World Theatre Day 2026

Friday, 27 March 

[World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), and is celebrated annually on March 27 by global ITI centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to celebrate an international message and remarks from national cultural leaders. The Global Theater Initiative (GTI), a partnership between Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics (the Lab), encourages U.S. theatres, individual artists, institutions and audiences to celebrate the occasion annually on the 27th of March. 

[Since 1962, World Theatre Day has been celebrated by the circulation of the World Theatre Day Message through which, at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares their reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day international message was written by Jean Cocteau in 1962. Succeeding honorees have included Arthur Miller (1963), Ellen Stewart (1975), Vaclav Havel (1994), Ariane Mnouchkine (2005), Sultan bin Mohammad Al Qasimi (2007), Augusto Boal (2009), Dame Judi Dench (2010), Jessica A. Kaahwa (2011).

[In GTI's role as the U.S. center of ITI, a U.S.-based author is chosen to circulate a national message for World Theatre Day in addition to the international message. Past U.S. honorees have included Mildred Ruiz-Sapp and Steven Sapp (2021), Indigenous Direction (2019), Heather Raffo (2018), Kwame Kwei-Armah (2017), Ping Chong (2016), Diane Rodriguez (2014), Jeffrey Wright (2011) and Lynn Nottage (2010). 

[In 2022, for the first time, GTI invited a U.S.-based Emergent Artist to pen a message and that author was storyteller/activist Jasmin Cardenas. This is now a continuing feature of the U.S. celebration of World Theatre Day.

[To learn more about World Theatre Day, visit the official website at www.world-theatre-day.org.  —"About World Theatre Day,” Theatre Communications Group website.]

INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE
by Willem Dafoe

[Willem Dafoe (actor, theater maker; b. 1955), Artistic Director of the Theatre Department at La Biennale di Venezia, was among the founding members of The Wooster Group.  Based at The Performing Garage in New York (1977-2004), they developed a distinctive approach to avant-garde theater.  

[He then went on to collaborate with Robert Wilson (1941-2025; director and playwright of experimental theater), Marina Abramovic (b. 1946; Serbian-born conceptual and performance artist), Richard Foreman (1937-2025; avant-garde experimental playwright and director; founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater), and Romeo Castellucci (b. 1960; Italian theater director, playwright, artist, and designer).  

[In the early 1980s, he also began working in cinema and since earned international acclaim for his versatility across both independent and mainstream films.  He has received four Academy Award nominations and was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2018.  

[As an actor, he’s received numerous accolades including nominations for four Academy Awards (1987 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Platoon [1986]; 2001 Best Supporting Actor nomination for Shadow of the Vampire [2000]; 2018 Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Florida Project [2017]; 2019 Best Actor nomination for At Eternity’s Gate [2018]), a BAFTA Award, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Critics' Choice Movie Awards and five Screen Actors Guild Awards.  

[He received four Independent Spirit Award nominations winning twice for Best Supporting Male for his roles in Shadow of the Vampire and The Lighthouse (2019).  On 8 January 2024, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[Dafoe’s commitment to theater continues to shape his artistic vision and performance practice.]

I am an actor principally know as a film actor. But my roots are deeply in the theatre. I was a member of the Wooster Group from 1977-2003 creating and performing original pieces at The Performing Garage in NYC and touring throughout the world. I have also worked with Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci. Now, I am the Artistic Director of The Venice Theatre Biennale. This appointment, the events in the world, and my desire to return to theatre work has strongly formed my belief in the unique positive power and importance of the theatre.

At the humble beginning of my time in The Wooster Group, the NY based theatre company, we would often get very little public at some of the performances at our theatre. Often the rule was if there were more performers than public we could choose to cancel. But we never did. Many of the company were not trained in the theatre but were people of different disciplines that came together to make theatre—so “the show must go on” was not really our mantra, however we felt an obligation to keep our meeting with the public.

We would also often rehearse during the day and in the evening show the material as a work in progress. We would sometimes spend years on a show while sustaining ourselves with touring of older performances. Working years on a piece would often become tedious for me and I found rehearsals somewhat trying but these works in progress showings were always exciting—even if the tiny public was a damning judgment of the level of interest in what we were doing. It just made me realize how no matter how few people, the audience as witness gave the theatre its meaning and life.

Like the sign in the gambling hall says “YOU MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN.” Shared experience in real time of an act of creation, that may be scored and designed but is always different, is certainly the obvious strength of the theatre. Socially, politically, theatre has never been so important and vital to our understanding of ourselves and the world.

The “elephant in the room” is new technologies and social networking, which promises connection but seemingly has fragmented and isolated people from each other. I use my computer daily even if I have no social media, I have even googled myself as an actor, and have also consulted AI for information. But you have to be blind not to recognize that human contact risks being replaced by relationships with devices. While some technology can serve us well the problem of not knowing who’s on the other end of the circle of communication runs deep and contributes to a crisis of truth and reality. While the internet can raise questions, it very seldom captures a sense of wonder that theatre creates. A wonder based in attention, engagement and a spontaneous community of those present in a circle of action and response.

As an actor and theatre maker I remain a believer in the power of theatre. In a world that seems to get more divisive, controlling and violent, our challenge as theatre makers is to avoid the corruption of theatre solely as a commercial enterprise dedicated to the entertainment by distraction or as the dry institutional preserver of traditions, but rather to foster its strength to connect peoples, communities, cultures and above all to question where we are going. . . . . .

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to imagine what we aspire to.

We are social animals and designed biologically for engagement with the world. Every sense organ is a gateway for encounter and through this meeting we achieve greater definition of who we are. Through storytelling, aesthetics, language, movement, scenography— theatre as a total art form can make us see what was, what is and what our world could be.

*  *  *  *
U.S. MESSAGE
by Moisés Kaufman 

[Moisés Kaufman (Venezuelan-American theater director, filmmaker, and playwright; founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama in Florida; b. 1963) received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama (b. 1961; 44th President of the United States: 2009-17) in 2016.  He’s a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright whose Broadway credits include Paradise Square (2022; 10 Tony Award nominations), Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song (2018), Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams (2011; Pulitzer Prize Finalist), The Heiress with Jessica Chastain (2012), 33 Variations with Jane Fonda (2009; wrote and directed, Tony nomination Best Play), and Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife (2003; Tony Award, Pulitzer Prize).

[Other productions include: Pulitzer Prize finalist Here There Are Blueberries (2018), Velour: A Drag Spectacular (2024), Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (2023), Seven Deadly Sins (2021; Drama Desk Award).  He is the co-writer of The Laramie Project (2000) and the writer of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997).  He’s an Obie and Drama Desk award winner and a Guggenheim fellow.]

Hello everyone, I’m Moisés Kaufman, I am a playwright, director and Artistic Director of Tectonic Theater Project and I am honored to have been asked to address you on World Theater Day 2026. 

Hola, soy Moisés Kaufman, soy escritor, director y director artístico de Tectonic Theater Project. Y me siento honrado de haber sido elegido para dirigirme a ustedes en este Día Mundial del Teatro 2026.

There are moments in history when the world feels as though it is breaking apart — when language itself becomes unstable, when facts are contested, when communities fracture along lines of fear and suspicion. In such moments, we may ask ourselves: What is the role of theatre?

I was born in Venezuela and came to the United States as an immigrant. To leave one’s country is to experience rupture — of language, of belonging, of certainty.

