A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series
[In the New York Times last summer, incumbent artistic director of the Public Theater in New York Oskar Eustis announced his retirement from the company effective in two years (“Nurturer of Theater Intends to Move On,” 23 July 2026 [Section C: “Arts”]). He also declared, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over.”
[“That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over,” Eustis added. “But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model.” In several past posts on Rick On Theater, readers have heard that the American theater, especially the regional and resident companies, is in crisis (see, for instance, “A Crisis In America's Theaters” [13 September 2023]).
[(There’s a list [with links] of blog articles about regional theater in the U.S. at the top of "Defying the Odds Far From Broadway" by Michael Paulson [22 December 2025].)
[The current issue of the Theatre Communications Group magazine American Theatre is publishing a series of short articles that attests to the belief, according to Kelundra Smith, publisher of AT, “that the American theatre hasn’t reached its climax.”
[“But it is in need of reimagining,” Smith admonishes. And her colleague LaTeshia Ellerson, TCG’s Co-Executive Director for National Engagement, chimes in with “there is so much we can learn from each other.”
[I’m reposting the articles in “A Tale of Three Cities” because . . . well, I’m always ready to spread good news. This is the first in the series, a report on the present state of theater in Washington, D.C. It will be followed by reports on theater in Los Angeles (8 October) and Atlanta (11 October).]
AT’s Introduction to “A Tale of Three Cities”
In looking around the U.S. in anticipation of a busy 2026-27 theatre season, we decided to tell the stories of three major theatrical hubs: Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. In exploring the unique challenges each community has faced and overcome, we’re also looking for the lessons these cities might hold for the national theatre field. Amid controversy and chaos, shifting real estate landscapes, changing audience behavior, and fickle funding, all three theatre scenes have much to celebrate and to look forward to.
“A TALE OF THREE
CITIES: DISTRICT DEFIANCE”
by Daniella Ignacio
[This article particularly caught my eye because, as some ROTters know, I’m a native Washingtonian. I was born there, grew up there (until 14, if that can be called having grown up), and was introduced to theater there before I saw my first New York show. In fact, I’ve confessed a number of times to being a confirmed Washington chauvinist.
[I’ve posted several pieces on ROT about D.C. theater topics, starting with “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985) (25 December 2011); click on the label “Theater in Washington DC” for additional post on that topic. (My early exposure to theater is laid out in “A Broadway Baby” [22 September 2010].)]
[The report below was published in American Theatre vol. 43, no. 1 (Fall 2026) and was posted at AMERICAN THEATRE | District Defiance on 28 September 2026.]
How theatres in the nation’s capital are surviving, striving, and living to fight another day.
On Friday, June 12, after six months of President Donald Trump’s name having been affixed to the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a crowd celebrated at the Kennedy Center all day and night in anticipation of the name’s removal, at a judge’s order—though a tarp covered the letters as they were removed in the early hours of June 13. (At presstime, the tarp still stood.)
But while those shenanigans captured national attention, on the local level, D.C. theatres have been busy charting a path forward, no matter the resident of White House. Earlier this summer, when Washington, D.C., mayoral hopeful Janeese Lewis George [b. 1988; Democrat; currently a member of the Council of the District of Columbia] met arts leaders in a forum at the Studio Theatre, she shared a desire for the arts to be “one of the biggest economic drivers of our community,” and was admirably responsive to leaders’ questions and concerns.
In short, theatremakers in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area are surviving and striving. From programming that taps into the political zeitgeist to more spaces dedicated to new work, they are taking matters into their own hands, exercising their right to speak out and cultivate an artistic community that can actively respond to the moment.
Stability and Controversy
D.C. theatre has become a “stable landscape” in the past decade [see “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985)” (25 December 2011) for the background of theater in Nation’s Capital], said Theatre Washington president and CEO Amy Austin. By 2015, she noted, “Not only did you have established leaders, but you had a lot of emerging leaders who are still here,” citing such small theatres as NextStop, Flying V, and others that opened in the mid-2010s, following 1990s and 2000s troupes like Rorschach and Constellation. “We kept that landscape through the pandemic.”
The region’s larger theatres have persisted too. According to Austin, the Small Professional Theatre (SPT) and League of Resident Theatre (LORT) companies that reopened post-Covid haven’t faced the closures or mergers that have plagued other theatre scenes. “We were very concerned about it,” Austin said. “Everybody was aware that it was happening nationally, but it didn’t happen here. That’s a significant statement about Washington theatre’s vitality, resilience, and collaboration.”
