said, are emotionally intelligent, empathetic, communicative, charismatic and in touch with their feelings. Those qualities, she said, don’t align with the “current administration.”

“They don’t want us to be empathetic and they don’t want us to care about those around us,” she said, “and they don’t want us to be open to expanding our horizons and feeling things deeply, because then we’re not as easily going to fall in line.”

[Sopan Deb is a New York Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.]

*  *  *  *
“IN RESPONSE TO NEW YORK TIMES,
EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION LAUNCHES
PROUD THEATRE KID CAMPAIGN”
by Diep Tran

[Playbill, the National Theatre Magazine, picked up the story with a report on 23 December 2025 revealing that the Educational Theatre Association had taken umbrage at the content of the Times’ article.]

The campaign is in response to an article that said that “theatre kid” is the new conservative insult.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article with the headline: “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [that's the online title; see above]. It attributed the rise of conservative pundits using “theatre kid” as an insult, to denote a “performance-based radicalism”—such as a conspiracy theorist calling incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani a theatre kid (though Mamdani has said he listens to Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen in the car).

In response, the Educational Theatre Association has launched the Proud Theatre Kid campaign to celebrate theatre kids everywhere. Said Dr. Jennifer Katona, executive director of EdTA, “This weekend, our members made it clear that the New York Times article touched a nerve. We felt it was important to stand up as leaders of the theatre education community and affirm what ‘theatre kid’ really means: creativity, discipline, collaboration, and empathy. The response today has been overwhelming, and it underscores the pride and unity of this community.”

The Association asked its followers to share why they are proud theatre kids. One respondent, who is a reverend, wrote: “My son is 14 and is confident, kind, and creative. I couldn’t be prouder! What a wonderful life both of us have found in the theatre. The world needs more of what theatre creates.”

Another respondent wrote: “The best description of theatre that I’ve ever heard is ‘the gym for empathy.’ It strengthened my ability to listen, to express complex ideas, and to put myself in others’ shoes. I can see why that’s threatening to certain politicians and pundits.” 

The Educational Theatre Association is a nonprofit focused on theatre education, serving as a professional association for theatre educators. EdTA is the parent organization of the International Thespian Society, a student honor society that has inducted more than 2.5 million thespians since 1929. Additionally, EdTA operates the Educational Theatre Foundation, the organization’s philanthropic arm dedicated to increasing opportunity and access to school theatre.

Said a representative from EdTA: “At the heart of this campaign is a simple belief: if even one student misses out on the life-changing impact of theatre education, we are all worse off. We want our community to stand together and refuse to let anyone else define what ‘theatre kid’ means.”

EdTA and Playbill are currently collaborating on a new Content Creator Scholarship that will send three students to the 2026 International Thespian Festival.

[Diep Tran is an arts journalist and editor based in New York City.  She is currently the Editor in Chief of Playbill.  Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, NBC News, New York magazine, Time Out New York, Backstage, CNN, Salon, Primetimer, Broadway News, New York Theatre Guide and other publications.  Her previous day jobs include being features editor of Broadway.com and senior editor of American Theatre magazine.  In 2023, she was named on Gold House’s A100 list as one of 100 most impactful Asians.  She loves musical theater, period dramas, and sci-fi/fantasy TV shows.]

*  *  *  *
“TEACHERS’ GROUP LAUNCHES
EFFORT TO RECLAIM ‘THEATER KID’”
by Mark Athitakis  

[EdTA’s position and its response were laid out in Associations Now in a 13 January 2026 post.  Associations Now is a daily news platform of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), which serves professionals in the association management field.]

The Educational Theatre Association’s #ProudTheatreKid campaign caught attention on social media, providing a boost to its advocacy message. 

A national theater organization launched a pop-up campaign to push back against the increasingly pejorative use of the term “theater kid,” galvanizing its member base in support of its advocacy goals.

On December 21, the New York Times published an article titled “Move Aside, Snowflake: ‘Theater Kid’ Is the New Go-To Political Insult” [see above]. The story showed how the term has been used to criticize New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA), and other Democratic lawmakers.

The story naturally caught the attention of the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA), which represents theater-education professionals and supports middle- and high-school theater students through its awards and foundation programs. 

“We absolutely felt like there was no space to not respond,” said EdTA Executive Director Dr. Jennifer Katona.

According to Katona, the organization has two million alumni across its 97 years of existence. “That’s two million theater kids,” she said. “The theater kid is our brand. It’s who we are, it’s who we care about, it’s who we talk about every day. We take a lot of pride in that, and we truly believe that a theater program in a school is not just about the performances, but about all the skills that are developed for students’ involvement in that, and also what that program does to the school and the community at large.” [See the post on this blog “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).]

Though EdTA’s staff was largely off for the holiday break, it developed a rapid social-media response, using the hashtag #ProudTheatreKid on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. “Theatre kids are academically strong,” the posts read in part. “They are emotionally intelligent. They are collaborative leaders and creative thinkers.” Readers were encouraged to share their own theater experiences growing up.

The posts struck a chord with EdTA members theater fans in general. The Broadway industry bible Playbill covered the campaign [see above], and the posts drew more than 1,200 shares on Facebook and more than 7,700 likes on Instagram. “If it wasn’t up by that evening, it was the next day,” Katona said. “It’s probably four or five times the reshares, if not more, that we usually get,” she said.

More than just attempting to blunt the use of “theater kid” as an insult, the campaign has given EdTA a platform to promote its advocacy work entering 2026. Last week, EdTA used the term “proud theatre kid” as a way to encourage registration for its annual March advocacy summit, which includes a visit with legislators on Capitol Hill and workshops on how participants can promote theater education in their own communities. 

“This comes at a time of years of their craft being under attack, with no-drag bills, the slicing of budgets, and the way some of our states and teachers have been censored,” Katona said. “So this felt like a line in the sand for everybody. This is really propelling us into action. It goes beyond just asking people to change your Facebook status. It’s: Let’s try to come together and go to DC and talk about the value of what we do. That’s where we’re taking it.”

[Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications.  He is a coauthor (with Mark Lasswell) of The Dumbest Moments in Business History (Portfolio. 2004).]

Theater Kids

 

[The term "theater kid" (or “theatre kid,” as it is below) typically refers to a young person, usually a student, who is deeply passionate about and involved in theatrical performance.  They are often characterized by their enthusiastic embrace of performing arts, particularly musicals, and may exhibit traits like spontaneously breaking into song—almost always one from a musical—or quoting lines from shows. 

[I wasn’t a theater kid.  As I explain in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010, I was introduced to theater as a young boy, but though I did the usual school performances in elementary and middle school, I wasn’t “deeply passionate” about acting.

[I also don’t insist on spelling it t-h-e-a-t-r-e, as John DeVore asserts below that all theater kids do.  I will honor the preference of each theater organization for the spelling of its name, but otherwise, I go with the American spelling.  I do not buy the distinction that theatre refers to the art form and theater to the venue.

[By the way, "Broadway baby" most commonly refers to someone, often a performer, who is deeply involved with or passionate about Broadway theater.  I guess that applies well enough.  Though, I go to a lot of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater, and regional repertory productions as well.