It was through this experience of displacement that I began to understand theatre not simply as performance, but as a space of encounter. A place where identities can be examined rather than assumed. A place where complexity is not feared, but honored. My life between cultures taught me that the act of listening across difference is both fragile and transformative.

When we founded Tectonic Theater Project, we were driven by a simple curiosity: How do we understand the world through the stories of others? How do we gather narratives from the real world, fragments of memory, contradiction, silence — and shape them into something that allows us to see more clearly?

So we asked how a group of artists might come together not merely to interpret a story, but to examine the forces beneath it, to gather voices, to sit with contradiction.

This process has taught me something essential: theatre is not the art of certainty. It is the art of inquiry.

Theatre, at its most urgent, is an act of investigation.

When we created The Laramie Project from the voices of a small American town grappling with an act of violence, we discovered that the stage could become a civic space. Audiences did not come simply to watch; they came to witness. They came to confront grief, anger, confusion, compassion — sometimes all at once. The theatre became not a courtroom and not a pulpit, but a gathering place.

That experience changed me. It revealed that theatre can hold complexity without sacrificing community.

In our time, public discourse often demands that we choose sides quickly. It rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Yet theatre insists on something different. It asks us to dwell in ambiguity. It reminds us that a single story rarely contains the whole truth. It invites us to encounter the humanity of those we might otherwise reduce to categories.

This is not a passive act. It is a courageous one.

To sit in the dark beside strangers and listen deeply is a form of resistance. It resists isolation. It resists dehumanization. It resists the temptation to turn away.

In a world mediated by screens and algorithms, this shared tribal experience is radical. It cannot be paused, scrolled, or muted. It unfolds in real time, and we are accountable to one another within it.

I have often reflected on the word “tectonic.” It refers to the forces beneath the earth’s surface — slow, invisible pressures that eventually reshape landscapes. Theatre works in a similar way. It may not create immediate transformation, but it exerts pressure. It shifts perception. It unsettles assumptions. It opens cracks through which empathy can enter.

And empathy is not a sentimental concept. It is an ethical practice.

When actors embody other people — when they carry their words, their cadences, their hesitations — they ask us to imagine what it feels like to inhabit another life. That imaginative act is foundational to democracy. A democratic society depends upon our capacity to see beyond ourselves.

Peace, too, depends on that capacity.

Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is the presence of understanding. It is the willingness to engage difference without erasure. It is the courage to hear a story that challenges our own.

Theatre does not provide solutions to global crises. It does something both more modest and more profound: it creates the conditions for intimate encounters.

Within the space of a stage, we practice holding multiple truths. And we train in empathy. 

These practices are not separate from civic life; they are essential to it.

On this World Theatre Day, I think of theatre-makers across the globe — in grand institutions and in makeshift spaces, in cities and in villages, in times of stability and in times of conflict. I think of artists who rehearse under threat, who speak when silence would be safer, who gather communities even when resources are scarce. Their work affirms something fundamental: the human need to tell stories and to hear them is irrepressible.

Today, let us honor the rehearsal rooms where questions are asked with rigor and humility. Let us honor the actors who risk vulnerability. Let us honor the designers who shape worlds from light and shadow. Let us honor the crews and theater staffs that make the work possible.

And let us recommit ourselves to the slow, tectonic work of listening.

If the forces beneath the surface are powerful enough, landscapes shift.

May our stages continue to shift the landscape of the human heart.

Let us keep asking questions.
Let us keep listening.
Let us keep gathering in the dark — believing that when the lights rise, we may see one another more clearly.
Thank you.

*  *  *  *
U.S. EMERGENT ARTIST MESSAGE
by Banna Desta

[Banna Desta (she/they; late 20’s-early 30’s) is an Eritrean- and Ethiopian-American writer for the screen and stage who crafts stories about and for the African diaspora.  She is the author of The Abyssinians (Audible, 2024); Midnight in Abyssinia (La MaMa’s CultureHub, 2024); Red Taxi (2025); Bygone Fruit which premiered at the 2024 Women in Theater Festival (6-24 June 2024 in Greenwich Village, New York City) and Pining which premiered at Rattlestick Theater (New York City) and was published by Samuel French in 2019.  

[Desta’s work for the stage has been supported and workshopped by Atlantic Theater Company, The Apollo Theater, National Black Theatre, The New Group, and the Dramatists Guild Foundation.  She has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Art Omi, Marble House Project, and Tofte Lake Center.  She was a staff writer for the BET+ series First Wives Club (Netflix Top Ten, 2019-22).  

[Desta has assisted multiple television series in both the writers’ room and on set, including FOX/NBC’s This Is Us (2016-22), and Amazon Prime’s Harlem (2021-25).  She’s held fellowships with Sun Valley Writers Conference, Marcie Bloom Fellowship in Film, and The Gotham Film and Media Institute.  She is a writing professor and arts educator at New York University, Rehabilitation through the Arts and Harlem Children's Zone.]

My name is Banna, and I am the emergent author for the International Theater Institute in the United States. Happy World Theater Day to theater makers across the country and around the world. It is my belief that storytelling is the bloodline of humanity, pumping empathy and understanding, reinforcing purpose and preserving culture and legacy in our hearts. Many of us have been shaped and inspired by the stories we’ve heard, whether they’re passed down from previous generations or absorbed through other mediums. Most forms of storytelling share theater’s DNA. They’re fleshed out through performance with tones of drama, comedy or both.

Coming from an Eritrean and Ethiopian household, storytelling was one of the ways I was able to hold on to my ancestral lineage being born and raised in the United States. Whether they were stories that illustrated the natural beauty and simplicity of African life or the tragedies of the civil war that delivered my parents to the U.S.[1974-91] , tales of the past were embedded in me and undoubtedly inspired me to indulge my own imagination and nurture my own creative inventions. They inspired me to explore my own history, sourcing facts to support the fiction in my plays The Abyssinians and Red Taxi, and influencing my love of realist fiction to write contemporary Black narratives in my new play, Nightlife. Like so many people in America, my life has been global and so, my stories reflect that.

Becoming a theatermaker wasn’t a straightforward journey, as the conventions of modern life felt like they required a more traditional vocation. I ignored the call to be an artist. However, in college, theater was my very first class, Monday mornings at 9am, my freshman year. It was there that I discovered Paula Vogel [b. 1951], re-explored Shakespeare, Moisés Kaufman and a number of other classic and contemporary artists and their work. No matter when their plays were published and how many years had passed since, their work felt urgent, and as a result so did my need to tell stories. I could no longer ignore the call. I took my writing more seriously, using it as a means of connecting with myself and sharing my work in the hopes of connecting with others.

Discovering theater was where my life felt most romantic, where I felt most comfortable to wrestle with the world’s competing contradictions. When I moved to New York to pursue storytelling more seriously, I was astonished by the depth of artistry, the grit and grace of theater’s artisans and the immense compassion theater inspired in me. I sat in the audience of plays like Is God Is at Soho Rep [by Aleshea Harris, 2018], In the Blood at Signature Theater [2017] and Hamlet at St. Ann’s Warehouse [2020], awestruck at the blend of rigor, chemistry and collaboration that made these experiences possible. I felt eager to create, to experiment, to court risk.