According to the leaders of Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, its past four years have also been the four highest-grossing seasons in the theatre’s 50-year history. Both Round House (with a $10 million budget) and Arlington, Virginia’s Signature (a $16 million budget) saw surpluses in the millions in the 2025 fiscal year. “The thing that drives audiences here is the sense that theatre is a form of civic engagement,” said artistic director Ryan Rilette, now approaching his 15th season at Round House. “The audience is smart enough and politically dialed in enough that they yearn for those conversations.”
[There are a number of reports on productions at the Round House on this blog.]
At Mosaic Theater, Reginald L. Douglas is entering his fifth season as artistic director. He came into the position after the theatre’s founding artistic director, Ari Roth [see “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)], resigned in the wake of a staff revolt. Mosaic, whose budget is close to $3 million, has seen record-breaking box office numbers (last season’s Young John Lewis [2025; new score debut at Mosaic, 2026] was reportedly its highest-selling show ever). What matters more to Douglas is its expanded community engagement.
“Mosaic strives to live up to our name, which is what happens when you bring different communities, cultures, and perspectives together through dialogue,” Douglas said. “We want to do that more intentionally throughout all of D.C.”
Others lament that a drop in federal funding and foundation giving has not been made up by corporate and individual support. At Adventure Theatre MTC, a Theatre for Young Audiences company in Maryland’s Glen Echo Park, artistic director Kurt Boehm said that the $2-million company is currently just $70,000 away from a surplus—the closest in his three years. “We’re doing it with the bare bones that we can until this organization is back on the path of surplus every year,” he said. That will be a feat for a company with a 10-person staff, restored after allegations surfaced in 2022 of unsafe workplace practices under previous leadership.
Another theatre in recovery is Spooky Action Theater, whose artistic director Richard Henrich left in 2022 after reports of alleged toxic behavior. Under the new artistic director, Elizabeth Dinkova, the company, which has an annual budget of $319,000, has leaned into resistance and immigrant voices, with at least one international play every season.
“I joke sometimes that the programming philosophy of Spooky Action is, if our theatre closes with this show, we will feel like it was the most exciting and meaningful thing to do, and we’ll go down happy,” Dinkova said. “Luckily, we’re nowhere near closing. We’re actually in a better position than we’ve been in many, many years.”
Larger theatres haven’t been spared from controversy. One issue: local hiring. At Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, (which has a $5.7 million budget), former artistic director Maria Manuela Goyanes pioneered a model where the theatre could be a launching pad for solo shows and a space for festivals. “While that was important, the gap it unintentionally created was a dearth of jobs for local artists,” said new artistic director Reggie D. White. “Solo shows come with people attached to them. The things that make it financially nimble also make it difficult for local artists.”
White said he’s “doubling down on space and opportunity for folks in our company,” with a commitment to featuring at least one company member in every show in the upcoming season. This includes Jared Mezzocchi, who will direct the world premiere of Matt Schatz’s Bobby Robotowitz [2026] next spring, in a co-production with Pittsburgh’s City Theatre.
The city’s oldest and largest theatre is also the site of the most dramatic local episode in memory, with repercussions felt not only locally but nationally: the apparently forced resignation, in late June, of Arena Stage artistic director Hana S. Sharif, just three years after she succeeded longtime leader Molly Smith. Complaints about her management at Arena (budget size: $30 million) soon surfaced in a series of news reports, though these were contradicted by glowing testimonials from peers and colleagues, including White, who worked closely with her at Arena before taking the job at Woolly.
Meanwhile, in early 2026, Arena’s production and box office workers voted to join IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees] for better wages and working conditions. The historic LORT company has only announced a partial 2026-27 season, and plans an artistic director search this fall.
Subversive Levity
Sharif was among a cohort of new artistic directors at D.C. theatres in the past decade, including Simon Godwin at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Matthew Gardiner at Signature Theatre, and Folger Theatre’s Karen Ann Daniels (though at presstime she was on medical leave, with longtime associate director of programming and director of producing Beth Emelson serving as interim director of artistic programs). Another of them, Mosaic’s Douglas, spoke about striking a balance of entertainment, empathy, and challenge in his theatre’s programming.
[There are several play reports on Rick On Theater of productions at Shakespeare Theatre. The referenced Folger Theater, which performs in the Elizabethan Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, shouldn’t be confused with the Folger Theatre Group, a precursor of the Shakespeare Theatre and on whose board my father sat. See “Theater Boards” (11 December 2022); a brief synopsis of the history of the Shakespeare Theatre is in the afterword to “Much Ado About Nothing: A ‘Recovered’ Report” (20 March 2021).]
