Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i American Theatre

I can still recall the first few times my kids started to begin sentences with the phrase, “Remember when…?” It began as early as age 5 or 6. It was bittersweet and bracing to realize that these newish creatures had entered the stream of time alongside the rest of us, with much water ahead but also a wake forming behind. What kind of world are they, and we, heading into? And can past lessons give us tools to face what’s coming for us? As we survey a national landscape riven with the kind of division and fear that opportunistic authoritarians are all too eager to exploit, we might do well to remember that their terrors and tactics are not new. Neither are the strategies that artists and activists have used…

“SO WE’RE GOING TO TRY something a little different for this scene,” said properties designer Glenn Michael Baker. It was two and a half weeks before the July opening of East West Players’ revival of Yankee Dawg You Die, and the cast paused their run-through of the play’s final moments to inspect Baker’s drawings of a cardboard-style theatre, complete with stick puppets, plastic toys, and interchangeable sketched backdrops. The intricate prop was to be operated by the actors of this two-person play by Philip Kan Gotanda, as they played out a comical interlude in which Godzilla rampages through various Northern California locales—all for a live feed’s tiny hidden camera that would broadcast throughout the David Henry Hwang Theater. “That’s very funny—I love it,” said actor Kelvin Han Yee, visibly beaming.…

SUSTAINING DONORS ($10,000+) Institutions Distracted Globe Foundation Richenthal Foundation Walt Disney Imagineering New York State Council on the Arts The Sheri and Les Biller Family Foundation National Endowment for the Arts Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation Paul M. Angell Family Foundation Edgerton Foundation Howard Gilman Foundation The Shubert Foundation Mellon Foundation TCG is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color cofounded by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and The Ford Foundation. Individuals Olga Garay-English Donna Long David Moore, Jr Eleanor Cook Nolan Arthur Rock Judith Rubin Anonymous SUPPORTING DONORS (UP TO $9,999) Institutions The Dot and Lam Hardman Family Foundation Media Works Seniel Ostrow Foundation McKnight Foundation Individuals Lari Abraham Jessica Adler Bruce Allardice Nicole Anderson-Cobb Albert E. Aubin Henri D. Barholomot Miles…

“A dream assignment” is how ASHLEY LEE, a Los Angeles-based arts reporter, described the chance to write about East West Players’ summer revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (p. 32). She resonated with the show’s theme, Asian American representation onscreen and onstage (“a priority topic” in her years covering entertainment, including for The Los Angeles Times), and savored the glimpse of EWP under its new artistic director, Lily Tung Crystal. “The story turned out to be emotional to report and satisfying to write,” she said. “It was a blessing in itself.” For DEZI TIBBS, a genderqueer theatre artist and writer based in New York City, writing about intergenerational mentorship among trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming performers (p. 16) “was like hugging my younger self.” Constructing their piece as advice…

Cyndi Lauper, that inimitable, brass-lunged icon of 1980s music and fashion, is such an obvious choice to write the music and lyrics for a new stage musical of the quintessential late-’80s social comedy Working Girl (at La Jolla Playhouse Oct. 28-Nov. 30) that it almost seems too good to be true. In fact, it turns out that she was already part of the sound of the original film: Melanie Griffith and Lauper were social acquaintances at the time, and, on a few occasions, the actor asked the singer to speak to her so she could learn the accent. But Lauper isn’t just putting herself onstage in the new musical, which has a book by Theresa Rebeck and direction by Christopher Ashley. Writing the Tony-winning score for 2013’s Kinky Boots taught…

It’s no secret that arts workers are facing unique difficulties right now. In April, the Writers Guild of America reported that over 1,300 TV writing jobs were lost in the 2023-24 season, with 37 percent fewer episodic series in production compared to 2022-23. TV and film productions are increasingly moving abroad to bring down costs. The theatre industry has also seen a marked contraction, if the annual season listings produced by Theatre Communications Group are any guide: In the 2019-20 season, there were 2,229 productions at nonprofit theatres in the U.S., a number that had plunged by last season to 1,281; this coming season will see 1,592, an improvement that’s still short of full recovery. When we talk about this turbulent period in the field, we tend to focus on…

Lauren Gunderson (24 PRODUCTIONS) Irene Sankoff & David Hein (23) Eboni Booth (21) Jonathan Spector (15) August Wilson (13) Kate Hamill (13) James Ijames (11) Jen Silverman (11) Ken Ludwig (11) Rajiv Joseph (10) Lloyd Suh (10) Henrik Ibsen (9) Arthur Miller (9) Jennifer Lee (9) Jeffrey Hatcher (8) Richard Maltby Jr. (8) Sandy Rustin (8) Tennessee Williams (8) Katori Hall (7) Joe DiPietro (7) Sanaz Toossi (7) Steven Levenson (7) Henry Lewis, Henry Shields, Jonathan Sayer (7) This list was culled from 1,446 productions at 293 TCG member theatres, plus 156 productions at non-member and commercial theatres. As always, we did not tally productions authored by Shakespeare, of which there will be 57 in the coming season.…