[I did a couple of plays in high school, but only my first two years.  I transferred to schools in Switzerland for the rest of high school, and they didn’t have student theater—and I didn’t miss it.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School” [29 April, 2, 5, 8, 11, and 14 May 2021].)

[I did more stage work in college and joined the university’s Troubadours, the extra-curricular theater group, and then, when I was in the army and stationed in Berlin—and no longer a “kid”—I found myself drawn to theater and acting as an amateur.  (See “Berlin Memoir” [16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017].)

[Then I got out of the service and came to New York City—I’m a native Washingtonian—to go to acting school.  I got an MFA in acting, knocked around New York auditioning, doing a lot of Off-Off-Broadway shows, trying my hand at directing and doing a little teaching. 

[Then I saw that I wasn’t advancing in the profession.  I went back to school for a doctorate with an eye on teaching full time—just at the moment when I was offered a role by one of the theaters back in the city where I was born!  I’d already committed to attending school for that Ph.D., but I toyed with blowing it off for the stage gig . . . but I decided it was a chimera, and stuck with my original plan. 

[I discovered that what I was good at was writing about this subject.  I got some articles published, delivered a few papers at conferences—not really my favorite thing, it turned out—and contributed to a couple of books.  I even won a prize with one of my essays.  Then, in 2009, I started this blog.  This will be my 1,281st post—though not all of them have been on theater, or written by me.

[Now, to the matter at hand in this post, John DeVore’s memoir of his sojourn into the land of theater.  He says theatre, but I’m stickin’ to my guns (prop guns, of course).  In addition to “A Broadway Baby,” which is my memoir of encountering theater at a boy, I have posted a number of pieces here that touch on children and young people’s encounters with theater. 

[Some are about youngsters engaging in the theater world itself, and others are about theater in the schools.  What I’m not going to list here are the posts about “children’s theater” or “theater for young audiences,” which cover theater for young people by adults.  That’s an important gateway for kids to get into theater, but it’s different, I feel.

[Here’s the list, with links, to ROT’s coverage of theater and kids (note that several of these titles contain multiple articles):

    • “Missoula Children’s Theatre” (28 August 2009
• “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013)
• “Kids on the Broadway Boards” (30 November 2013)
• “Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” by Oona Haaranen (9 January 2014)
• “Musical Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018; rerun on 5 February 2023)
• “Jimmy Awards” (2 September 2024)

[For the other posts on children and theater and the arts in schools, I suggest using the search engine a the top left corner of the screen, or browse through the archives to the left of the text column.  You can also click on an appropriate label at the bottom of the post.]

“HOW TO TELL IF YOU’RE A THEATRE KID”
by John DeVore

[This excerpt of John DeVore’s memoir appeared on the American Theatre website.   The piece is categorized as “Book Excerpts” and is dated 6 September 2024.  It wasn’t published in the print edition of the magazine.]

In this excerpt from a new memoir about his years toiling Off-Off-Broadway, the author reflects on what it means to be young and bitten by the acting bug. 

Lights up on a small theatre in Brooklyn, New York. Enter John DeVore, late 40s. His hair and beard are streaked with gray. He stands in a spotlight centerstage and says: 

My name is John, and I’m a theatre kid. I’m a theatre kid the way a raccoon is a raccoon, or a pineapple is a pineapple. I like to think of it as my astrological sign, something about me that is fixed. It is who I am, and I had little choice in the matter.

During one of my very first school plays, a teacher suggested I had been bitten by the acting bug, contracting a virus with no known cure. But I knew better: I had been screaming for attention since I was born. If I could have been the opposite of a theatre kid, I would have. But I can’t be who I’m not. I’m pretty sure the opposite of a theatre kid is a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Being a theatre kid is like that Groucho joke about not wanting to join a club that would have you as a member. That’s my experience, at least. I’ve never been a joiner. If I could change that about me, I would. I want to be loved and left alone at the same time. That is my default setting. My therapist is always telling me to open my heart to other people, and my usual response to his gentle requests is, “I’m trying, Gary.”

[Groucho Marx (1890-1977) was a comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed on the vaudeville stage and in films and on television, radio, and the stage. Groucho made 13 movies with his brothers (Chico [1887-1961], Harpo [1888-1964], Gummo [1892-1977], and Zeppo [1901-79]), who performed under the name the Marx Brothers. He later had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show You Bet Your Life (radio: 1947-60; NBC-TV: 1950-61).

[As for the joke about joining a club, it was long attributed to Groucho, and in both his son’s biography of his father, My Life with Groucho (Simon and Schuster, 1954) and Groucho’s own memoir, Groucho and Me (Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), both men quote the “Resignation Joke,” which they record as Groucho’s withdrawal from the Friars Club (sometime around 1950-52). In Groucho’s rendering, he sent a telegram stating: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”]

I once denied being a theatre kid, a bit like how the apostle Peter repeatedly lied when asked by the mob if he knew Jesus. My denial happened years ago, in the late aughts. 2008? Right before the economy cratered. Those were dark times for me. I had gone on an impromptu weeknight bender with a former colleague—a lonely old journalist with a talent for sniffing out bullshit and a sickening thirst for crème de menthe—who suspected I had acted in high school or college. I just laughed him off. Me? A theatre kid? No.

And my ruse would have worked had we not stumbled, piss-drunk, into a nearly empty karaoke bar and had I not insisted on performing a sloppy, surprisingly poignant rendition of the popular torch song “On My Own” from the blockbuster 1987 Broadway mega-musical Les Misérables—which, if you’re not aware, is a weepy, blood-and-thunder pop opera written by Claude-Michel Schönberg [French; b. 1944] and Alain Boublil [French, born in Tunisia; b. 1941] and based on Victor Hugo’s [French; 1802-85] 19th-century novel [1862] about poor French vagrants suffering beautifully. “On My Own” is sung by the forlorn street waif Eponine, who pines after handsome revolutionary Marius, whose heart in turn belongs to Cosette, the adopted daughter of our hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean. Eponine is a lonely victim of unrequited love, and later she dies in Marius’s arms, fulfilling the deepest, darkest, most pathetic fantasy of anyone who has ever longed for someone they could never have.  

[The French version of Les Misérables premièred in Paris at the Palais des Sports on 24 September 1980. Its English-language adaptation, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (1925-2020), produced by Cameron Mackintosh (b. 1946), has been running at the Barbican Centre London since 8 October 1985. The London show had its 15,000th performance on 28 September 2023.

[The musical had a pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House in Washington, D.C., on 27 December 1986 and ran there for eight weeks through 14 February 1987. The production then transferred to the Broadway Theatre on 12 March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre on 17 October 1990, and after 6,680 performances in 16 years, it closed on 18 May 2003. It won eight 1987 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. There were Broadway revivals in 2006 and 2014.]

My former colleague could see the truth in my tear-filled eyes as I sang with everything I had. I couldn’t help myself. I was feeling it. I sang like I was competing for a Tony Award. I did that thing Broadway divas do where they slowly push one jazz hand toward the heavens as the emotions swell. I was in church, and from the back pew, I could hear him laughing and pointing at me like I was a fool. He knew a theatre kid when he saw one.

Like I said: dark times.  

