Kahlo’s self portraits, especially those depicting her pain and illness, mesmerize me. But I went into El último sueño de Frida y Diego, an opera composed by Gabriela Lena Frank with libretto by Nilo Cruz, unsure which Frida I’d encounter. Frida Kahlo, after all, is a girlboss. Or rather—she’s been girlbossified: transmogrified, like a late-capitalist saint, into an ahistorical queer feminist icon. Hyperpoliticized and depoliticized, hypersexualized and desexualized, it’s hard to name a more overdetermined figure.

Fridamania, which took off in earnest in the 1980s, thirty years after the painter’s death, bears no real relationship with Kahlo herself, nor anything but the most tenuous connection to her oeuvre or even her biography. The casual viewer wearing her face as a t-shirt, tote bag, or novelty socks might know that Kahlo survived childhood polio, and later a horrific bus accident in Mexico City when she was a teenager. A metal rod impaled her through the stomach, and though she miraculously survived, it derailed her life. The accident and her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera (and the affairs she had with both men and women) loom large in the popular imagination. Art critics and historians critique Fridamania as valorizing her accident, her marriage, and even her radical political ideology at the expense of her work and its context.

El último sueño de Frida y Diego embraces the mythologizing of Kahlo, telling a magical realist story of the lovers’ reunion three years after Frida’s untimely death. As the curtain rises, villagers swarm the local cemetery with offerings for their dead. (Frank, who received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in music, has a longstanding interest in indigenous Latin American music traditions. In El último sueño, she incorporates indigenous instruments and Mexican folkloric melodies and rhythms, channeling the syncretism of the Day of the Dead.)

Diego Rivera (baritone Alfredo Daza), dazed and grief-stricken, makes his way to Frida’s grave. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Lorena Maza, the set (designed by Jorge Ballina) evokes an Aztec pyramid as Diego traverses the candlelit tombstones and ofrendas to Frida’s memorial at the pyramid’s apex. After he leaves, an old crone peddling flowers metamorphoses into Catrina, the Keeper of Souls (soprano Ana María Martínez). In Mictlán, the Aztec underworld, Catrina commands Frida to spectrally return to her husband for the 24 hours of Día de Muertos, but Frida initially refuses to return to the pain of her life.

The girlbossification of Kahlo transforms her disability into inspirational pablum, inventing a neat dramatic arc for her life while simultaneously privileging images that obscure her physical suffering. (Her most ubiquitous images, like those with her pet monkeys, hide visible manifestations of her illness.) It becomes a boon, if not for her, then for us, her insatiable consumers. It fueled her painting, which she undertook as a means to cope with her pain while she recovered. Her suffering, by that logic, was worth it.

Except that logic is bullshit, and the opera knows it.

It’s striking that the opera’s composer, Frank was born partially deaf, and she too invites her disability into her artistic process. As she writes in the New York Times: “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.”

Her invocation of dream logic mirrors Kahlo’s surrealist visions of herself, which frequently entangle her body with the natural world. It’s also a testament to how disability can engender wildly creative ways of being. When the world doesn’t conform itself to your body, you are compelled to find new ways of shaping the world. This may seem like a girlboss move, but in reality, it’s the antithesis of everything the girlboss stands for: an unthreatening image of feminized power.

To the contrary, the opera is rife with ungovernable female power, especially in Catrina, the embodiment of Death. She transfixes in a gold and black gown (designed by Eloise Kazan) with a corset covered in an exoskeleton of ribs and vertebrae and skirt bedecked in the sinuous skeletons of snakes, a reference to the Aztec goddess Cōātlīcue. Catrina dominates Mictlán, a kingdom with its own thrumming vibrancy, depicted not in Hadean greyscale but glorious Sonoran ochre. The opera unsettles one of the most insidious tropes of disability narratives: that the disabled person is better off dead. Instead, the narrative—and the orchestra—ripples with tension and ambiguity: Frida may want to remain in the underworld, but it isn’t the torturous dungeon of Western myth. It’s also a permeable space, as spirits move between the dead and living. Reluctant though she may be to return to a world full of pain and visit her wayward husband, she desperately wants to return to her art.

The pop culture narrative about Kahlo is that she used her painting to make meaning of her accident, and the lifelong pain she suffered as a result. (Or even that she cultivated her pain and illness to make art and to get Rivera’s attention.) But that’s not what I see in her canvases. I see an artist ambivalent about the task of transmuting her pain into something beautiful. It’s probable that I’m projecting. Like Shakespeare’s plays, Kahlo’s paintings serve as a Rorschach test for whatever the spectator wants to see; it’s part of their genius. (Her paintings are astronomically valuable, in part because of their rarity on the art market since the Mexican government declared them artistic monuments in 1984. Last November, a self-portrait called El sueño (La cama) of Kahlo—encircled with vines and sleeping on a bunk bed while a skeleton occupies the top bunk—sold for an eye-watering $55 million.)