As I was gathering my thoughts for this issue’s letter, I couldn’t help but notice that it would be heading to print around the 24th anniversary of 9/11. What’s different in today’s cultural and political landscape from 2001, and what’s the same? What does it take mentally, emotionally, physically to stay true to the North Star of our values? What are we fighting for versus what are we fighting against? Is it possible to both fight for and against simultaneously? John Lewis’s words “good trouble” are often invoked as inspirational fighting words; the full quote is, “Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” This issue uplifts stories of good trouble, including Nathan Pugh’s reflections on why…

In the mid-1920s, a group of young Black artists came together to create the first all-Black literary magazine. With minds like Wallace Henry Thurman, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas behind it, FIRE!! would go on to influence the Harlem Renaissance for years, despite only publishing one issue, in November 1926. Now the lives and experiences of the legends behind the magazine are coming to the stage of Philadelphia’s Quintessence Theatre Group in FIRE!! (Oct. 8-Nov. 2), written and adapted by Marilyn Campbell-Lowe and Paul Oakley Stovall. “These voices are fading,” Campbell-Lowe said. “FIRE!! is a classic. I would like to reintroduce audiences to these voices, because they’re absolutely brilliant.” The world premiere production will tell the backstage story of the joy and drama of the…

THE PRESENT IS NEVER ALONE. Take comfort: There is future, and there is past. We walk, hand in hand, with ghosts of world stages: all the players who have exited, shadows of violence, sets in ruins. Memory and evidence. If you press your ear to the plays of the 20th century, they’ll tell you secrets of human acts gone by and strategies to keep on. Among bloody slings and arrows of inhumane humanity are extraordinary scenes, real and imagined, of survival. At a concentration camp, a woman hides within a crate for 10 days to write a comic operetta, encouraging fellow prisoners to keep going. An everyday South Korean town square transforms from fear to ecstasy with the banging of drums, and grieving friends see their dead materialize. An iconic…

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has always been a part of my life. Growing up just outside of Washington, D.C., in the 2000s, I always saw its large marble building as integral to my city’s landscape, just as much as the Washington Monument. I came of age in the building, seeing Theater for Young Audiences as a kid, national tours of Broad-way musicals as a middle schooler, and music concerts as a high schooler. The creation of such a multifaceted arts organization was only possible thanks to the federal government. In 1958, Presi-dent Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Cultural Center Act, which allocated D.C. land for a culture center, and man-dated that it would be a privately funded organization. President John F. Kennedy helped fundraise…

ALASKA CYRANO’S THEATRE COMPANY, ANCHORAGE Outside Mullingar, John Patrick Shanley; dir.: Michael Hood, Oct 3-26 Hay Fever, Noël Coward; dir.: Teresa K. Pond, Nov 21-Dec 21 PERSEVERANCE THEATRE, ANCHORAGE & JUNEAU What the Constitution Means to Me, Heidi Schreck; dir.: Leslie Ishii, Sep 12-28 (Juneau), Oct 17-26 (Anchorage) Buyer & Cellar, Jonathan Tolins; dir.: Colby Bleicher, Dec 5-21 (Juneau) Pueblo Revolt, Dillon Christopher Chitto; Mar 6-22, 2026 (Juneau), Apr 10-19, 2026 (Anchorage) ARIZONA ARIZONA THEATRE COMPANY, PHOENIX & TUCSON Deceived, Johnna Wright & Patty Jamieson (adapt. from Patrick Hamilton); dir.: Jenn Thompson, Sep 28-Oct 18 (Tucson), Oct 25-Nov 9 (Phoenix) Heist, Arun Lakra; dir.: Matt August, Nov 30-Dec 20 (Tucson), Jan 10-25, 2026 (Phoenix) Ain’t Misbehavin’, Richard Maltby Jr. & Fats Waller; dir.: Dell Howlett, Jan 25-Feb 14, 2026 (Tucson),…

NETWORKING AND KNOWLEDGE-BUILDING TCG’s Research programs include long-standing studies such as the Salary Survey and Fiscal Survey, as well as responsive snapshot surveys. The National Conference is a biennial gathering of theatre professionals to forge connections, address field-wide issues, and celebrate the theatre of the host community. Theatre for Activism is a series of gatherings to strengthen care, share practices, and forge connections between activists and theatre practitioners. GRANTMAKING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS THRIVE! Uplifting Theatres of Color provides unrestricted funds for those who have all too often been outside the grantmaking sector’s funding opportunities: Black theatres, Indigenous theatres and Theatres of Color which are closely connected to and have positive impact on their chosen communities. The Rising Leaders of Color Program forms cohorts of exceptionally talented early-career leaders of color…