How can you tell if someone you know, or even love, is a theatre kid? Ask yourself this: Do they take a lot of selfies? Do. They. Enunciate. Every. Word? Do they frequently sigh heavily? Do they talk about themselves and their manifold feelings incessantly? These are just a few of the signs. Do they spell it t-h-e-a-t-r-e instead of t-h-e-a-t-e-r? That’s a good one. Only a true theatre kid spells it “theatre.” A “theater” is where you watch “theatre.” You see? No? This difference matters, and if you don’t think it does, you’re probably not a theatre kid, which may come as a relief to many of you.

Now, I need you to know that I know that t-h-e-a-t-r-e is just the British spelling of the word. But I much prefer the other explanation, don’t you? It’s more romantic. The theatre is an ancient art, a sacred, almost holy occupation. It’s a way to teach moral lessons and to celebrate the human condition; it is a story full of sound and fury that can levitate you or knock you sideways. The theatre is a spirit—and the theater is where you sit and cough politely, and then the curtain rises. There might not even be a curtain. A theater can be a space, any space. A storefront, an apartment living room, a parking lot.

This wisdom has been passed down from theatre kid to theatre kid from time immemorial. It was a veteran of my high school’s drama program who taught me the difference between theatre and theater. She was a full year older than me, but she knew things. I thought she was brilliant. I remember listening to her intently: Theatre was life. This lesson probably happened over cups of creamy, sugary coffee and plates of baklava at the local 24-hour diner, where all the theatre kids at my high school would go to celebrate after a successful production—a one-act or the spring musical.

We’d pour into the diner like an army of frogs, laughing and talking a mile a minute and singing show tunes, and the poor servers endured our overbearing youthful cheerfulness. My true theatre education happened either at that diner or backstage, during rehearsal breaks, and these impromptu lectures are the closest thing to an oral tradition in action I’ve ever encountered.  

These 16-year-old elders patiently explained the superstitions and rules of the theatre, and I did the same when it was my turn to pass on the lore. I remember the rules like commandments: Never whistle backstage or say the name of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy about that Scottish couple who make a series of poorly thought-out career decisions. Both of those things are bad luck. [See my four-part series “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions” (14, 17, 20, and 23 August 2020).]

Saying “good luck” is also bad luck. You’re supposed to say “break a leg.”  

There are all sorts of explanations as to what that phrase means. I was told, over a plate of french fries, that in ye olden times, the mechanism that raised and lowered the curtains was called a leg, and so to break a leg would mean that the audience cheered for so many encores, the curtain went up and down and up and down until it broke. Is that true? I have no idea. That’s just how I heard it.  

Here are a few more sacred rules: Give flowers after a performance, not before. Always open the stage door for one of your fellow castmates and invite them to enter first with a graceful bow. One of my favorites warns against putting your shoes on any table backstage. Don’t do that. Why? I don’t think you want to find out. 

There were also practical, straightforward rules about rehearsal and being part of a production. Always be on time. (“If you’re 10 minutes early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” That was the mantra. I was told to repeat it and to repeat it.) Don’t skip rehearsal. Memorize your lines. Stretch before every performance, and drink nothing but hot water with lemon juice and honey if you catch a cold. And never, ever become romantically involved with someone in the cast—a rule that was broken during every production at my high school, sometimes multiple times. Show romances were a huge no-no. This rule was meant to keep rehearsals drama-free. But rehearsals are intense and intimate, and it’s almost impossible to keep theatre kids from trying to make out with other theatre kids.

Show romances—also known as “showmances”—were looked down on, even by those who had them. The only exceptions were hookups between cast and crew, which worked in my favor. I will always be a sucker for a girl who can use power tools, because I cannot use power tools, and I fell for stage managers and set builders. A boy never hit on me, but I was ready for it, just in case, and had practiced a flattered, “I like you, but I don’t like-like you” speech in the mirror. I never got to perform that speech, which disappointed me. A few years later, in college, a beautiful man kissed me on the dance floor of a party. It was a deep and playful kiss, and before I could stammer, “I like you, but I don’t . . .,” he had disappeared into the crowd, and now that I think about it, that was disappointing too.

When I was a senior I gave the newbies at the diner a variation of the speech I was given in ninth grade. It went something like: “Look around at this table. These are the friends you’ll have for the rest of your life.” That wasn’t true, but in the moment it felt true, and that’s good enough. I also passed along to them what was passed to me, from senior to frosh, and that is to always, always attend the closing night cast party, and to stay until the very end.

*  *  *  *

The publisher’s description:

Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s [1897-1962] novel As I Lay Dying [1930] inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.

The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.

An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre and the weirdos who bring it to life, Theatre Kids is DeVore’s buoyant, irreverent, and ultimately moving account of outsize ambition and dashed hopes in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City. Sharply observed and bursting with hilarious razzle-dazzle, it will resonate with anyone who has ever, perhaps against their better judgment, tried to bring something beautiful into the world without regard for riches or fame.

Editorial Reviews:

“A wry and boisterous account . . . .  Electric prose elevates this homage to an enduring art form.” ―Publishers Weekly

“For those of us lucky to call John DeVore a friend, the skill and warmth with which he’s written Theatre Kids comes as no surprise. If you should not be in the elect group, however, the next best thing would be to read this book. There’s something funny, moving, surprising, or trenchant on every page. Often there’s all of these at once. Theatre Kids is a lemon tart made by someone who loves you, sweet and light and sharp and substantial all at once.” ―Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (see on Rick On Theater “The Method – a Review” [12 March 2022] and “Bombast to Beckett” [13 January 2025], both by Kirk Woodward)

“John DeVore is a master storyteller, and Theatre Kids is a delightful and moving read. It's a valentine to the New York City theatre scene in the late ’90s and early aughts, told through the eyes of one of the many young people who have for generations come from hamlets, small towns, and sprawling suburbs hoping to make their mark in the glittering city. DeVore will keep you laughing, gasping, and sometimes cringing all the way to the last page.” ―Catherine Burns, former artistic director of The Moth, a storytelling theater group in New York City’s Financial District

“Like all beautiful memoirs, John DeVore’s Theatre Kids will tell you not just about the author, but about things and places and people dead and gone. DeVore brings them alive again. How glad you'll be to meet them, and him. This is a funny, sad, loving, and mournful look at what artistic strivers and dreamers put themselves and others through on the quest for greatness―or, perhaps, just plain old survival.” ―Sara Benincasa, author of Real Artists Have Day Jobs (And Other Awesome Things They Don't Teach You in School)

“"Theatre Kids is a rickety roller coaster ride into the hearts of New York City’s downtown theatricals – that rare breed that can turn a moldering black box and a couple of folding chairs into a diorama of the divine."” ―Mike Errico, author of Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter

“This moving memoir recounts DeVore’s life-changing experience having a bit part in a tiny, four-hour production adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel “As I Lay Dying” as he struggled with addiction and grief. The cast and crew were scrappy but passionate as they tried to bring their vision to life in a windowless theater in Brooklyn in post-9/11 New York.” ―New York Post

[John DeVore (b. 1974) is an award-winning writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and one-eyed mutt, Morley.  His debut memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway, was published by Applause Books and came out in June 2024.]