The aestheticization of pain is complex. As artists, it’s arguably our job to render our experiences beautiful. To make meaning out of suffering. (Or inflict suffering, but that’s another aesthetic category altogether.) Kahlo’s paintings, the ones about her illnesses, are transfixing, but they’re unnerving more than lovely. For example, her 1946 painting The Wounded Deer, recently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibit on Frida Kahlo in Paris, is a tiny canvas which depicts her antlered head on the body of a stag pierced with nine separate arrows. Yet the deer runs through the woods, not yet felled by its fate. The viewer is placed in the role of the hunter. As an artist whose life has been reconfigured by chronic illness, I recognize that creature—animal and artist—bloodied, exhausted, still working, and I recognize myself as predator, creator and commodifier of the work.

Pain is not a vehicle for making great art, even at its most operatic.

It just fucking hurts.

Of course, pain is art’s atomic matter dating back at least to Greek tragedy. But generally this means psychological, not physical agony. One might argue that the boundary between the two, especially in art, is fluid. I can’t deny pain’s primacy, even as I resist (resent?) it. Even as it suffuses my own artistic process and practice. Frida experiences the same vacillation in Catrina’s presence.

El último sueño de Frida y Diego is irrefutably beautiful, and I would not wish it otherwise. Frida capitulates to Catrina’s demand and returns to the land of the living, rendered in majorelle blue—the color of her home, La Casa Azul. Uninspired, Diego is attempting to work on a mural when she returns. It’s noteworthy that he’s the only one who can paint onstage. As a spirit, Frida cannot see her own image, and therefore cannot paint her primary subject, herself. Her reunion with Diego is imbued with Orphean yearning. After all, they can’t touch each other. But inevitably, they can’t resist embracing, and Frida’s pain once again engulfs her. By then, it’s too late to paint, as she must return to Mictlán. Inverting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Diego follows her.

Ultimately the opera can’t escape the inextricability of pain and beauty. Neither could Kahlo. (Neither can I.)

The girlbossification of Frida is, by extension, the girlbossification of pain: the repackaging of pain as something profitable. But I’m not interested in commodifying my pain. I’m interested in what Kahlo did, what Frank and Cruz do: make legible the contradictory, contingent choices disabled and chronically ill artists make. We are not making our suffering palatable for you. We are defying the Keeper of the Dead.

She paused, straightened, eyed us. “I am asking you to do this:” she said, reversing the gesture. “Watch me do this,” She said, gracefully sweeping the invisible masks away into the forgetting air. When I think of it now, the sweep of her arms reminds me of Wave Hands Like Clouds, an isolated piece of Tai Chi we practiced in a later acting movement class, each of us barefoot, dressed in unadorned black, grave of purpose, sweeping our hands across our faces, releasing an invisible cloud into the air, lifting the opposite hand and doing this again, ceaselessly. “Watch me do this,” I can hear her say, and she swept a final hand over her face, and kept them both raised, beatific, radiating total surrender. “To me,” she said, supremely peaceful, “this is what acting asks of us.”

Around that same time, The Jeff committee was caught in the crossfire of the reckoning around Profiles Theatre. The Jeff Committee put out a hasty and general statement on Facebook claiming they would “advise the community” at some point in the future as to whether or not abusive Artistic Director Darrell Cox’s award would be revoked. Publicly, no advisement to the community ever came, even after the theatre shuttered permanently. Darrell W. Cox is still the listed recipient of four Jeff Awards, alongside eleven still-standing recognitions for the disgraced company.

When Charles Askenaizer took home the Jeff this Spring, both moments came back to me.

When Askenaizer accepted his award in absentia, using his partner to address the audience in the first person, he invoked a very familiar narrative — of a suffering so epic it is transformative — of oneself, but especially of the world. He invoked a Jewish grandfather who was “denigrated, dehumanized, [and] lied about,” who “left behind his home and his family to dream of a better world.”

It wasn’t a random reference. It was a mawkish and grifting one, certainly, one which implied a link between Prior’s suffering in Angels in America, the suffering and death of Askenaizer’s own family in the Holocaust, and the persecution Askenaizer would have us believe he is currently enduring as a result of his conduct.

Putatively, the invocation was in service of his interpretation of Angels in America. In extending his interpretation outside the play, though, Askenaizer’s speech suggests this framing as something central to his worldview; he sees suffering as inherently meaningful, valuable, and redemptive. There’s a “painful progress” – a phrase he borrowed from Angels in his speech– and it’s clear, to him anyway, that the pain isn’t tangential to the progress: it’s the very means of achieving it.

When a number of actors came forward regarding Askenaizer’s rehearsal room behavior this year, the stories about his directing methods were remarkably consistent. It seems that Askenaizer’s primary tool was to drive actors into more emotionally volatile states in rehearsal through the repetition of intense material, paired with the invocation of the actors’ own personal histories and traumas.