Most important of all, theater taught me that we must lean on each other. The life of theatermakers, theaters and their audiences depends on us working collaboratively towards our united future. We must protect each other’s dignity. One does not have to look too far to witness the theatrics of daily life, whether that be in our politics, our communities or even on our phones. Today, as I address you in 2026, the dominant narrative from the highest seat in office, as well as our national leaders, is encouraging us to be cruel to each other. Their intent to erase history, misinform us and keep us at odds with one another is more clear than ever before. Their messaging is sinister, divisive and harmful. It is an assault on our collective dignity.

Despite the fearmongering, despite their deepest wish to separate ourselves from each other, it is our responsibility as theatermakers to have the courage to rewrite this narrative. In order to reclaim the narrative, we must turn to our foundation. Theater is foundational to many, if not all, of the ways we exchange stories in the world today. It is where we can seek more thoughtful provocations about our times, it is where our heartbeats synchronize, it is where we enter the dark to feel the light. We must be fearless and relentless in protecting this sacred space and to attempt at making the connection.

On this World Theater Day, may we recommit to the truth, may we guard our foundation, and may we keep humanity's bloodline alive, in and outside the theater.

[I don’t repost the World Theatre Day messages each year, but I have done so for several of the recent ones.  You can check back on these sets of messages: “World Theatre Day 2012” (24 April 2012), “World Theatre Day: 27 March 2022” (4 April 2022), “World Theatre Day 2023” (27 March 2023), and “World Theatre Day 2024” (28 March 2024).]

Verticals

From the 1950s to the 1980s, we had essentially three networks dominating our television landscape: ABC, CBS, and NBC.  In 1986, Fox Broadcasting joined the Big 3, but we still had over-the-air broadcasters for our TV content providers. 

Then, in the early 1980s, cable TV broke into the market when CNN, MTV, ESPN, and some other specialized channels began providing service.  In the early 2000s, online streaming services branched out from traditional broadcast, giving audiences exponentially more platforms on which to find the latest television show.  By 2022, streaming viewership officially exceeded cable usage in the U.S.

Now, a new form of TV-viewing has arisen, and it’s not on a television at all, or even on a computer screen—but on our cell phones.

Verticals or vertical productions, also known as vertical shorts, micro-dramas, mini-dramas, verts, and more, are short, serialized stories filmed in a 9:16 portrait format specifically designed for mobile viewing on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and dedicated apps like ReelShort and DramaBox. 

For comparison, at this point in 2026, micro-drama viewers in the United States number 28 million; traditional streaming platforms attract a little over 200 million watchers; the cable/pay-TV viewers number 50-60 million households (not individual viewers); and the number of “non-pay TV” households (over-the-air viewers) is projected to reach 80.7 million by the end of 2026.

A vertical drama is defined as an online audiovisual program consisting of 60 to 100 episodes with each one running from several dozen seconds to about 15 minutes.  Each episode features a clear theme and the main storyline is continuous and forms a complete narrative arc.

The most successful verticals feature episodes from 1 to 2 minutes long.  A complete series typically runs between 90 and 180 minutes, compared to 120 to 150 minutes for a feature film or 60 minutes for a standard episode of a traditional U.S. television series.

Along with several other characteristics (which I’ll enumerate shortly), the format of verticals is distinguished by its structure as an episodic series and its narrative-driven dramatic form from other short-form videos online such as brief clips of people’s daily activities such as vlogs, how-to’s or tutorials like tips, recipes, or educational shortcuts, or videos based on popular music, “hashtags,” or specific physical challenges.

Furthermore, the narrative style is purposely dynamic and intense.  Unlike most content on platforms such as TikTok, micro-dramas are professionally produced with paid writers, actors, and crew (which accounts for the interest among unions like WGA and SAG-AFTRA).

Just as the episodes are fast-paced, so is production.  Joy Quinn, co-owner of 9:16 Productions of Kansas City, Missouri, where she’s also a producer, the artistic director, and the production designer, laid out the process:

Vertical productions are quite unique in structure and timeline.  Pre-production typically lasts 3-4 weeks, filming takes 6-9 days (rarely more than 12), and post-production wraps up within 1-2 months. . . .  Although the total runtime equals that of a typical feature film, verticals are broken into short episodes—each lasting just about 1 to 1.5 minutes.  Viewers scroll through the episodes rapidly, completing the series in one quick burst.

According to the conservative British daily newspaper The Telegraph, a Los Angeles talent agent declared: “They’re cheap and fast and nothing to be proud of—but they’re good work for young actors, despite the lousy pay.”  Critics and regulators have registered concerns over the micro-dramas’ content.

Criticisms include relying too heavily on sensationalism, exploiting viewer emotions, and potential manipulation of susceptible viewers, say, ones who don’t understand the way vertical producers let them buy “extras” without leaving the app (that is, “in-app purchases”).      

This entertainment sector is growing so fast that SAG-AFTRA, the U.S. labor union that represents media professionals (including actors, announcers, dancers, singers, stunt performers, voice-over artists, and others) worldwide, launched a “Verticals Agreement” in October 2025 to regulate the field.  (I won’t get into the specifics of the guild’s contract; aside from the webpage, there’s also a YouTube video featuring Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, and Sean Astin, President.)

(In September 2025, the Writers Guild of America, the two American labor unions—WGA East and WGA West—representing writers in film, television, radio, and online media, reminded its members that writing for verticals or micro-dramas is covered by existing agreements.)

This field of video art is new to me; I only first heard of it when I received an e-mail from SAG-AFTRA announcing the new agreement.  I had to look “verticals” up to see what they are, and I’m going to try to describe it for any ROTters who share my unfamiliarity.  If any or all of this is already within your knowledge and/or experience, just chalk it up to the ramblings of an old geezer who’s chronically out of touch.

Verticals are bite-sized episodes meant for mobile, vertical viewing, primarily on smartphones.  They got their start in China during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-23) but starting around 2023, have expanded to the U.S., where revenues reached $1.3 billion in 2025, and are projected to rise to $3.8 billion by 2030.

The rapid growth in the U.S. is one of the primary reasons major Hollywood entities like Fox Entertainment and Disney have begun investing in vertical platforms or launching their own vertical-content divisions. 

Other major players are entering the space as well, including former Miramax boss Bill Block with the platform GammaTime and the launch of the dedicated vertical studio Knockout Shorts.

The video’s portrait orientation originated in China and was designed to fill the whole screen of a smartphone held upright because producers found that audiences on platforms like ReelShort or TikTok don’t want to rotate their phones. 

While tablets, as well as wearables, like smartwatches, and handheld gaming consoles can connect to the internet and play videos, smartphones are the primary device for vertical content.  This is because micro-dramas are designed for people holding a device vertically with one hand, the way they already use their phones for texting or scrolling, and for which a phone is optimized, but which is awkward with a tablet. 

Even though a tablet is “mobile,” it has much more screen real estate.  If you watch a 9:16 vertical drama on a tablet held horizontally (that is, in landscape mode), you’ll see large black bars (or “mattes”) on each side of the video, defeating the “immersive” purpose of the format.

So, although in a general tech sense ‘mobile’ refers to any handheld, battery-powered computing device designed for portability, in the context of verticals, producers use ‘mobile’ as shorthand for “the vertical screen in your pocket.”

Producers use the vertical drama’s dimensions to ensure the content feels “native” and “immersive.”  These terms have to do with the way the story is built specifically for the phone, rather than just being “shrunk down” from a TV screen.