"The Reformation" – Article 4: "Racism Erodes the American Theater"

by Jesse Green 

[This final essay in Jesse Green’s New York Times series, “The Reformation,” was published in the print edition of the Times on 4 September 2022 in the “Arts & Leisure” section; the online edition, with Deena So’Oteh’s artwork, is at After a Long, Starring Run, Will Racism at Last Get the Hook? - The New York Times (nytimes.com).

[The foregoing articles in “The Reformation” began on 20 September with Callie Holtermann’s “A Revolution Behind the Curtain,” which I posted as an introduction to the series.  Jesse Green’s three preceding essays, each dealing with a different issue, are “Is It Finally Twilight For Sacred Stage Monsters?” posted on 23 September; “When Paying Your Dues Doesn’t Pay the Rent,” 26 September; and “Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life,” 29 September.]

We can no longer ignore the theater’s systemic inequities. But leaving them behind may remake the industry in unexpected ways.

Severed from the rest of New Haven [Connecticut] by [New York State suburban commuter rail service] Metro-North tracks on one side and I-95 on the other, the Long Wharf Theater shares a patch of industrial bleakness with a busy food terminal and a chicken processing plant. The only convenient way to get there is by car, which is one reason the Tony Award-winning company [1978 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre], despite decades of excellent work, has had no trouble attracting visitors from the suburbs and exurbs. For many Black and Latino New Haveners, that seemed to be the point; according to a local joke, the initials L.W.T. stood for “lily-white theater.”

To be fair, the epithet could apply to most theater in most of the United States for most of its history. Regardless of demographics — white residents have long been a minority in New Haven — producers of commercial and nonprofit work have overwhelmingly selected repertory and instituted policies that in essence ensured a monoculture.

Even the improvements that started surfacing more recently have come with caveats. On Broadway, most musicals now offer some degree of diversity in their ensembles, if less so in leading roles. In the 2018-19 season, the last for which there are published results, the percentage of “non-Caucasian” ticket buyers grew to about a quarter of the audience — nice, but still vastly underrepresenting their actual proportion in New York.

It took the double punch of Covid-19 and the racial reawakening of 2020 to fully expose the unfairness and disrupt the status quo. First, the pandemic, stopping theater cold that March, gave people time to reflect on the work they do and the values inherent in it. Then, that May, the killing of George Floyd — and the publication a few weeks later of “We See You, White American Theater,” a crowdsourced manifesto featuring  29 pages of demands for a more equitable industry [“BIPOC Demands for White Theatre”] — threw grief and outrage into the mix. As theater companies rushed to put diversity training on their agendas, and anodyne expressions of support on their websites, it seemed real change might be coming at last.

This summer I’ve been thinking about what that change will look like. In earlier parts of this series I’ve argued for ridding the art form of its “great man” inheritance, weighed the costs of fair pay and explored the physical and emotional dangers theater workers face as part of their jobs. And though these are all important, they are really just aspects of the bigger picture of inequity that begins, in the American theater as in the country at large, with racism. Previously swept under the rug of supposedly immutable traditions and rules, it is now revealed everywhere, in casting, funding, leadership, programming.

Yet many of the people I’ve spoken to about it feel hopeful. They are not deluded; they know it will not be a smooth ride. Though the running of some regional companies has, for the first time, been taken out of white hands, their inheritors immediately faced a public health disaster. Efforts to improve diversity onstage and backstage have too often come without the support necessary to help new hires succeed. Culturally specific theaters may face an existential crisis if their function gets co-opted by change. And as new ways of thinking about the purpose of theater have led to new ways of producing it, traditional audiences, feeling disoriented, sometimes resist.

I understand that; it’s hard to let go of what you grew up loving enough to make room for what others might love. But sometimes the first step in fixing a bad foundation is to get out of the house.

That at any rate is the Long Wharf’s plan. In December, when the lease on its longtime home expires, the company will say goodbye to I-95 and the poultry plant as it embarks on an “itinerant production model” — which Jacob G. Padrón, who became the theater’s artistic director in 2019, recently described as “placing ourselves fully in the community.” As a taste of that undertaking, “Jelly Roll’s Jam,” a jazz concert in connection with an upcoming reading [17-18 September 2022] of the 1992 musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” was presented Aug. 16 at a public library in Dixwell, a predominantly Black neighborhood. It was packed.

But it’s not just the venues that will change. To see how thoroughly the Long Wharf has reimagined its agenda you have to look at before-and-after snapshots of the work itself. Emerging from the pandemic, the 2021-22 season seemed relatively familiar, at least in format, with four plays running in fully mounted productions of about three weeks each. Even so, not one was the work of a white playwright, and only “The Chinese Lady” [12-31 October 2021] was by a man.

The 2022-23 season, which began Aug. 3, is a new creature entirely. Among eight events, there’s only one conventional run, if convention can be said to encompass a work [currently titled Maria; further details, including dates, have not yet been revealed] by the multidisciplinary ensemble Universes at a site suggested by the artists. The other seven, most lasting for just a few performances, include that jazz concert, a festival of short plays by and about Black trans women, a “work-in-process sharing,” a “community parade,” a Muslim American virtual play project, a monologue competition and, in a nod to the Long Wharf’s inaugural production, in 1965, a benefit reading of “The Crucible.”

[In addition to Maria and “Jelly Roll’s Jam,” the other LWT events alluded to above were: Black Trans Women at the Center, virtual, 3-6 August 2022; Dignity, Always Dignity, 10-11 September 2022; “Home(coming): A Community Parade,” 14-15 October 2022; I AM: American/Muslim, Fall 2022; Next Narrative Monologue Competition, Spring 2023; and The Crucible, Spring 2023.]

“Our legacy should not be one of bricks and mortar but of people,” Padrón said during a Zoom call that also included Kit Ingui, the theater’s managing director. “And if we want to belong to all people in the city, we had to move into a space where they could discover us.”

Ingui pointed out that the rigid way regional theaters function is very different from the fluid way theater is created — “and that’s part of the base problem,” she said. “After 50 years without change, their mission has become keeping the company alive as opposed to making the plays. We haven’t allowed ourselves to ebb and flow with the times.”

The Long Wharf’s new flow, Padrón admitted, has elicited “a lot of fear of change.” But he quickly added that “the hope is that we can decenter fear and recenter possibility and imagination.”

Still, the problem of racial inequity was never far from the surface of our conversation. The theater’s board of directors, for instance, did not “reflect the composition of the community” when he arrived; of its 26 members only two were people of color. (Now there are 28 members, 15 of them people of color.) To achieve that balance, Ingui added, the theater explicitly removed the requirement that members “give or get” a certain amount of money — a typical condition of board membership that often discourages diversity.

Though this is the kind of structural change that can begin to undo institutional racism, it comes at a cost; money not donated or raised by the board has to come from somewhere else. One source, Ingui pointed out, is the new production model itself, which will save the Long Wharf $250,000 this year, and $500,000 next year, on an annual operating budget that as of 2019 was $6.4 million. The savings will be reinvested in the model.

“Show me your budget,” Padrón said, “and I’ll show you your values. 

Padrón, who is Latino, is one of a new generation of artistic directors hired over the last few years at regional theaters whose prior leadership was almost entirely white. The circumstances of their hiring vary widely. Maria Manuela Goyanes of Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C., and Robert Barry Fleming of Actors Theater of Louisville are both taking over from retiring artistic directors associated with their theaters almost from the start; Padrón replaced Gordon Edelstein, who was fired in 2018 after he was accused of sexual misconduct.