“He would have actors screaming their heads off for five to ten minutes at a time; they would do these very emotionally fraught scenes five, six, seven times– for the entire rehearsal” recounted actor Jack Morsovillo, who worked with Askenaizer on Hamlet.

Ebby Offord, who played Ophelia, recalled that

Charles […] would keep me in the dressing room alone with him, and he would ask me to grab his hands […] and push and push and push and push and scream until my throat was raw. And the entire time that I was screaming in his face, he would repeat back to me: “you’re never going to see your father again. He’s never gonna get to hear you sing. You’re never gonna get to hold each other. He’s never gonna hug you. You’re never gonna get to tell him how much you love him.” Over and over and over again until I would get to a point where I would literally physically start breaking down, and then he would push me on stage and expect me to perform the mad scene, and I would do it over and over and over again, some times four or five times in a row before I was allowed to have a break.

Actress Elise Soeder affirmed that, under Askenaizer, “We were expected to emotionally live our characters’ trauma. That’s how he rolls. It is not safe. It is not sustainable, but as someone ten years younger than I am now, I really wanted it to be good.”

As actor Shane Novoa Rhoades put it, “the way I can best describe the way Charles directs is somebody who learned all the wrong lessons from Meisner. He wants everyone yelling, screaming, and crying all the fucking time, because that’s where the “emotional truth” is.”

Morsovillo recounted that Askenaizer named this strategy explicitly, saying, as he recalls, “My job is to get you to have the most emotionally real performance that I can get you to have. To make the play the best it can be.”

In a written statement to Block Club, Askenaizer justified that his methods are “designed to help performers access deeper, more truthful work” and that “This is what good directing looks like. This is how actors are trained to do challenging, meaningful work”. His rationale draws a direct equivalence between the value of the work and its “truthfulness”. In his schema, the more self-evidently “truthful” a performer’s work is, the more valuable it becomes.

The worship of truthfulness is especially reminiscent of Profiles Theatre’s downfall a decade ago: then, it was another hybrid director-star, Darrell Cox, who criticized other actors in the room for “not bringing their real lives to the table. They’re not showing up, they’re not being honest.” The insistence on repetition is also mirrored here, with an actor who worked with Cox reporting “I never was able to get what he wanted right. One night he had me stay till 4:30 in the morning with another actor because we didn’t do the scene right.” The motto of Profiles was, quite literally, “Whatever the Truth Requires”.

As I see it, there is a significant epistemological problem with Askenaizer’s justification, and Profiles’ motto: Can theatrical performance ever be classed as the truth, anyway? Even modes like verbatim theatre, pulled from a truthful source, become inherently fictive in their rehearsed retelling. We’re never the thing itself onstage, only ever its simulacrum. Further still, why is the truth even required?

This schema (correct acting equals truth equals total surrender equals meaningful work) is not at all exclusive to Profiles and Invictus. What Cox and Askenaizer represent is an especially pernicious expression of an idea already free-floating through our community and its collective unconscious.

“Why are we concerned with art?” Polish director and theatre Theorist Jerzy Grotowski asks in his 1968 manifesto Towards a Poor Theatre, “to cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness — fulfill ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent.” Elsewhere, Grotowski clarifies that this process of fulfillment

is not an egoistic technique based on the actor’s enjoyment of his own emotional experience, but rather the revealing technique of a trance, an integration of spiritual, psychic, and physical faculties climaxing in a “penetration” from and by the actor’s intimate instinctive psyche: the actor in the act of giving himself.

Grotowski’s imagery is much the same as Cox and Askenaizer — the sense of the truth being something buried, darkened, obscured by the intractable body, which must be totally surrendered; he describes his work as an “attempt to eliminate [the actor’s] organism’s resistance to this spiritual process.”

Grotowski’s designation that this is an inherently spiritual endeavor, rather than a matter of technical skill, aligns his theatrical aesthetics with the practices of religious mystics.

In 1982, after a would-be-assassin’s bullet tore through Pope John Paul II’s abdomen, draining him of three quarters of his blood, he had been rendered, in his words, “half dead and half alive”. In the long months of convalescence that followed, the Pope’s thoughts crystallized around the mystical power of suffering, culminating ultimately in a letter entitled Salvifici Doloris– or, “redemptive suffering”. “Down through the centuries and generations”, he writes, “it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace.”

Indeed, some of the earliest Christian figures came to Revelation directly through their suffering, such as the Apostle Paul, who was stricken with blindness and commanded to wander the desert by God himself. When Saint Francis prayed that he might know the full measure of Christ’s suffering, and his love, Jesus appeared to him, shrouded in flame, and

streams of fire and blood shot from His wounds and pierced the hands and feet of Francis with nails and his heart with the stab of a lance. As Francis uttered a mighty shout of joy and pain, the fiery image impressed itself into his body, as into a mirrored reflection of itself, with all its love, its beauty, and its grief.