“Native,” which is about the technical fit (it feels right on the device), refers to content that feels like it belongs on a smartphone naturally.  It follows the “media language” of the device.  The producer ensures that the human eye is focused entirely on the content.

As I noted earlier, it’s designed to be watched while holding the phone vertically in one hand, matching how it’s already used.  Non-native content—like a horizontal movie clipped for TikTok—often has distracting mattes at the top and bottom.  It respects the user’s habit of scrolling because many micro-dramas include interactive elements or “next episode” buttons positioned exactly where your thumb naturally rests.

“Immersive,” which is about the emotional grip (it feels like you are right there with the character), describes the feeling of being pulled directly into the story’s world, often through techniques that make the screen feel like a window rather than a distant display. 

Because, for instance, the portrait frame is narrow, the camera stays very close to the actors’ faces.  This creates an intense, “moving portrait” effect that feels more personal and intimate than traditional wide-screen cinema.  Characters in vertical dramas often look directly into the lens, making it feel as if they are addressing the viewers directly or speaking to them privately. 

By filling the entire vertical screen—which viewers usually hold quite close to their faces—the production blocks out the surrounding physical world, heightening the emotional impact of the drama’s cliffhangers and twists.

The typical episode length of a micro-drama is 1 to 3 minutes, often featuring high-drama suspense to encourage binge-watching.  The series rely on melodramatic tropes—secret romances, revenge arcs, identity-reveal plots, supernatural and fantasy storylines, family drama, and high stakes ventures. 

The first few episodes are usually free, but if a viewer wants to see more, he or she’ll have to pay—buying digital “coins” or passes from the apps (the “in-app purchase”) to watch additional content.  That can cost viewers $10 to $20 a week or up to $80 a month.

Because viewers must pay or watch an ad (a trade of time for content where viewers can unlock the next hook without paying money by sitting through a 30-second video advertisement) to unlock the next 60 seconds, the vertical dramas rely on a narrative structure where every minute must end on a high-stakes emotional beat, a “vertical cliffhanger.” 

Without describing verticals as addictive, one viewer said the stories can suck you in.  After seeing TikTok ads for the ReelShort micro-drama series True Heiress vs. Fake Queen Bee, she watched it and then purchased a pass to finish the 85-part series.

“Despite the cheesy acting, the clip ended on a cliffhanger, and I desperately wanted to see what happened next,” said the viewer.  This viewer pronounced verticals “my generation’s soap opera.”

“The stories are outrageous, and the dialogue is very two-dimensional,” said Ryan Luevano, owner/talent manager of Skyfire Artists, a Los Angeles talent management company, of micro-dramas.  “This isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s also not what it’s about.  It’s the modern-day soap opera.  They’re written for Gen Z, and they’re consuming them on TikTok and Instagram and all these other platforms.”

Some observers, however, like Caiwei Chen, a tech reporter who covers China for MIT Technology Review, question whether micro-dramas are merely a viral curiosity.  “I do worry about how soon people will get tired of it,” she offered.  “It’s competing with TikTok . . . It’s competing with Instagram and a lot of other stuff.”

[In my reading on verticals and micro-dramas, I came across a post on the eponymous blog of Gary Mason, who describes himself as “a working actor and SAG-AFTRA member. I also help other actors . . . figure out this business without making all the mistakes I made.”  He lays out the newly union-sanctioned field of verticals for those in the biz who might be contemplating giving it a go.  I decided it’d made a good afterword for my post, so here’s what he has to say:

“VERTICAL MINI-DRAMAS:
FROM TIKTOK TREND TO SAG-COVERED WORK”
by Gary Mason
23 September 2025

Remember when vertical video was just for Instagram stories and shaky concert footage? Yeah, that changed.

Vertical mini-dramas . . . those addictive, phone-shot serialized shows you’ve probably seen your kids (or grandkids) binge-watching . . . have gone from viral curiosity to legitimate industry. And as of October 2025, SAG-AFTRA has a contract for them.

Which means union actors can now work these productions with full protections.

If you’ve been wondering whether this vertical thing is worth paying attention to . . . the answer just became “probably yes.”

Wait, What ARE Vertical Mini-Dramas?

If you haven’t stumbled across them yet, here’s the quick version.

Vertical mini-dramas (also called micro-dramas) are short, serialized shows shot in portrait mode . . . the way you hold your phone. Episodes run 1-3 minutes each, often with cliffhangers that keep you swiping to the next one. Think soap operas meets TikTok.

They started in China during the pandemic and EXPLODED. We’re talking $819 million in U.S. revenue in 2024. Projections say $3.8 billion by 2030. In China, micro-drama revenue is expected to surpass theatrical box office this year.

Platforms like ReelShort, DramaBox, and various TikTok-native productions are pumping these out constantly. And they need actors.

The SAG-AFTRA Verticals Agreement

In October 2025, SAG-AFTRA launched the Verticals Agreement . . . a new contract specifically designed for this format.

Here’s what you need to know:

What it covers: Serialized micro-dramas shot in vertical (9:16) format with budgets under $300,000.

Why it matters: Union actors can now work these productions with protections. Before this, it was a gray area . . . or you were working non-union.

Typical pay: Lead actors are averaging around $500/day, according to Backstage. Not life-changing money, but real work.

The bigger picture: SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin called this an “exciting new space” and said the union is “meeting the moment.” When the union creates a whole new contract category for something, that’s a signal.

This isn’t replacing traditional TV and film work. It’s adding a new lane. And for actors in regional markets like mine . . . where we’re not swimming in major productions . . . more lanes is good news.

Should YOU Care About This?

Honest answer: it depends on where you are. 

If you’re still figuring out whether acting is for you . . . don’t worry about this yet. Get your fundamentals in place first. Headshots. A basic reel. Profiles on the casting platforms. Learn how to self-tape. THEN start thinking about specialized formats.

If that’s you, my free guide “Start Where You Are” at gary-mason.com covers the mindset and first steps before you spend money on anything.

If you’re actively submitting and building your career . . . this is worth paying attention to. Not because you need to drop everything and chase micro-dramas, but because:

      1.      It’s real, paid, union-covered work
2.      Casting for these productions is happening NOW
3.      Having vertical content in your reel shows you’re current
4.      The market is growing fast . . . getting in early has advantages

If you’re a character actor or play “types” . . . micro-dramas LOVE distinct, memorable faces. The melodramatic style actually works well for bigger performances. This might be a better fit than you’d expect.

Adding Vertical Clips to Your Reel

Even if you’re not chasing micro-drama roles specifically, having a vertical clip or two in your materials signals something to casting: this person understands where the industry is going. 

You don’t need fancy equipment. You need:

• Your phone (shoot in 4K if it supports it)
• A way to mount it vertically (cheap tripod adapters work fine)
• Decent lighting (window light or a simple LED panel . . . no ring lights)
• Clean audio (a $20 lav mic makes a huge difference)

Keep it simple. A 60-90 second scene that shows you can perform in this format. Tight framing . . . your face should dominate the frame. That’s the whole point of vertical.

I cover reel building, self-tape setup, and how to present yourself to casting in “Beyond the Basics” at gary-mason.com. If you’re at the stage where you’re actively submitting and want to make sure your materials are working for you, that’s where to look.