However they came to their jobs, they found institutions that had hardened into fortresses, doing essentially what they had always done in the way they had always done it. The idea of theater as collaborative and evanescent had long since given way to a rather different image: an expensive building enshrining the taste of a single, immovable and usually white male visionary.

If too little turnover can be sclerotic — the artistic directors of several of New York’s most successful institutional theaters have been in place for three, four or even five decades — too much can be chaotic. Some companies are staking a compromise position, one that aims to maintain the stability of the single-leader model without relying on a single leader. Taibi Magar, who is Egyptian American, and Tyler Dobrowsky, who is white, have just been named the joint artistic directors of Philadelphia Theater Company — a two-for-one deal, as they are married. Soho Rep in New York City has three co-leaders; Steppenwolf Theater Company, in Chicago, has two.

But another Philadelphia theater, the Wilma, recently established what may be the most unusual setup, a rotating triumvirate in which Yury Urnov, James Ijames and Morgan Green are taking one-year turns as “lead” artistic director, in the off years serving as advisers in what Ijames described as “heavy, heavy consultation.”

Ijames, who was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize [2022] for his play “Fat Ham,” told me that the Wilma’s arrangement, which began in 2020 and was immediately stressed by the advent of the pandemic, still has kinks that need to be worked out.

[Fat Ham made its world première as a streaming presentation of a filmed production at the Wilma, 29 April-23 May 2021. It subsequently played on stage in its in-person, live début at the Anspacher Theater of New York City’s Public Theater (in a co-presentation with the National Black Theater), 12 May-31 July 2022.]

“The tricky thing about the shared leadership model,” he said, “is that it’s still leadership. It’s still about decisions coming from the top. One of the lessons out of this great time of reckoning is that we have to, have to, have to listen to people and create systems in which they feel heard. But because we don’t always agree, decisions take longer too, which is a weird drawback.”

Certainly it was weird for the Stratford Festival, in Ontario, where a three-headed directorship failed almost immediately in 2008, victim of a leadership style best summed up as “the buck stops nowhere.” Still, Ijames isn’t sure disagreement is always the enemy (“it encourages deeper thinking”) or certitude a supreme value. “Theater prepandemic was very much obsessed with trying to get things perfect, and not very interested in making the industry a good place to work. Something that looks great can be rotten underneath.

“And anyway,” he continued, “what’s the virtue of the singular vision? When we think of great movements, like the civil rights movement, we may think of Martin Luther King, but the number of lay folks, women and young people who were actively involved in petitioning, marching and driving people to the polls is how the world got changed.”

Ah, but one still wants a King. I am sentimental enough to enjoy my memories of great directors and their signatures, great companies and their sweet spots. One result of these leadership shifts is that theaters will develop unfamiliar house styles, or multiple house styles, as decision-making becomes more distributed and diverse. That’s an obvious plus for those who will now get a seat at the table, and for the health of the system overall, even if it may be disorienting to those who expect, every time out, to see and love what they’ve seen and loved before. Yet how can change happen without letting go of the past?

For me, meeting new people and new worlds through plays has always been the point. In a way, the further from my experience they were, the more meaningful the exercise; to find something familiar in violent Jud Fry or reckless Walter Lee Younger or donkey-struck Titania was to triangulate my own geography by distant stars.

More recently there have been more stars to go by. Even with a 15-month hiatus, I have seen more work by Black authors on Broadway since 2019 than in the 10 years preceding it. But Broadway is fickle, and that burst of diversity will end if the plays don’t start turning a profit — which they probably won’t, if the industry doesn’t learn how to make theatergoing more inviting to diverse audiences.

In any case, the real work of serving communities often marginalized by the mainstream falls to what Ralph B. Peña calls “culturally specific” theaters. Peña is the artistic director of [New York City’s] Ma-Yi Theater, whose mission is to develop and produce new plays by Asian American writers. In the last few years I’ve seen many excellent results of that mission, including “Vancouver,” Peña’s gorgeous puppet play about cultural displacement [streamed by Ma-Yi Studios, a digital streaming center, 30 April-31 May 2021], and “The Chinese Lady,” by Lloyd Suh [23 February-10 April 2022], which is now being staged around the country.

“There’s a focus on Asian American works I have never seen before,” Peña told me. “But we still don’t receive the kind of support the mainstream theaters do. Our annual budget is about $1.5 million. We should be between $3 and $5 million to carry out our mission. We have a lot of writers we’ve cultivated over the years whose plays we can’t produce because we don’t have the money.

“So we do co-productions,” Peña continued, “and push other theaters to schedule the work. But oftentimes when they do, they put them in their basements. I’m saying stop: You cannot use works by playwrights and artists of color to check your diversity box, and then blame the work when you don’t sell enough tickets. You put on one Asian American play and expect audiences to come in droves? How is that supposed to work? Think of the plays instead as loss leaders, sunk costs, whose success should be measured in helping to create a relationship with the community.”

Part of Ma-Yi’s aim, Peña said, is to “get the work out there” — meaning into the mainstream. Other culturally specific theaters aim also to get the work “in there,” delivering it to their neighborhoods. In Atlanta, True Colors, co-founded by the director Kenny Leon in 2002 “to celebrate the rich tradition of Black storytelling,” has been highly successful at that; at a performance in 2020 [11 February-8 March] of “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play,” a comedy I had seen in New York three years earlier [MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 2 November-31 December 2017; remounted 16 October-9 December 2018], I was just about the only white person in the sold-out auditorium.

From the reactions around me, I recognized the pleasure a shared understanding between actors and audience can engender. I remembered feeling something similar watching work that speaks to my own cultural background, which because I am white means most of the work produced in the American theater. Why shouldn’t everyone have that experience? And why shouldn’t I enjoy being a witness to it?

At the same time, I wondered what the improvements in diversity I otherwise support might mean for companies like Ma-Yi and True Colors — and the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, Minn., Pregones in New York and Two Worlds in Albuquerque, which serve Black, Latino and Indigenous communities. Will they go the way of the gay bookstores of my youth, which disappeared completely as gayness went mainstream?

That already seems to be a concern at Penumbra. “When we developed these actors and people began to see these stories being told,” Lou Bellamy, the theater’s founder, told the PBS NewsHour last year, “we became almost a farm team for the larger theaters in town.”

Peña isn’t worried though. “If someday the use for us becomes nonexistent,” he said, “then we will become something else.”

That’s a good lesson for the American theater, which should be flexible and imaginative and openhearted enough to adapt itself to new conditions. But what looked like a willingness to change at the start of the pandemic in many cases bounced right back to business as usual when performances resumed. Nicole Javanna Johnson, a diversity, equity and inclusion director, said she rarely faced resistance when she started working with theaters soon after George Floyd’s death. But when the urgency of actual production returned, “it was more like capitalism, money, can we just do this fast? People didn’t understand that they had the quality of someone’s life in their hands.”