Other Christian figures encountered this immense revelatory pain not once, but over and over. Hildegard of Bingen was beset with visions of God as a pure beam of light throughout her life, during which she expressed “I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me”.

As Christians came to understand suffering as a potential waypoint to divinity, some of the devout started to seek out that suffering intentionally. In one of the most visceral examples, Saint Simeon Stylites, “endeavoring to realize in the flesh the existence of the heavenly hosts,” exiled himself deep into the desert, to stand atop a meter-wide pillar fifty feet high and open to the elements. Wrapped in heavy chains, arms outstretched to the sky, he bowed ceaselessly, day after day. A spectator once reported that he “counted 1244 repetitions of this movement, and then gave up reckoning.” In so doing, Simeon sought to “[lift] himself above the concerns of earth, and [overpower] the downward tendency of man’s nature, [...] intent on things above.”

In each of these examples, we see pain so extreme it reaches towards ecstasy- a kind of intractable, all consuming pain that tears the soul somewhat away from the confines of the body. In much the same way, Grotowski’s intent “to cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness – fulfill ourselves” supplants an ecstasy which reaches toward a divine creator, with a more vernacular, digestible replacement — the ever-elusive truth that Askenaizer and Cox worshipped in the rehearsal room.

The veneration of a “truthful”, self-sacrificial acting technique is by no means the exclusive purview of exploitative storefront theatre directors. Angelica Jade Bastién, in her 2016 essay observes that

For the last few decades, particularly after Robert De Niro’s infamous body transformation for 1980’s Raging Bull, which netted him an Oscar, method acting has become a critical factor in the campaigns of actors seeking trophies. Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christian Bale, and particularly Leonardo DiCaprio have spoken about how they lose themselves in roles—gaining weight, whittling themselves down, never breaking character, taking on accents and hobbies that affect their personal life. The underpinning of this strategy is the belief that to create great art one must suffer.

Yet another author lamented that the Best Actor nominees evince “the tendency to see acting greatness in terms of transformation and misery… Acting becomes a stoic’s routine, a form of monk-like self-flagellation to prove devotion to one’s craft. Lose that weight. Eat that flesh. Take the punch to the face.” The clear pattern is that suffering and the perceived import or validity of the performance are deeply culturally interlinked.

Elsewhere in this issue, Hanna Kime explores theatre’s uneasy relationship with productivity. We like to believe that acting has the power to do something in the world, whether or not the evidence actually supports that claim. There is, perhaps, no more extreme justification for the theatre than a metaphysical one — that the very performance of the work (namely, the suffering) is a world-changing force, even over and above the capacity of the work to consciously change the perspective of a viewer.

But putting aside a world where we all share the same religion and the same theological frameworks (a world which, needless to say, has never befallen us), the leap from the Pope’s balcony to the stage is a long and uncertain one. Even if you believe, as Pope John Paul II did, that suffering “is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world’s salvation”, there’s another leap to make to believe that intentionally self-inflicted suffering is an effective author of those aforementioned “good things”. Further still, should we believe that the theatre is a viable means of such mortification? I’m not convinced that this is the case.

Still, this framework for acting looms large in the back of our minds. Whether or not any of us would explicitly or consciously submit ourselves to a regimen of mortification for the theatre, it’s a seductive enough idea that I think there’s no coincidence that Askenaizer won his award specifically for Angels in America, in which Prior’s illness and suffering is a direct link to the divine, and a force which, in and of itself, has the power to reshape the world.

Make no mistake: the fact that Askenaizer won the Jeff is staggering. Askenaizer’s rehearsal room behavior is documented: repeatedly, fervently, unambiguously corroborated, viewed online 75 thousand times. There was plenty of time for the Jeff Committee to make a public statement, or withdraw the nomination, condemn even the intimation of abuse in theatre making. But to rebuke Askenaizer, to reject his Theatre of Mortification, would require the Jeff Committee to subscribe to an alternate model of what theatre can do and be in Chicago. In researching this piece, I discovered that the Jeff Committee has no publicly available mission statement. What kind of a vision does the Committee have for our community, or for the world?

It is imperative that each of us name our own positive values for the theatre. Disappointment with the Jeff Awards is not altogether misplaced, but we materially endanger ourselves by reassigning that responsibility to an institution, rather than claiming it ourselves. In the absence of a new prevailing cultural value, the old ones still linger, only now, they’ve slipped loose from their original contexts, and become ripe for exploitation and misappropriation. Mortification is still part of our rhetorical cargo, heavy as ever, sliding totally untethered over the deck.