What to Actually Shoot

If you’re creating a vertical clip for your reel, think about what shows you off:

For drama: A confrontation scene. Tight on your face. Emotion building. These formats reward intensity . . . don’t be subtle.

For comedy: Setup, complication, punchline. Reaction shots work great in vertical because you’re RIGHT THERE in the viewer’s face.

For either: Keep it under 90 seconds. Front-load the good stuff. If casting is scrolling through reels, they’re deciding in the first few seconds whether to keep watching.

One or two solid vertical clips is plenty. You’re not replacing your horizontal reel . . . you’re supplementing it.

The Bottom Line

A year ago, I would have told you vertical mini-dramas were an interesting trend but not something to prioritize. Now? SAG-AFTRA built a contract for them. The money is real. The productions are hiring. 

Does that mean you should drop everything and pivot to micro-dramas? No. Get your fundamentals right first. But if you’re already in the game and looking for more opportunities . . . this is a door that just opened.

And doors that just opened tend to have less competition on the other side.

[Mason has more advice on other matters of interest to actors—not just verticals—so interested actors should log onto his blog and have a look.]

Wallace Shawn

 

[In late February 1992, I interviewed actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (b. 1943) on the telephone.  I was doing research on avant-garde stage director Leonardo Shapiro and his Shaliko Company for a profile to be published in The Drama Review in 1993 (“Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony,” vol. 37, no. 4 [T140] [Winter 1993]). 

[Shawn was a friend of Shapiro’s from their student days at New York University’s School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) and he followed and supported Shapiro’s work from the beginning in the early 1970s.  Shawn was working on an MFA in the Graduate Acting Program of SOA from 1966-68 while Shapiro was studying directing in the undergraduate division from 1966 to ’69 for a BFA.  At the same time, Shawn was working with André Gregory (b. 1934) at his theater troupe, the Manhattan Project, which would become a model for Shapiro’s own Shaliko Company in the following decade. 

[I never got to meet Shawn; our only contact was that phone interview, though the actor and writer was instrumental in many of the early steps in Shapiro’s artistic life (see my eight-part post “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro” [16, 19, 22, 25, 28 April, 1, 4, and 7 May 2023]).

[As I’ve recorded elsewhere on Rick On Theater, the first service Shawn rendered Shaliko was to broker the connection between The Shaliko Company and Joseph Papp’s (1921-91) New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater).  The playwright praised Shapiro’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken to Gail Merrifield, Papp’s wife and the director of play development at NYSF, in 1974 and Merrifield got her husband to see it.  Papp offered Shaliko space at the Public Theater on the strength of that production—only the third troupe to have been accorded such a privilege at the time.

[After Measures moved to the Public, Shaliko produced two more shows there.  After the third one, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, Shapiro disbanded his company and decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Shawn. 

[Shawn mediated Shapiro’s return to direct Youth Hostel, overcoming Papp’s reservations by affirming “that he really believed in” the director.  Papp had called Shawn “my favorite writer.”

[The 1976 workshop presentation before subscribers and invited guests was a test to determine if Three Short Plays (as the bill was called in this production), set before, during, and after sex, was suitable for a full staging at the Public.  The one-acts were never put on the NYSF schedule because their explicit portrayal of sex was too seamy for Papp.

[(For the record, the other two plays were Summer Evening, directed by Wilford Leach [1929-88], and Mr. Frivolous, directed by Lee Breuer [1937-2021].  The three plays are published as A Thought in Three Parts [the title under which they were successfully produced in London in February 1977] in Shawn’s Four Plays [Noonday Press, 1998].)

[Shawn later described the workshop as “a disaster,” and the NYSF stage manager’s reports indicate that many spectators left during the performance.  The direction and performances were generally commended and not considered to be at fault for the reception, however, and the forty-five-minute Youth Hostel cemented the life-long friendship between Shawn and Shapiro.

[In 1983, Shapiro, having tried unsuccessfully to relaunch Shaliko, tried again.  Shawn had brought a new play, The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar (1961-90), from England where it had been produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1980, and Shapiro approached Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), who agreed to let him present the play at La MaMa E.T.C., beginning Shaliko’s association with that East Village theater.

[Max Stafford-Clark (b. 1941), the director of the Royal Court, had earlier successfully directed the Shawn one-acts in London under the umbrella title A Thought in Three Parts after they were rejected by Papp.  The production of The Arbor attracted a great deal of attention for its raw power and honesty, so Shawn brought it back to the U.S. and showed it to Shapiro.

[The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar had its U.S. premiere at La MaMa from 9 September to 4 October 1983.  It was generally well received, with Frank Rich of the New York Times asserting, “[T]his modest play . . . is honest and at times affecting in the most plaintive way.  We not only get a completely unsentimental portrait of Andrea, but also a streetwise sketch of a rugged social environment . . . .”

[What I think was the last professional collaboration between Shawn and Shapiro was in 1990.  Shapiro, who’d been appointed artist-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1983, directed a production of Shawn’s 1985 play Aunt Dan and Lemon at Trinity in April.  Out of this association with the school, Shapiro launched the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program in 1987, an advanced theater-training course he administered from the East Village theater and for which Shawn conducted a seminar.

[Shapiro resigned from Trinity/La MaMa in 1992 and closed down Shaliko the next year.  He retired to a mountain cabin in New Mexico, near Taos where he’d lived among the hippie communes doing guerrilla theater from 1969 to 1971.  Diagnosed with bladder cancer, Shapiro died in 1997, a couple of weeks after his 51st birthday.] 

“THE NEW YORKER”
by Susan Dominus 

[Susan Dominus’s profile of actor-playwright Wallace Shawn appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 22 February 2026.  The online version, “Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square?,” was posted on 8 February (and updated 9 February; note bracketed correction below).]

The playwright and actor Wallace Shawn remains possibly the only avant-garde artist to draw tourist attention in Times Square.

After I had lunch with Wallace Shawn, a lifelong New Yorker, he readily accompanied me across town, although it was a frigid Sunday in December and much of the city’s usual post-snow slush had hardened into ice. [The snowfall occurred on 26-27 December 2025, delivering about 4.3 inches of snow to Central Park.] Shawn, who’s 82 and famously small in stature, wore a generic black parka and generic black boots. Before leaving the restaurant, he’d shoved onto his mostly bald head a dark gray wool cap, notable only for a few moth holes. He looked, in other words, like any other city native who could expect to travel invisibly through the streets, except that when we reached the theater where I was meeting my niece, a ripple of jittery energy instantly traveled down the row of people waiting to enter. The two women behind my niece in line nearly jumped when he approached, staring at him in open adoration and amazement. Shawn, who’d already been stopped twice that day by giggly fans, smiled back automatically; such encounters are routine — pleasant enough but also common enough to have little emotional valence.

Shawn showed up in Times Square that day like a one-man tourist attraction, a symbol of the city’s telegenic renderings on shows like “Sex and the City” [Martin Grable: 2004] and “Gossip Girl” [Cyrus Rose: 2021], both of which have featured him as a romantic savior to glamorous Manhattan women in need of a decent (or, really, any) man. He’s also played a New Yorker in such consummately New York films as Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979) — in which he was also cast as an unlikely Lothario — and in the film he wrote and starred in with his friend and colleague André Gregory, “My Dinner With André” (1981), an art house breakout hit in which both men depict versions of themselves as artists. Shawn has earned what he always refers to as a “bourgeois lifestyle” by playing the ultimate funny valentine: his mouth a little weak, his figure less than Greek, all of it superseded by an intelligence and originality that the camera captures at close range.