Johnson, a “theater kid” from Florida, was already booking professional roles while attending New York University. “With my entree as a Black, female, cisgender musical theater performer I could easily grab one of those Black female spots, even if it was tokenized,” she told me. But while performing in regional productions and national tours of “Hairspray,” “Aladdin,” “The Wizard of Oz” and others, she began to observe differences between the treatment of union and nonunion actors — and also “unfortunate incidences when you’re in Kansas doing a show, living in a community they placed you in, and the community has an opinion of you as a person of color.” Left with a feeling of unendurable “dissonance” with her ethics, she quit performing.

It’s no surprise, then, that in her recent D.E.I. work — with “Pass Over,” “Freestyle Love Supreme” and “Into the Woods,” as well as several institutional theaters — she is deeply concerned with how people get hired but also what happens after. Banishing audition tables that feature a monolith of white faces whispering secretively to one another is the first thing, she said, productions must do to make their workplaces more equitable.

[The Broadway productions referred to were (or are) at, respectively, the August Wilson Theatre, 22 August-10 October 2021; Booth Theatre, 2 October 2019-12 January 2020 and 19 October 2021-2 January 2022; and St. James Theatre, 10 July 2022-8 January 2023.]

But it is hardly the last. Now that “everyone’s calling everyone to find a stage manager of color,” it’s imperative, Johnson said, to provide people thrust into leadership positions with the resources they need to thrive in “what has always been an unhealthy industry.” Instead, they are typically asked “to do several additional jobs and then if things don’t work it’s their fault.”

Narratives that Johnson has begun to collect for Harriet Tubman Effect, an institute for justice advocacy research she founded in 2021, demonstrate the result, she said. “Some people are experiencing large-scale pain cloaked in this smile and these great-looking shows. And some” — she paused — “are just breaking.”

Perhaps that’s inevitable as the theater “quickly and haphazardly” tries to address decades and even centuries of wrong. Even so, Johnson has found purpose in training the ushers and house management staff of “Pass Over” to deal with racist responses to the confrontational work, and joy in helping the cast of “Into the Woods” build an accessible tickets initiative for young people from “under-resourced communities” who had never seen a Broadway show. “There’s progress,” she said. “Not a lot, but I err toward hope.”

A real reformation must do more than “err toward hope,” of course. It must leap toward the future, not fully knowing what hope even looks like. It will certainly include changes in leadership; would it be so wrong if, in the coming generation, most major theaters put a person of color at the helm? (They had white people at their helms forever.) Experiments in content and format should be part of the agenda as well; perhaps there will be fewer conventional plays meant for everyone and more rituals, parades and sharings meant for someone. Profound changes in funding are also imperative. If fairer pay for workers, as well as greater respect for their well-being, means less money for leases and leaders, so be it.

To be clear: I am not saying we can’t still have “Oklahoma!” — let alone “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Cancellation of imperfect or merely old work is not a healthy part of a vigorous art form. Nor, I add disinterestedly, is the cancellation of imperfect or merely old critics.

But sooner or later we must make room for what’s coming next, even giving it a chance to fail. For many people, that may feel like a loss. And yet, can we really look at the rotten edifice supporting what we’ve loved and not be at least a little revolted?

This recently hit home for me at, of all places, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., about the whitest place it is possible to imagine. In the corner of an exhibition called “Imprinted,” exploring the role commercial illustrators played in forming the country’s ideas about race, I saw some posters for Hilson’s Famous Minstrels, a troupe that toured widely in the mid-19th century. Nearby were engravings of various minstrel characters, including one called “Zip Coon.” This was of course a white actor painted and dressed to ridicule a Black man. In other images, Black people were made to look like apes.

Keep in mind that the popular American theater began with these racist depictions. And since that is where it began, that’s where the reformation must begin as well.

[Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for the Times. His latest book is Shy, with and about the composer Mary Rodgers.  He is also the author of a novel, O Beautiful, and a memoir, The Velveteen Father.  (Additional biographical remarks are in the afterword to “‘The Reformation’ – Article 1,” posted on 23 September.)]

"The Reformation" – Article 3: "Shutting the Door On a Hard-Knock Life"

by Jesse Green 

[Jesse Green’s third essay of the “Reformation” series was published in the print edition of New York Times on 7 August 2022 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was updated on 24 August 2022, including a correction to an earlier version of this article concerning the name of the organization Intimacy Directors & Coordinators.

[I’ve posted an introduction to “The Reformation” by Callie Holtermann on 20 September and Articles 1 and 2 of the series on 23 and 26 September.  I invite ROTters to read the three foregoing articles and to return to the blog for the final installment.]

The requirements of the theater, and the constant physical and emotional risks facing performers, have many demanding their basic needs as humans.

Getting to play Cinderella in a Broadway revival of “Into the Woods” sounds like a young musical theater performer’s dream, until you break your neck doing the pratfalls built into the role.

That’s what Laura Benanti says happened to her in 2002. “I was a 22-year-old girl who didn’t know how to say ‘this doesn’t feel safe to me,’” she wrote on her Instagram page nearly two decades later, after suffering “intense pain every single day for seven years,” two surgeries and much heartbreak.

[Into the Woods played at the Broadhurst Theatre 30 April-29 December 2002.  Benanti left the show in November.]

At the time, people bad-mouthed her for missing performances.

Disastrous tumbles and physical danger are so much a part of theater history that they’ve become treasured backstage lore instead of causes for concern. I am ashamed to admit to laughing when I read about the dancer who fell into the “Anyone Can Whistle” orchestra pit in 1964, landing on a saxophone player, who promptly died. In 1991 we all gossiped merrily when the tempestuous Nicol Williamson ignored his fight choreography in “I Hate Hamlet” and struck his co-star Evan Handler with a sword. (Handler quit; Williamson got applause.) For much of the early 2010s, the mayhem of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was an endless source of schadenfreude.

[Anyone Can Whistle ran at the Majestic Theatre from 4-11 April 1964; the accident occurred during the Philadelphia try-outs at the Forrest Theatre, 2-21 March 1964. I Hate Hamlet ran 8 April-22 June 1991 at the Walter Kerr Theatre; the incident reported occurred on 2 May 1991.

[Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially played at the Foxwoods (now the Lyric) Theatre, 14 June 2011-4 January 2014, but producer Michael Cohl had repeatedly delayed the opening night. I posted “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press” on Rick On Theater on 20 March 2011, on the dispute between the press and the producers of the musical over the long preview run.]

But concussions, broken ribs, a fractured skull, a crushed leg and an amputated foot — those are just the “Spider-Man” injuries — aren’t actually funny. And they are only the most visible part of the story of harm endured by theater workers onstage and off. In return for the privilege of scraping by in a field they love, they are commonly expected to endanger themselves physically and emotionally.

They dance till they drop. They work punishing hours. They strip themselves, often literally, and enact trauma over and over. If they are parents and nevertheless insist on sleeping more than five hours a night, they may see their children — as Amber Gray, a star in the original cast of “Hadestown,” told me — barely more than 50 minutes a day.

[Hadestown, still running on Broadway, premièred Off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, where Gray was part of the cast, and opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 17 April 2019; Gray was with the show until 19 February 2022.

[I have a post on ROT that reports on parenting in the theater: “Life upon the Wicked Stage – With a Family,” 21 December 2017.]