Positioning acting as something that happens to you, something that necessitates a state of self-forgetfulness, of a separation from one’s own body, rather than as an activity requiring sustained engagement, creates the conditions for exploitation. If we position acting as inherently mysterious and unknowable, there’s no need to justify exploitative rehearsal practices. If we conflate our own suffering as actors with the meaning and value of the work, we create a feedback loop that engenders abuse.

The Art of the Season

A theatre season is a budget with opinions. Every title a company announces is a small argument about what deserves a stage, an audience, a run. Stacked across a city and over five years, those arguments add up to a portrait of what a theatre community believes it is for.

I spent a lot of time with that portrait. This piece is about programming: specifically, which plays got produced, whether they were new work or revivals, and who wrote them.

It’s one of two companion pieces drawn from the same dataset. Madie Doppelt’s casting analysis asks the parallel question one rung closer to the audience, not who wrote the words but who got hired to say them.

Read together they’re two angles on the same question: who is Chicago theatre actually for? The preface covers which theatres we counted, why we stopped at Equity houses, and how the data was assembled. I’ll point to it rather than repeat it.

The short version of the scope: 29 Equity theatres in and around Chicago, five seasons (2021/22 through 2025/26), 496 productions (once a handful of one-off benefits are set aside). For each one I logged two things. Was it a world premiere or a revival? And who wrote it? Everything below comes from those two columns.

02 · THE SHORT VERSION

Chicago Theater, by the Numbers

The findings, fast:

• 29 theatres, 5 seasons, ~500 productions. One in four was a world premiere. The other three-quarters had been produced somewhere before.

• Overall authorship: 65% men, 30% women, 4% mixed collaborations, 1% trans or nonbinary playwrights.

• But split by whether the work was new: world premieres ran 44% women. Previously-produced work ran 26% women, 70% men. New work is approaching parity. The inherited repertoire is not.

• Form is a factor. Plays: 32% women-authored. Musicals: 17%, with men credited on 76%.

• Season by season: We saw 31%, 38%, 30%, 36%, 18% women’s authorship across the the past five years (in chronological order, from 2021/22 to 2025/26).

• The companies doing the most new work are also the most gender-balanced. They cluster in the city. The suburban musical houses lean heaviest on a male-authored back catalogue.

03 · NEW WORK, OLD CANON

Premieres vs. Proven Hits

Start with the (comparatively) rarest thing on a Chicago stage: a play nobody has seen before. Across five seasons, a quarter of all productions were world premieres. The dominant mode of Chicago’s Equity theatres is not invention but revival, staging work that has already proven somewhere else that it can fill a house.

To be clear, that’s not a scandal. At a time when arts funding is being slashed to ribbons and macroeconomic conditions are looking… let’s say “uninspiring,” it’s unsurprising that theatre companies are pushing for surer bets.

A previously produced play arrives with reviews, a known shape, an audience that may already love it, and a playwright with at least some influence. A world premiere is a bet placed with real money in front of people who have to renew their subscriptions (or reward the theatre with a return visit for another show). The wonder isn’t that theatres lean on proven titles. What is interesting is how completely the leaning varies from one company to the next.

Drury Lane, Paramount, and Music Theater Works, for instance, staged zero world premieres across the entire window. Porchlight, also none. These are big suburban musical operations, and their model runs on titles the audience already knows by heart. Then there’s the other end of the field: Rivendell premiered every single show it produced. Black Ensemble Theater, 94% of its work (the other 6% were revivals or productions of work it previously premiered). A Red Orchid, about 70%. New work is not spread evenly. It’s concentrated in specific kinds of theatres, usually smaller, mission-driven.

04 · WHO WROTE THE SEASON

Whose Pen, Whose Stage?

Who gets cast is Madie’s territory. This dataset is about who holds the pen. Whose plays get staged?

Tally up every Chicago production with a credited author and the headline is lopsided: roughly two playwrights in three were men. Thirty percent were women, four percent mixed writing teams, about one percent trans or nonbinary. In a vacuum, it looks like a familiar imbalance. One we’ve grown to know (and resent, to be clear).

But the single figure hides the most interesting thing in the data.

Split those same productions by whether the work was new and the field cleaves in two. Among world premieres, women wrote 44%, close enough to even that one could (charitably) call it a coin flip. I won’t, but others could.

Among previously produced work, women wrote 26%, men 70%. Same theatres, same artistic directors, same seasons. The difference is entirely whether the choice was about the future or about inheritance. The gender imbalance on Chicago’s stages is not being manufactured by what theatres commission today. Today’s commissions are nearly balanced. The imbalance is being inherited from decades of accumulated canon, carried forward one safe revival at a time

When theatre companies opt for safer bets, they are also opting for male playwrights.

Nowhere is that inheritance heavier than in the musical. For context, plays were 32% women-authored. Not parity but definitely better than what you’re about to read.

Musicals were 17%, with men credited on more than three-quarters of the books and librettos.