Although the 30th anniversary of the film “Clueless” (1995) has revived interest in Shawn’s performance as an avuncular teacher, the part for which Times Square tourists may most likely know him is Vizzini, the Sicilian would-be hit man of “The Princess Bride” (1987). His most famous line, “Inconceivable!,” turns up several times in the movie, and Shawn’s wildly varied delivery — distinctively nasal and lisping one moment, cocky and debonair another — made it a kind of meme long before the internet would spread it even further. It’s an earworm of an exclamation — nerdy, beloved, handy. People still shout it at him on the street as he walks by. Even at a Harvard reunion (he attended the school as an undergraduate), teenage children of his classmates called it out as they passed him, something to be reckoned with for someone who once told an interviewer that his goal as a human being, since childhood, was “to be taken seriously.”

Shawn, who describes acting as “this funny thing I took on late in life,” considers himself primarily a playwright — one who has, as he puts it in the introduction to the published version of “My Dinner With André” [Grove Press, 1981], “generously shown on the stage my interior life as a raging beast.” In “Our Late Night” (1975), an urbane party devolves almost immediately into chatty conversations about fornicating and farting; someone vomits loudly offstage, and a man casually tells a woman he’s just met that he’d like to have sex with her, and in what fashion. In 2013, he performed, along with the actress Julie Hagerty and others, in his play “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” [Joseph Papp Public Theater, Off-Broadway, 28 October-1 December 2013 ], in which he envisions a world where a consumable solution to a global food shortage has the disturbing side effect of making humans (even more) obsessed with their genitalia, with other taboos cast aside and recalled as quaint relics of a more uptight time.

Shawn’s works often have the feel of profane fairy tales in which humans aren’t so much transformed into animals but revealed as them. His own creative compulsion seems to lie in exposing his characters’ secrets, their shameful, if universal, instinct to root around for pleasure and comfort, whatever the cost — be it others’ emotional anguish or, on a more global scale, the suffering of the oppressed. Next month, his new play, “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” [opened 5 March 2026], will open off Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater. Shawn, whose own family was defined by a longstanding secret, continues to explore what’s hidden in “Moth Days” — but the play represents something of a departure, a move toward material that is more personal, less pungent or political. Gregory, who is directing it at 91, says it’s a play that has a deceptively simple quality. “The tip of the iceberg is what the audience sees, but the bulk of the iceberg is invisible and underwater,” he says. “So underneath this play is a lifetime of writing and a lifetime of being involved in the world.”

As if in counterpoint, Shawn is also reprising, two days a week at the same theater, his role in the one-person play “The Fever” (1990), which features a member of the privileged class who comes to feel revulsion at the violence inherent in maintaining the global status quo. “‘The Fever’ is a very harsh, cruel depiction of bourgeois people,” he says. “In ‘Moth Days,’ I have a fondness for those people, even a love for them.”

For all his recognition as an important figure in the theater and as a writer (Shawn has published two books that showcase his essays [Essays (Haymarket Books, 2010); Sleeping Among Sheep Under a Starry Sky: Essays 1985-2021 (Europa Editions, 2022)] and been honored by PEN [worldwide association of writers] for his playwriting), he is perceived by millions of people, and reminded almost on a daily basis, that he will forever be best known for his screen work, some of which he did decades ago over the course of just a few weeks. It occurs to me, as we talk over lunch, that it might be alienating for Shawn to have his exterior persona — the powerful associations people have with the look of his face, the shape of his body — mean so much to those he regularly encounters, when it’s often because of a piece of work, released years in the past, about which he feels relatively little. “It’s unbelievably strange!” he says, leaning in across the table. “Unbelievably strange!”

The strange, the unsaid, the contrast between our outer and inner selves — these have been Shawn’s preoccupations since he was a precocious and mildly rebellious child of the Upper East Side. When he was 13, he and a friend went to see the first American production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1956) at the Helen Hayes Theatre. The play, which O’Neill [1888-1953] wrote toward the end of his life, is his most autobiographical, the story of family members in pain facing the secrets that made their trajectories both bearable and awful; it’s about sons stumbling in their efforts to build lives beyond the shadow of their outwardly successful father, a man grappling with his own heavy disappointments. [James O'Neill (1847-1920) was an Irish-American stage actor, famous largely for one role: Edmond Dantès. the title character in a stage adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo.]

The play opened something in Shawn, who didn’t know back in 1956 that he would end up a playwright and actor; he just felt he’d been given a view through a porthole to a universe in which what was real could be expressed and lived, loudly and publicly. “I was thrilled by its truthfulness,” he tells me. “It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, ‘This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.’”

Shawn announced to his parents that they had to go see the production, which they did — and then pointed out to them afterward that the family in the play was much like their own. “My mother said, ‘What do you mean, dear? I’m not a dope fiend!’” he recalls. “But yeah, there was a secret in my family.” As he says this, we’re sitting in the back of a restaurant near Lincoln Center, although Shawn asked that I not reveal the place to protect his privacy. “I didn’t know it,” he continues. “I had no idea. But kids always know it at some point. And I know I thought, ‘This was my family.’ My mother made fun of the idea. My father wasn’t saying anything. He got it. Of course! He thought, ‘Wallace is picking up something.’”

Shawn and his brother, Allen [b. 1948], who is five years younger, lived their lives in a state of what could be considered true dramatic irony: They were conducting themselves according to certain premises, the falsity of which everyone around them was well aware. Their father, William Shawn [1907-92], the second editor of The New Yorker, was married to their mother, a former journalist, Cecille Shawn [1906-2005]; but he also had a long relationship with Lillian Ross [1918-2017], a writer for the magazine, and was even raising her adopted child with her. The affair was known to many who worked at The New Yorker; it was known, for most of its duration, to his wife. But their playwright-actor son, who lived at home in his mid-20s, didn’t find out about the relationship, somehow, until some three decades after it started, when he was almost 35, after a friend who assumed that he and his brother knew made mention of it.

“A lot of people grow up in families where there’s a secret,” Shawn says. “Fewer grow up in families where there’s a secret that a lot of people know but the kids don’t know. That’s more unusual.”

Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical. “Moth Days” — those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them — unfurls the story of a long-running extramarital affair told, in a series of monologues, from the points of view of four people: a father who’s a famous author, played by Josh Hamilton; a son, a philosophizing and wounded searcher played by John Early; a long-suffering mother, played by Maria Dizzia; and a cultured, bookish lover, played by Hope Davis [read a review]. The pacing is slow, the mood wistful and only gently comedic. The set is minimal, as is the staging, so that the storytelling and self-reflections of the actors alone mesmerize the audience. With empathy for themselves and those who disappoint them, Shawn’s characters ponder the preprogrammed compulsions to fall in and out of love, to be overwhelmed by and then lose all desire, “to use the tiny, pitiful words that the creature uses to point to invisible parts of itself, invisible parts that grow so vast that they turn us inside out and then swallow us up and eat us,” as the son, Tim, puts it. One of the play’s most beautiful passages is not about the pain of heartbreak but about the suffering felt by someone who has fallen out of love — someone who had no control over its dwindling course but who must inevitably wreak emotional havoc on the blameless formerly beloved as a result. What’s strange about the world, in Shawn’s work, is how little examined it is for its impossible constrictions, its punishing inevitabilities.