The pandemic put a temporary end to all that, reuniting families and helping injuries heal. The pause also gave theater workers, perhaps for the first time ever, plenty of time to consider the lives their profession requires them to lead. It’s no surprise that, as theaters reopened, calls for change therefore emerged with greater urgency. This summer I’ve been grappling with those demands, and in earlier parts of this series I’ve looked at ridding the art form of the “great man” inheritance that built cruelty into its DNA and the movement for fair pay.

But getting back to business has also reminded show people of the specific weirdness of their work. In sync with the resurgence of labor activism nationwide, actors, dancers, stage managers, technicians and others have been questioning the nuts and bolts of their contracts — both the documents that detail their jobs and the wider assumptions about what they owe an audience. Can the theater, they ask, find a way to uphold them more holistically as humans, even as they continue to gut themselves every night?

Some people will not even agree that it should. The idea that theater is a calling, not a job, and that the two categories are mutually exclusive, is so ingrained in the industry’s ethos — not to mention its business model — that demands for shorter working days, more understudies, intimacy coordinators, mental health stipends, child care reimbursements and other accommodations are often met with doubt or derision. Caring for actors, some say, is coddling. Suffering is a badge of honor, and the theater is properly a purple-heart club.

That indoctrination goes deep. Stanislavski saw his students as votaries in an ascetic cult. The men who created the dominant forms of American theater assembled their power by extorting it from others. Musicals have often romanticized the idea that a good artist is a starving one. And Broadway dancers, many trained in a system even more repressive than the theater’s, have traditionally been expected to perform like robots, retire early and shut up in between.

Perhaps the most pervasive and pernicious maxim is the one that says the show must go on — no matter what. Work rules that would seem ludicrous in any other business are, in the theater, built into the contracts. Performers represented by Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union for [theater] actors and stage managers, are typically engaged for eight-show weeks, but productions can increase that number under certain circumstances. During holiday seasons, many offer 10-show schedules, and nonunion gigs can exceed even that.

Another rule, governing the number of hours a company can work during technical rehearsals, is so reviled it has been the subject of a 2015 backstage comedy. In Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” — named for the clause in Equity contracts that permits 12-hour days if there are two hours off — the under-slept and daylight-deprived company of an absurd plantation melodrama undergoes a kind of mass psychosis while the tech teams adjust lights and scenery.

[10 Out of 12 ran Off-Broadway at SoHo Repertory Theater in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, 10 June-18 July 2015.]

It’s not fiction. Kate Shindle, the president of Equity, has lived it herself. As a working actor she spent part of 2018 at a regional theater having “an awesome creative experience,” she told me in an email. (She declined to name the theater.) “But the schedule was no joke. On the longest days, I left my apartment at 9 a.m. and didn’t return home until after 1 a.m. And to be clear, the employer wasn’t bending or breaking work rules. This is the intensity that the American theater has been relying on for generations. The workers have helped sustain a model that simply needs to be rewritten.”

At its annual convention last year, Equity delegates endorsed the elimination of 10 out of 12s — along with five-show weekend-performance schedules and six-day workweeks. But while these were just recommendations for future contract negotiations, some theaters have already begun to experiment with the ideas.

For Donya K. Washington, the festival producer at Oregon Shakespeare Festival [in Ashland], the experiment has its roots in 2016. It was then, while working at a different theater, that a production department head told her how the 12-hour tech calls for actors were nothing compared to what he experienced. To manage his crew, implement changes and debrief later, he arrived at the theater well before the cast and stayed well after. As a result, he was working 16-hour days for days at a time.

“That’s not sustainable,” Washington said in a recent Zoom conversation. “I didn’t know what to do about it, but it stuck in my head.”

After arriving in Oregon in 2019, where she was drafted onto the team creating the intensely complicated schedule that allows a repertory company to function, she started looking for ways to eliminate the 10 out of 12s. It was then that a worker “began proselytizing” for another quality-of-life improvement: the five-day workweek. “We had just finished building the calendar for the 2021 season, and my brain broke,” Washington said.

But the pandemic — which closed the festival’s theaters for 14 months — gave her time to think. Over the course of 50 calendar drafts, she played with the parameters. What if the company produced five shows instead of the usual 11? What if they mounted one show at a time instead of several in rep? In one of those passes, since the exercise “wasn’t real anyway,” she decided to see if “you could do a five-day, 40-hour week and still get a production up. And lo and behold you could.”

On a spreadsheet, anyway. In reality, when the festival fully reopened this April, the five-day week was not quite attainable. (They got as low as five-and-a-half.) But Washington feels it will be possible in the future, by adding about two additional weeks of rehearsals per show to make up for the lost time. The cost, she said, “would not be ginormous.” Already 10 out of 12s have been eliminated without trouble, reduced to 8 out of 10s — a step in the right direction. “And even if just from a business perspective it makes sense,” Washington added, because happier, healthier, better-rested companies produce a better product.

“Sometimes we have a mind-set of doing something for the sake of doing it, because that’s how it’s always been done,” she said. “But step by step we have to retrain ourselves. And not just actors. Even I have to remind myself I’m not supposed to work seven days a week!”

When I pointed out that we were having this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, Washington smiled and shrugged.

The theater is unlikely to become a model workplace anytime soon. It’s always going to be a very tough life choice for most people. But who gets to make that choice is one of the things at stake in the calls for bettering a work-life balance that more often presents itself as a work-nonwork nightmare. Those who can’t afford to be penniless must generally opt out of theatrical careers, and if they do get a job they can’t afford to complain.

Among that group, traditionally, have been parents of young children. Even if you have a stay-at-home partner or the means to hire full-time care, the mismatched hours of a baby’s schedule and an actor’s can be unbearable. Gray, the “Hadestown” star, was horrified to find that her older son, now 6, at some point started to cry whenever she sang, having learned to associate the sound with her going away. “It’s brutal,” she said, “when your child hates what you do. I felt like a deadbeat mom.”

Not that working while pregnant was less worrisome. “We sign contracts that say we must always be able to fit the costume,” she told me, adding that she hid her second pregnancy “because there are so many stigmas.”

But general acclaim for her performance in “Hadestown” — and a 2019 Tony Award nomination to cap it — emboldened her when her contract was up for renewal. “I asked for an alternate for the Sunday matinee and Tuesday night, so that I could be home at least one day when my kids are too.” Previously, like most actors, her only day off was a Monday.

When the producers, to her surprise, said yes, Gray found that the block of three days off, Sunday through Tuesday, made a huge difference. Finally getting enough sleep, she could “bang out” her two-show Wednesday “like nothing.” Her partner felt supported, she could play with her children, she could see other people’s work and attend the galas where connections are made. And even though the pandemic soon shut down that arrangement, it remains a model. Elizabeth Stanley, the star of “Jagged Little Pill,” made a similar deal when she returned to that show from maternity leave, splitting the role of Mary Jane with her friend Heidi Blickenstaff.

[Jagged Little Pill played 5 December 2019-17 December 2021 at the Broadhurst Theatre.]

These are, so far, one-off solutions, available to women considered important to the commercial success of a show. To test whether the idea of supporting parents could work in the nonprofit sector, the Playwrights Realm, an Off Broadway company devoted to early-career playwrights, created a pilot program called the Radical Parent-Inclusion Project. Roberta Pereira, the Realm’s executive director, explained that during the 2019-20 season, which included a production of Anna Moench’s “Mothers,” the company basically tried every possible accommodation to make parents welcome not only onstage and backstage but also in the audience.