The standard musical-theatre canon, the proven-title tier the commercial houses depend on, was built overwhelmingly by men. Leaning on it means importing that authorship wholesale. The suburban musical house isn’t (necessarily) making sexist choices show by show. It is, however, making canonical ones

Has any of this authorship shifted over five years? Not in a clean line. Women’s share of all productions rose to 38% in 2022/23, slid back, climbed again to 36% in 2024/25, and then falls to 18% in 2025/26. That figure once again illustrates how precarious representation can be — even in the arts. When maleness is the default, a “safer” approach will beget further maleness.

Plot each company by how much new work it does against how much of its writing comes from women and trans or nonbinary playwrights and the dots line up. Rivendell sits alone in the top-right corner: all new work, 88% women and nonbinary writers. The big commercial musical houses cluster at the bottom-left, little or no new work, few or no women. The balanced, premiere-heavy companies are overwhelmingly Chicago storefronts and mid-size North Side houses. The male-leaning ones reside in the suburbs.

The suburban, musical-driven houses that lean hardest on a male-authored canon are largely the same ones Madie’s data finds casting the whitest. The city houses programming the most new work cast closer to the city’s actual demographics.

Our two datasets keep pointing at the same places.

05 . CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

What’s the Point?

If new work in Chicago is nearing gender parity, and the imbalance lives in the canon, then the future of who gets staged depends on something slow and unglamorous: which of today’s premieres get picked up, revived, produced again somewhere else, until they harden into the kind of title a theatre programs without having to explain itself. Today’s world premiere is tomorrow’s proven hit. But only if someone produces it twice, thrice, etc.

For context, Chicago is 51% female. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey estimates, women are the majority of this city — and have been for as long as anyone has counted. They buy the tickets. They fill the seats. They are, by any demographic measure, the primary audience for Chicago theatre. And across five seasons of Equity programming, 70% of the previously produced work they were invited to watch was written by men.

That gap doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from a specific, defensible, and ultimately circular logic: risk-averse programming means reaching for proven titles, proven titles are the ones that have been produced before, and the plays that have been produced before are overwhelmingly by men — because the people making those decisions, for the last hundred years, were also overwhelmingly men. So the canon is male because it was built by men, and it stays male because building on it feels safe.

The frustrating thing is that the data also shows another path is possible. New work in Chicago is close to gender parity. The companies commissioning most aggressively — Rivendell, A Red Orchid, Black Ensemble, About Face — have figured out that a theatre’s mission and its programming can actually match. None of them are doing it by taking crazy risks. They’re doing it by deciding that the canon they’re building is the one happening right now, in their city, with the writers who are here. That’s a different definition of what’s safe.

To be direct about what this argument is and isn’t: a play written by a man is not, by virtue of that fact, a sexist play. Many searching, feminist-in-effect plays in the canon were written by men who understood something about power. The issue is the aggregate signal sent by a field that consistently reaches for male writers when it wants to feel safe — and what that signal tells every writer who isn’t male about whether the institution considers their work a risk worth taking.

One more thing the numbers can’t tell you. This dataset counts trans and nonbinary playwrights where writers publicly self-identify — fewer than 10 writers at a small handful of companies. That number is almost certainly wrong. Not because the research is sloppy, but because publicly available information about writers’ gender identities is incomplete by design: many trans and nonbinary people don’t disclose, and no public database tracks it. The census comparison is also a binary one — the ACS records male and female, not gender identity — which means the 51% female figure undercounts Chicago’s actual gender diversity in the same direction this dataset does.

The TGNC population of this city is real, present, and paying for tickets. It is essentially invisible in both the data we’re working from and in five seasons of Equity programming.

So…what’s the point I’m making? Today’s world premiere is tomorrow’s proven hit. But only if someone produces it twice, thrice, etc. The companies doing the most new work right now are building a different canon, one that might look a lot more like Chicago by the time it’s old enough to feel safe. Whether other institutions follow them there, or keep borrowing a past that was never built for this city, is the question the next five, 10, 15 seasons will answer.

The dataset is public.

Just click the text above to view the full findings. If you spot an error, an omission, a show I miscategorized, please send it. This is meant to be the beginning of a conversation.

06 . HOW I COUNTED

METHODOLOGY

The preface covers scope, sourcing, and the theatres included. Here’s what’s specific to this piece.

Productions vs. events. Five entries were held out as not-really-productions: one-night benefit talks by Eddie Izzard and Ian McKellen at Chicago Shakespeare, a Natalie Merchant concert and a toddler story-time series at Chicago Children’s, and a developmental workshop at Theater Wit.

Premiere status. Evidence-first: a show gets called “previously produced” only when a source explicitly confirms a prior production; “world premiere” only when documented as such. Ambiguous titles were individually verified. None remain undetermined in this cut.