In conversation, Shawn can be benevolent, even beaming. And yet one senses that although it would be hard to say something that would offend him, it would be easy to ask a question that would. As I delicately try to broach the parallels of the play with his own upbringing, Shawn sounds, if not quite sharp, pointed. “I had no complaints about my parents,” he tells me. His work often suggests he is interested in exploring humans’ worst instincts. But even the most venal characters in his plays often describe their fate, in ways that are almost convincing, as the culmination of factors far beyond their control or awareness. “Moth Days” not only has sympathy for a man seeking love outside a marriage; it also gives dignity and dimensionality to a beautiful woman who might have been betrayed, even shattered, but is nonetheless adored by her son for her strength and brilliance. And it reveals a son — a writer who is no rival to his father, a figure who writes sexually inappropriate children’s stories that have gained a cult following — who loves both of his parents and judges neither, even as he feels real pain.

Much of Shawn’s theater is defiant in one way or another, often refusing the conventions of the form altogether. With little direct interaction among the characters, the performance of “Moth Days” has a stillness that calls on the listener to lean in. “It really felt like these four characters were in the psychiatrist’s chair,” says Elizabeth LeCompte, 81, a founding member of the Wooster Group, who saw the play in rehearsals. “And I was the psychiatrist.”

[The Wooster Group is a not-for-profit, experimental theater company based in New York City. The troupe’s performance style is highly innovative, often employing audiovisual techniques such as interactive video, live stream, recorded sound, and pre-recorded video into their work. Rejecting traditional psychologically realistic acting, the company favors a more technical, athletic, and detached approach. 

[Though the group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte (b. 1944), formally took its name in 1980, it spun off from Richard Schechner’s (b. 1934) The Performance Group (1967-80) during the period from 1975 to 1980. The company’s base is the Performing Garage, the home of Schechner’s troupe, on Wooster Street (from which it took its name) in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. The Wooster Group has won nine Obie Awards, six Bessie Awards (for dance and performance art), multiple grants from the Carnegie Corporation, and the 1985 National Endowment for the Arts Ongoing Ensembles Grant.]

Unlike his brother, Allen, who has excavated his family history in three memoirs in which he also details his mental health struggles, Shawn says he has never been in therapy, with the exception of several months in college when a psychology professor he admired offered to provide analysis as if it were a generous extension of his coursework. But he has little interest in exploring the psychological reasons he’s chosen to delve into this material now, at this phase of his life. The actress Kate Valk, 68, another founding member of the Wooster Group, suggested to me that in the later years of one’s life one feels drawn to more personal material, a notion Shawn dismisses. “I don’t think I could have written that play 25 years ago,” he says. “Because 25 years ago, there was too much interest in the old New Yorker and Mr. Shawn.” If anything, he adds, he wrote it now simply because he’s a different person, composed of different experiences and reflections, so that what he wrote inevitably changed over time in ways he couldn’t predict or particularly control.

In his first memoir, “Wish I Could Be There” ([Viking,] 2007), Allen, the twin of a sister, Mary Shawn, who has autism and was institutionalized, enumerates the various topics, beyond the affair, that were either secrets or unmentionable in the Shawn household: that they were Jewish, and also universally short (Wallace is 5-foot-2); that both parents saw psychiatrists; that they worried about money (their father felt trapped by his job, which he held from 1952 to 1987, but also was loath to ever ask for a raise). Allen, an accomplished composer, turned to music, in which everything is felt but nothing explicitly said, to express himself; his older brother, it seems, chose for his creative outlet a medium that would allow him to say everything that he thought should be said, no matter how shocking or, as some critics have found, morally heavy-handed. “The World’s a Mess, and It’s All Your Fault,” is the headline of a New York Times review of the 2007 production the New Group did of “The Fever.”

[Allen Shawn’s two other memoirs are Twin: A Memoir (2011), which focuses on his relationship with his autistic twin sister, and In the Realm of Tones: A Composer's Memoir (2025), which is about his career and life as a composer and pianist.]

The actor Ethan Hawke, who had shared a dressing room with Shawn for six months during their run of David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” off Broadway in 2005, was so incensed by the damning review of “The Fever” that he wrote a (never published) letter to the editor defending Shawn’s play, which Hawke, now 55, said inspired his mother to overhaul her life to start volunteering overseas. “What ‘The Fever’ does for many of us is to articulate and validate the ambivalence we feel about the privileged lives we lead,” he wrote. “The liberating effect that ‘The Fever’ had on my mother was to make what she wanted to do seem logical — not heroic or saintly but logical.”

Hawke’s comments made me think back on a moment at the theater to which Shawn had accompanied me. Among the many details of his life that he’d asked me not to include was the name of the play I was seeing at that time with my niece, since he had decided to see it as well. His concerns were less about privacy than about a policy of do no harm. What if I mentioned the play, he explained, and then asked him on the record what he’d thought about it? And what if he didn’t like it or didn’t say one way or the other? Some actors’ feelings might be hurt. And what if he did like it? Someone else, some other friend performing in a different play at the same time, might be hurt that he hadn’t found a way to say a few kind words about that performance.

As we stood outside the theater, he delivered the request firmly, smiling gently up at me, but with some implied apology and resignation, as if other people’s feelings were an inconvenience that required effort to manage but that must nonetheless be navigated carefully, much like the icy streets we’d just traversed. At first I thought his request was overly cautious, even neurotic; but when I played it out, I saw that it had a rock-solid logic behind it, the kind that comes only from someone with a rare and complicated gift for empathy, for understanding the deep vulnerabilities of anyone who puts themselves onstage trying to show what it is to be human.

Before he would find his way to writing plays, Shawn first majored in history at Harvard (an institution he despised, as he was sure to tell its alumni magazine), traveled to India to teach English, then studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, fully intending to become a civil servant. “If you’d met me back then, you’d have thought, ‘This is a very serious person,’” Shawn says, contrasting that first impression with the way he’s so often perceived now — as the funny guy from the movies. Instead, while still at Oxford, he started writing plays, for no reason other than that he felt compelled to. He began mailing them to figures he admired; eventually, he showed them to the writer and critic Renata Adler [b. 1937; author, journalist, and film critic], a family friend who felt the plays — imaginative, literate, at times very witty — had originality and, as she recently recalled, “a music to them — a purity.” She introduced him to Gregory, by then a noted avant-garde director, who shared her opinion. Others did not. In 1971, Peter Brook [British; 1925-2022], the experimental-theater director, whom Shawn revered, agreed to read his work, only to offer a short but withering critique that Shawn can quote word for word more than half a century later. “To make any worthwhile comments about someone’s work, you have to have at least some sympathy with it,” Shawn recites. “But” — and here he slows down, as if to savor the feel of the shiv in his creative soul — “I remained on the outside of your plays.” Those words may still haunt him, but they didn’t sway Gregory (whose self-confidence perhaps surpassed even that of Shawn) from starting to direct and mount his plays, while some of the actors in his group, the Manhattan Project, were arguing with one another over whether to do the work.