Among those accommodations was a caretaker reimbursement of up to $750, available to anyone working on the theater’s programming that season. (The credit was good for any kind of caretaking, including eldercare.) Rehearsals were cut back to 30 hours over the course of five days from 36 hours in six, necessitating an extra week to make up the difference. Broadway Babysitters, an arts-focused child care company, was hired to mind children during open auditions and callbacks, and a 4 p.m. matinee was added to the schedule. “For children who are younger and take naps,” Pereira said, “that was a much better time than 2 p.m.”

[Mothers was staged at Manhattan’s The Duke on 42nd Street, 25 September-12 October 2019.]

The free child care was not just for performers, by the way; audience members brought a total of 22 children, half of them less than a year old, to the matinee — which perhaps as a result sold out.

“Not that every theater should try this at the level we did,” Pereira said, “but you could see which things work for you. Some cost nothing, some cost a lot.” In all, the season’s caretaking enhancements added about $38,000 to the company’s $1.3 million budget, most of it covered by increased grants from its usual funders. That’s in line with what PAAL, the Parent Artist Advocacy League for Performing Arts and Media, has found at other theaters experimenting with child care programs. For Elevator Repair Service, a New York-based company, the cost of those programs amounted to less than 2 percent of the budget, PAAL reported.

As a result, Pereira said, actors who effectively used to pay to be in a show — or just to audition for it — may no longer have to make the choice between plays and parenting.

Achieving a better work-life balance is something you might expect to read about in emails from the human relations departments of companies promoting Yoga Thursdays. And though by no means common in American business, child care stipends are at least a familiar concept. But some of the other changes happening in the theater are intensely specific to the needs of the stage.

One is the growing presence of intimacy directors, who help shape moments of physical contact in ways that feel safe to the people performing them. Intimacy Directors & Coordinators, one of several organizations created to further the field, defines its aim as the creation of “a culture of consent” in storytelling  [See “Theatrical Intimacy Designer,” 26 May 2019, and “More On Theatrical Intimacy,” 29 August 2019.]. Though that culture was traditionally the responsibility of a show’s director, the history of abuse in rehearsal and production has led many actors to advocate for the hiring of dedicated professionals on every show where the subject may come up — which is to say, virtually all of them.

“To not have someone in that position is asking for trouble,” Audra McDonald told me in a recent phone interview. She first worked with an intimacy director in 2019, when Claire Warden helped stage the nude scenes and other physical interactions between her and her co-star, Michael Shannon, in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Having been in previous situations where she felt she “didn’t have the right to speak up about what was happening,” McDonald found Warden’s presence “revelatory.”

[Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune ran at the Broadhurst Theatre, 30 May-28 July 2019.]

“Knowing what the boundaries and parameters were for what Michael and I had to go through on that stage, we could push up against them as hard as we possibly could while knowing what lines not to cross,” she said. “It’s about knowing where the bottom of the pool is, so you feel safer about diving all the way down and then swimming as fearlessly and fiercely as you want.”

“Pass Over,” Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s harrowing play about the precarious lives of two young Black men, also had an intimacy coordinator, Ann James. But its producers offered the cast another protection against the potential trauma of the story: a mental health allowance.

[Pass Over was staged 22 August-10 October 2021 at the August Wilson Theatre.]

The allowance permitted actors to seek reimbursements of up to $250 a week for expenses deemed beneficial to their “health and wellness as it relates to performing this show eight times a week,” the policy stated. Matt Ross, the lead producer, added that the definition of “health and wellness” was deliberately broad; it could mean, for instance, a therapist or a voice lesson or a massage.

Cody Renard Richard, the production stage manager, said it was only fitting to offer that support. “From their first class, actors have been asked to bring their traumas into a certain space, been nagged to call up personal stuff so they can cry in a scene. To ask them to open their wounds like that and not give them the help to deal with the result is incredibly unfair.”

The additional cost of the mental health stipend, along with the production’s intimacy coordinator and the equity, diversity and inclusion consultant, Nicole Johnson, was “minuscule,” Ross said. “Probably less than 1 percent of the overall weekly costs.”

But low cost is not the main selling point for advocates of such changes; undoing the harm built into the system is. And one of the reasons there is so much resistance to what seem like obviously worthy goals is that the harm has never been evenly distributed. When I spoke to Wayne Cilento, who originated the song “I Can Do That” in the 1975 musical “A Chorus Line,” he seemed proud of his ability to work on that show despite what he described as constant back and knee injuries. Later, in Bob Fosse’s “Dancin’,” which earned Cilento a Tony Award nomination in 1978, he missed only two performances in one-and-a-half years “while other people who didn’t have my urgency were dropping all around,” he said. “Stepping out was not my way.”

[Broadway’s début production of A Chorus Line played at the Shubert Theatre, 25 July 1975-28 April 1990; it originated at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 21 May-13 July 1975. Dancin’ opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 27 March 1978 and ran there through 29 November 1980, moving to the Ambassador Theatre from 30 November 1980 to 27 June 1982.]

Still, in preparing to direct and choreograph a revival of “Dancin’” for Broadway, he said he was more conscious of looking out for his dancers than Fosse was. (Fosse “never had a conversation about how’s your back or how’s your hamstring.”) For the tryout at San Diego’s Old Globe this spring, he cut the material from three acts to two and divvied up “his” track — the sequence of dances he’d done in the original production — among several men because it now seemed too much to ask of just one. For the planned 2023 Broadway production, he is rethinking the number of swings and covers to step into any role at any time so that injured dancers will feel less pressure to perform. And he is much more collaborative with the ensemble than Fosse was with him.

[Dancin’ was staged at the Old Globe from 19 April to 5 June this year.  The planned Broadway revival is tentatively scheduled for the August Wilson Theatre, 20 November 2023-8 February 2024.]

“But it’s a fine line,” he said. “Incorporating the ensemble in the conversation makes them feel trusted and cared for, and it’s good for the show. But — this sounds awful — even though I want to hear your problems, at some point I don’t want to. The bottom line is: What you have to do for the show is what you have to do for the show. And the director, the choreographer, is the one who decides what that is.”

Cilento is touching on a problem that underlies the uneasiness some people feel about the changes advocates are seeking. So much of what we are used to in the theater, so much of it thrilling, is ultimately the result of individual virtuosity being inspired by individual vision, even if the individual with the vision is a tyrant. When everyone is equally empowered what happens to it? If the theater ever does become a worker’s paradise, will it still produce heavenly art?

Another source of unease is that those of us — I include myself — who grew up in the harsh, sometimes inhumane ways of thinking about the theater may have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome. About the harshness we are blasé or even sentimental. When, in “A Chorus Line,” Cilento sang, with the rest of the ensemble, “What I Did for Love,” we understood the response to be: Everything. Anything. The gift was ours to borrow.

Now I’m pretty sure that’s not the right answer.

[Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for the Times; additional details are in the afterword to “Article 1,” 23 September.

[The fourth and last essay in Green’s series, “The Reformation,” will be posted on Sunday. 2 October.  Please come back to Rick On Theater for the conclusion to the series.]