Playwright gender. Recorded as male, female, trans/nonbinary, mixed (co-authored across categories), or devised/ensemble. Trans and nonbinary identity was assigned only where the writer publicly self-identifies — meaning it appears in a public bio, interview, or author statement. This likely produces an undercount. Gender identity is not reliably inferable from public sources, many TGNC writers do not disclose it in professional contexts, and no comprehensive database of playwright gender identities exists. Any future version of this research that wants to do better on this dimension will need direct, voluntary disclosure from writers — which is a different kind of research project than this one. Gender percentages in the analysis are over the 491 productions with a named, attributable author.

What to watch out for. A few source-data errors surfaced and were corrected in the dataset, including two plays credited to the wrong author in the original listings. The full dataset, with the basis for every classification, is linked from the preface; again, corrections are welcome and will be logged!

ZACH BARR: This coming Sunday will be the 79th annual Tony Awards. It will also mark the 25th anniversary of your attendance at the 55th Tony Awards, on behalf of Regional Theater Tony Award winner Victory Gardens. What do you remember about attending the ceremony?

SANDY SHINNER: First of all, the fact that we were even going to be the regional theater honoree was almost unbelievable to us. When the Tony Award Committee called Dennis Zaçek [founding Artistic Director of Victory Gardens], he didn’t even believe them. I think [he] had to call them back. And then Dennis came down to tell us in rehearsal, which was a fabulous moment. We had a huge number of people at the Tonys, it couldn’t have happened without all of those people. It took the all the Playwrights Ensemble, it took the staff, it took our incredibly generous donors.

But the thing that changed for Victory Gardens was that… our mission of new play development had been under fire, basically. A couple of years before that, we had some disagreements on the Board, about what the focus should be. They wanted us in a bigger space, and they wanted us to do more plays that would, quote unquote, “sell.” We always wanted to stay small enough and intimate enough that we could do world premiere work. So, it was an enormous stamp of approval that we were on the right track. Poetic justice, as it were.

BARR: In the next few months, you’ll be stepping down from your tenure as Producing Artistic Director at Shattered Globe. How did your transition into the position go in 2013? Has the onboarding process changed, during the time you’ve been in the role?

SHINNER: There had never been a producing artistic director. I was the first one.. It was the ensemble that transitioned me into the new job. I’ve often said that, although I am certainly leading, I’m not the only voice in the room. It’s a collaborative effort. That’s how the theatre has been created, and that still exists, in terms of how its run. I certainly am hopeful that, for those thirteen years, I’ve made some stability in the organization. When I came in, we couldn’t even find the mailing list. We have reached a certain level of organizational ability that is much easier to transfer now.

BARR: Have there been any changes to how the company operates artistically that you’ve been able to see realized?

SHINNER: When they asked me if I was interested in coming on board, I said very clearly that my commitment, which had been formed at Victory Gardens, was to new plays and making sure that the theater company looked more like the city of Chicago. So the evolution of the ensemble, for instance, has been steady. Adding people into an ensemble-based theater is not like casting somebody for a single show. The idea that people have multiple skills and want to share what they know, that they believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that we all work towards the same goals––that’s not for everybody. But we have a wonderful ensemble and it’s diverse, generationally and racially. I’m really proud of the fact that they accepted that kind of a challenge when I came in, and that we continue to grow and do it authentically. That was always the goal.

BARR: While you’re stepping away from leadership, you’ll remain a Shattered Globe Ensemble member. What opportunities do you hope that you’ll have as a regular ensemble member, that you didn’t have as Artistic Director?

SHINNER: That’s really tricky! I don’t absolutely know. You have to be in an ensemble because you believe in the group, and you sometimes put your personal needs to the side because there’s something more important at that particular moment. I directed in the first season that I was AD, and I thought it would probably be a good idea if I went every other season.

When we got to the pandemic and everybody was rethinking how we had approached things, I realized that, you know, I have had a lot of opportunity, and now I’m in a leadership role where I can give that opportunity to other people. And there were so many wonderful people who were ready to direct that I was happy to say, “great, take this and run with it, and I’ll be here to support you.” I have directed other places in Chicago, and maybe there’ll be an opportunity to do some readings and work with some playwrights. I don’t know what that’s gonna look like, but I’m happy to be open to the possibilities.

BARR: There’s been a lot of hand-wringing post-pandemic about low theater attendance, with a lot of companies programming what could be called “safe” picks. Do you feel that shift in audience interest? How do you balance ambitious new work programming with concerns about audience retention?

SHINNER: We have been really lucky. We had incredible audiences for London Road, incredible audiences for Lobby Hero. And, I mean––we didn’t pick Lobby Hero because we thought it was gonna be off the charts. We picked Lobby Hero because it was something that Nate [Santana] brought to the table, and he was passionate about it.

And then, because Nate is a great artist and he found and cast Elliot Esquivel, who really kind of changed the idea of who that character was, people wanted to see it.