Shawn’s early playwriting career landed him in a period of exhausting debt and mindless clerical work, the toll of which he described to the reporter Don Shewey [b. 1959] in a 1983 Esquire profile. “The fact is,” Shawn said back then, “most of my time is spent racing around trying to answer half of my phone calls, doing half of my errands, paying half of my bills, just desperately trying to keep up with the minimum of life. And I have to fight and kill, I feel, to get any free time to do a little writing of my own. I feel I have to be a monster, a murderer, to get 15 minutes for myself!” Although Shawn’s own financial life would gradually improve in the years following the release of “My Dinner With André,” his introductory lines in that movie reflect the contrast between his cosseted early days as a 10-year-old artist in the making, the scion of a literary great, and his sometimes grim life as a working artist: “Now all I think about is money,” his character complains. That he wasn’t more successful as a playwright by his mid-30s came as something of a surprise to Shawn, who’d assumed — maybe given his upbringing, his education or some innate conviction — that his work would be widely embraced by that point in his career.

Shawn occupied an unusual class demographic in New York at the time. Even as he had close friends who shared Thanksgiving with the Kissingers or were thriving in his father’s employ at The New Yorker, he himself was so broke he considered driving a cab, and his girlfriend worked as a waitress. Shawn may have experienced a somewhat hardscrabble life, but he nonetheless was living in a period when an experimental artist could still scrape by in Manhattan — when the arty productions he and his friends mounted, even with small audiences, still got reviewed by critics at major papers, so that it felt like the work, too, had a legitimate home in the city. His writing led him to film and television work after Woody Allen’s casting agent saw him in his first onstage New York performance, at the Public Theater in 1977, in Machiavelli’s “The Mandrake” (1524). Shawn had translated the script, and played the part of a rambling, comical servant only because the director [Wilford Leach] had an instinct he’d be good. A memorable bit part as Diane Keaton’s sexually gifted ex-husband in “Manhattan” resulted in interest from other casting agents, which led to recurring roles on “The Cosby Show” [Jeffrey Engels: 1987, 1989, 1990, 1991] and “The Good Wife” [Charles Lester: 2013, 2014, 2015].

[Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) was an American diplomat, political scientist, and politician. He served as the 7th National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975, followed by being the 56th United States Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977. He served under presidents Richard Nixon (1913-94; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1913-2006; 38th President of the United States: 1974-77).]

The work as a character actor, which started in his mid-30s, allowed Shawn to pay off his debt. He says that he and his partner, Deborah Eisenberg [b. 1945], the acclaimed short-story writer, never particularly minded the shabbiness of the humble life they were leading in Chelsea (the neighborhood where they still live). The money he started making as an actor was important mostly because it meant that he never had to choose, he says, between “having a pleasant bourgeois lifestyle and writing my plays. I never had to face any kind of a crisis where anybody said, ‘You know, the problem with you is the type of plays you write — couldn’t you possibly write more enjoyable plays? You would be able to lead a bourgeois lifestyle then!’” His role in culture, high and low, is unique, as if an actor like Jane Lynch only did film and television work so she could continue to choreograph well-regarded but little-seen productions of interpretive dance.

It wasn’t only his educational pedigree and upbringing, of course, that gave Shawn his confidence. Though much of his early work was panned, he was right to think it was worthy of being admired and eventually valued in the canon. “I was wrong until I was 70 or something,” he says. “Then I began to feel that more people respected me.” Eisenberg, he adds, will no longer put up with his complaining that he’s underappreciated.

And yet even Shawn still has to hustle to make the art he cares about. When some funding for the “Moth Days” production fell through, he used all of his considerable social capital to find actual capital. “I went around asking everyone I knew, ‘Do you know anyone who has a lot of money?’” he tells me. (Scott Rudin [b. 1958] [and Barry Diller (b. 1942) are] producing the show.) Shawn sounds proud that he wasn’t squeamish about the topic of money, as his father had been — that he’d brought his own power to bear in order to bring this story of loving, flawed humans to light.

As is typical for Shawn and Gregory, who spent some 15 years rehearsing their adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s [1828-1906] “The Master Builder,” which became a 2013 film directed by Jonathan Demme [1944-2017], rehearsals happened sporadically over a year and a half, rather than mere weeks. Shawn showed up for all but one of them. Early, 38, says the experience was easily the most meaningful of his career. “This play has had the effect of making me embarrassed by most of my other performances,” he tells me. “There’s a difference between memorizing your lines and knowing your lines.”

Gregory’s talents as a director do not lie in the notes he gives, says Shawn, as there are almost none; his gift is in the exquisite warmth and receptiveness, the aliveness, with which he observes. Early says that Shawn brought the same quality to rehearsals, so much so that the intimacy was almost uncomfortable at times. “It’s like you’re staring face-to-face, making eye contact with the playwright, as you’re performing, as if you’re delivering the performance directly to him,” he says.

When Donald Trump was re-elected, Shawn had momentary doubts about the timing of such a personal play. “I wrote this during the Biden era!” he tells me. “At first I was upset because I thought, ‘I really would like to have written a play that explicitly cries out against the murderous regime of Trump and the evil that has happened.’ But now I’m feeling, ‘Well, this gang of people who have clustered around Trump — and Trump himself — they’re violently opposed to sympathy for other human beings.’ So to do a play that is, in a way, subtle, and that deals with suffering human beings somewhat compassionately . . . it becomes political.” Even the act of putting so much care into a play was, as he perceives it, a rebuke to those in power. “The whole enterprise of creating an artistic work is of value. I think the way we’re doing it is sort of intelligent. And that makes a statement in this bizarre time we’re living in.”

So much about the world seems not just cruel or senseless but bizarre to Shawn that it doesn’t seem entirely coincidental that “inconceivable” is the word with which he has become so strongly associated. (In fact, the word turns up in one of his lines that he wrote in “My Dinner With André”: “It’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today.”)

On a Reddit thread in which Shawn participated in 2022, someone asked if it ever bothered him when fans made jokes to him or just shouted one word out at him as he walked by. “I’m sure they mean well,” Shawn wrote back, “but nobody likes to be reduced to something smaller than what they really are.” Another person on the thread countered that, to him, it was far more than a throwaway comedic line; as a lover of Shawn’s work, he saw it as “that tiny little crack that opens into a world of wonder.”

Shawn had just seen a Wooster Group production of Richard Foreman’s [1937-2025] “Symphony of Rats” last spring [27 March-8 May 2024] when someone in the audience stopped to ask for a photo. “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this in the citadel of art,” he demurred; he seemed embarrassed, in front of his fellow avant-garde actors, to be caught in the role of pop-culture celebrity. “He’s a snob,” LeCompte says lovingly, as if no higher compliment could be given. Nonetheless, Valk urged him to embrace the recognition. “Oh, go on,” she told him. “Give the people what they want.”

And in that moment, at least, he did.

[So, what’s wrong with Grand Nagus Zek?  He doesn’t get a mention?  (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 7 episodes: 1993-99)

[Susan Dominus, a journalist and professor, has been a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine since 2011.  She was part of the winning team for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and for reporting on sexual harassment in the American workplace and in 2024, she won a National Magazine Award for an article about menopause.

[Before her current position at the Times, Dominus worked as an editor for eight years at magazines including Glamour, The American Lawyer, and New York before switching to reporting and writing.  She freelanced for the Times Magazine and other outlets before joining the Times staff in 2007 to write the “Big City” column for the Metro section.

[Dominus graduated from Yale University where she is currently a lecturer.  She is the author of The Family Dynamic (Crown Publishing, 2025).]