Douglas said he often hears that “audiences perhaps are a little overwhelmed, but artists are buzzing inside with a desire to let their art be revolutionary,” he said. “This past year of the National Guard being here, of ICE raids, of seeing so much stress in the city—the best way to combat that is to put artists at the center. Speaking up is hope enough. You become an example of what it means to speak out, to stand up, to affirm that we are D.C. in a time when it feels really compromised.”
To that end, Douglas has commissioned four local artists to reflect on what it’s meant to live in D.C. under quasi-occupation, using various theatrical forms: plays, poems, sound design/music composition, and more. That series opens the season, along with a production of Somewhere Over the Border [2022] by Brian Quijada, a twist on The Wizard of Oz making its D.C. premiere, which Douglas hopes resonates for its celebration of “the resilience of immigrant communities and joy as resistance.” Mosaic’s upcoming world premieres include Natural History [2027] by Collin Van Son and Paige Hernandez’s 7th Street Echo [2027], whose characters represent all four quadrants of D.C.
For its part, Woolly Mammoth is presenting five world premieres that have in common what White called “subversive levity.” He explained, “After being inundated with the cortisol spike of political news, it’s good to be welcomed into an alternate experience through humor that cracks open deeper curiosity and a lot of heart.” Though none of the plays he’s programmed “are about the current political climate,” he knows that “as a Black queer man, the personal is the political. Giving stories dignity is political.”
Theater J, the city’s Jewish-focused theatre, also has a history of producing new work, particularly under Hayley Finn, who started as artistic director in 2023 and immediately ramped up new-play development, including an Expand the Canon program that commissions Jewish writers of color, as well as Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish writers. This season’s world premiere, American Girls [2027] by Emily Feldman, is about a Jewish woman and a Muslim woman coming to terms with the ways the events of Oct. 7, and the ensuing Israel/Palestine war, affect their friendship.
[Sephardim are Jews from Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and North Africa (from the word that in modern Hebrew is the name for Spain). Mizrahim (or Mizrachim) are Jews from the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus; the name, which derives from the Hebrew word for ‘easterners,’ refers today, especially in Israel, to Jews from Muslim-majority lands, especially Arabic countries and Iran. There’s a slightly more detailed discussion of these and other Jewish populations in “Crypto-Jews: Legacy of Secrecy” (15 September 2009).]
“I’m interested in telling new stories that are relevant to our community, and thinking about that through an expansive lens,” Finn said. “The programming has been rather diverse in terms of how it looks at the mission, both around the complexity and nuance of Jewish identity, and also ethical questions of our time that sit in conversation with that.”
At Round House, a second Trump administration and attacks on DEI led to a “deepening of values,” according to Rilette, reminding them of their mission to be a “theatre for everyone.” Its upcoming season includes regional premieres of Alex Lin’s Chinese Republicans [2026] and Leslye Headland’s Cult of Love [2018], but last year’s production of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me [2017] may be a telling example: Rilette programmed it before he knew the outcome of the 2024 election.
“If it were Kamala, it would be a strong feminist piece, and if it were Trump, it would be an anti-Trump piece, to a certain extent,” he said. Well, we all know how that went, but director Morgan Gould took it a step further: She asked Schreck to change the text to reflect more recent Supreme Court and presidential actions, so that at Round House, the play began at the moment Trump started signing a flurry of executive orders in January 2025.
In the last three years, Spooky Action’s Dinkova said she has been as interested in innovations in theatrical form as in content, and above all making work “that feels essential and necessary to conversations taking place in our city and the world.” She said she believes in “building solidarity around shared struggles. We need to invest in bigger movements.”
At Adventure, Boehm said, “We can’t, as a nonprofit, state our political beliefs, but through the art I want here, we can make a statement,” he said. He pointed to She Persisted [2019], Adam Tobin and Deborah Wicks La Puma’s stage adaptation of Chelsea Clinton’s book about American women trailblazers [She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World (Findaway World, 2019)], as “the perfect example of how we will make a statement, but not say, ‘Here’s the party I believe in.’”
Adventure dedicates its first slot every season to a new work, for which they apply for grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has paid off: When they applied with Not Your Mother’s Goose! [2025], an irreverent new take on nursery rhymes by Michael J. Bobbitt and Sandra Eskin, Boehm said he told his managing director, Sarah Chapin, “If they don’t fund Not Your Mother’s Goose!, what the hell are they funding?” They received the grant, and five Helen Hayes awards.
[The Helen Hayes Awards are Washington’s recognition of excellence in professional theater. Hayes (1900-93), known as the “First Lady of American Theatre,” was a native Washingtonian.]
Clearly, D.C. theatremakers are rising to the challenge of new work. When Rilette first arrived 15 years ago, he said that Washington Post critic Peter Marks told him, “We don’t have a lot of new work here the way that New York does,” believing it was “more challenging here.” Now, Rilette says, “I think that is changing. It seems like there are more and more world premieres, there’s more and more development taking place. That probably has to do with the fact that our theatres are continuing to get bigger at a time when [those in] other cities are struggling to survive.”
Community and Connection
According to Amy Austin, one key to D.C.’s strength is that its artists “don’t tend to look at each other as competitors, but as collaborators.” Indeed, despite a series of devastating losses—Capital Fringe [2005-19; 2022-24] and the Kennedy Center’s REACH residencies [2019-26], Page to Stage Festival [2001-19], and Local Theatre Festival [2023-25]—a hearteningly cooperative festival and new-work culture has emerged in their wake.
[The Capital Fringe Festival ceased operation for financial reasons. The Page to Stage Festival shut down because of COVID-19 and didn’t reopen; it was later replaced, however, by the Local Theatre Festival—but that was closed by the KC board in the turmoil that followed Trump’s take-over of the Center’s governing board. The REACH residencies were suspended due to Trump’s precipitous closure of the Center for “renovations.”]
To wit, this past winter saw Ford’s A First Look festival and the Folger’s Reading Room Festival; Theater Alliance’s Hothouse Festival; Studio’s first New Pages, New Stages Festival with Arena, Theater Alliance, Theater J (come 2027, Olney Theatre Center, Spooky Action, and Woolly Mammoth join the mix), and Solas Nua; and Round House’s National Capital New Play Festival. May and June had Theater J’s “Festival of Favorites and Firsts” and Woolly’s Playwrights Group Showcase. Mosaic’s Engaged Theater Fund has been bringing community organizations to new-play readings. Olney’s Vanguard Arts Fund offering workshops for artists has also been a staple of the scene since 2017. And Capital Fringe has been revitalized as a new District Fringe since last summer.
For Studio Theatre’s Jess Chayes—who spearheaded New Pages, New Stages after joining as associate artistic director last fall—collaborating with partner theatres made a great welcome. In the future, they hope to partner with different theatres each year, including the small and mid-sized companies that are carving out new spaces, resources, and communities.
One area where D.C.’s new-work focus has been in particular danger has been in plays for young people, due to the suspension of Kennedy Center’s award-winning TYA [Theater for Young Audiences] company. But as in other sectors, artists aren’t taking it lying down. One former KCTYA staffer, Michelle Kozlak, has founded a new company, Joy Play Heart Productions, which will produce Fishing for Stars [2027], a nonverbal devised piece originally commissioned by KCTYA, at 1st Stage in Tysons, Virginia [a D.C. suburb], in March 2027; a national tour with TYA Tour Development Collective seed funding will follow.
“I spent most of the fall being so sad and in a grief place, not being able to move on with a job that I loved,” Kozlak said. “I thought: I could sit here and be sad, or I could do something about it.” Added Adventure’s Boehm of the loss of KCTYA: “It’s our house, and we will have it back. What happened is just egregiously wrong.”
As D.C.’s theatre artists continue to defy both the odds and the current regime, these words from Professor Woland’s Black Magic Rock Show, a production of Spooky Action [premiered, 2025], may provide inspiration:
When the real demons come for you, will you stay silent or will you sing? Sing! Will you lay down and take it or will you rise? Rise! Will you quit or will you fight? Fight!
[Professor Woland’s Black Magic Rock Show is an anti-authoritarian rock musical inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s (1891-1940) banned 1930s Russian novel The Master and Margarita. It explores the potency of speaking truth to power, the triumph of love over oppression, and the reality that “manuscripts don’t burn.” Its Spooky Action premiere won critical praise and several Helen Hayes Awards.]
[As I noted above, the second AT article on regional theater, covering the Los Angeles scene, will be posted on Thursday, 8 October 2026. Please come back to ROT on that date to read the next installment of “A Tale of Three Cities.”]
[Daniella Ignacio is
associate editor for American Theatre.
She is an arts journalist, actor, music
director, and teaching artist in the D.C. area. She also reviews for DC Theater Arts
and Washington City Paper.]