The audience is a little fickle, I think, after the pandemic. The idea that somebody’s gonna commit to see all three of your shows is less of a reality. Sometimes the reviews help, but I think it’s about where people are getting their information now, and how much of that’s changed in terms of being able to reach people and scoop them in to be excited about a show.

For Eelpout!, for instance, who would have thought that it was going to be as incredibly well received as it was, you know? We’re always hopeful, but…you put it out there and, if it means something to you and everybody is passionate, then you just hope that other people catch that passion. So we’ve been lucky to be able to do that.

BARR: Victory Gardens has changed significantly since you left, closing in 2022 after the majority of its staff were fired or quit. But the company has announced their intention to return to operation, with Teatro Vista co-founder and Chad Deity director Edward Torres as Interim Artistic Director. What future would you like to see for that organization?

SHINNER: Well, you know, I’ve talked to Eddie Torres about this. Eddie’s very passionate about trying to make this happen. I think that having a theater the size of Victory Gardens continue with the mission of new plays and new play development is huge in the community. We built a place that did great work with wonderful writers, and we were able to do five plays a year, many of them new plays. It’s such an important mission to be held by a theater with status, to kind of elevate the idea of new plays, and the importance that hearing what living playwrights have to say about our world. And I think that’s what Eddie is trying to do.

BARR: We’ve seen a lot of incubators for new plays shutter in the last decade: Humana Festival, Lark Play Development Center, and IGNITION Festival at Victory Gardens, which you founded in 2010. What are the benefits of development series like these?

SHINNER: The thing about all of those programs is that that they actually took the thing from idea to production. You can only have workshops and readings for so long before you just need more information, and the only information you get is from having the show produced.

So the fact that those big, incredibly important––and I include IGNITION in that because, my goodness gracious, we brought The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and We are Proud to Present a Presentation…, and Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them. So, I feel like that’s a big loss, right? Shattered Globe, we did our series which was slightly the stepchild of IGNITION, called the Global Playwright Series. We did produce Jasmine Sharma’s Radial Gradient, and we’re still in contact with the other playwrights, and hope to produce all of them in that cohort eventually.

BARR: I found your 2016 interview with Ed Tracy, in which you pointed out that New York does not refer to itself as having a theater “community” in the same way that Chicago does.

SHINNER: That’s right. All the people that have come in from New York––famous actors that I’ve worked with, and other people who have come in to lead theaters––are always surprised at Chicago. That sense of how committed we are to the work, that we want to be inclusive and we want to forge our artistic lives here. There are so many people in Chicago who could have chosen New York and didn’t, because of what we’ve got here.

BARR: There’s been some testing of the trust holding that community together, in the last couple of years. Certain companies have struggled to navigate scandals and dwindling community support, not to mention the ongoing anger around the non-Equity Jeffs in March. Do you still feel that Chicago’s theater scene is a community right now?

SHINNER: You know, I feel that. There always have been risks. There’ve been problems. The non-equity Jeffs is not something new. Things come along, exacerbated by our political life, or the life outside the art. And sometimes things get shaken up for a little bit, but they’ve always come back together. Sometimes it just takes time. I can only really speak myself on that. I hope other people feel the same way, but… I don’t know.

BARR: The cultural idea of “Chicago style” storefront theater is still somewhat rooted in the 70s and 80s––your Steppenwolfs, your ensemble-based companies, your character-driven plays. The current crop of storefronts continue to challenge the definition of what the style is. What would you classify as hallmarks of today’s “Chicago style,” if it can be said to have one?

SHINNER: Other people have heard me say this before, having been here for a really long time. We all spent a lot of time building a community in Chicago. Getting to know each other, feeling like the rising tide floats all boats. It was not competitive. We were here to make Chicago theater a place where people could live, and feel like they had an artistic life in the city. The larger theaters supporting the smaller theaters––and the smaller theaters supporting the larger theaters, by lifting up great new artists that we can take a chance on, and their careers can grow because of it.

I hope that people realize that the history of how Chicago’s built, which is not like any other city, is that we all collaborated––big, small, medium-sized––different points of view in terms of what art we were making. We were all important to the city, and it took all of us to create the community. I hope that that particular idea still continues for a long time, because it’s made Chicago what it is.

Reading those DEI statements felt like taking cough syrup: disgusting, with the hope that soon the malady would turn for the better.

In 2021, when theaters began to reopen, there seemed to be a concerted effort to diversify programming. We saw an influx of new actors, directors, designers, and plays giving tangible value to the DEI statement promises of 2020. But in the years since, I’ve noticed casts seemingly revert back to pre-2020 numbers. Every time I inquired about this, artistic leaders assured me they valued and prioritized diversity. I was referred back to those stale, desperate DEI statements. And in the same breath, an all-white cast would be announced.

I’m tired of being lied to. Our instincts are responding to something, whether or not organizations try to gaslight us out of them. As a salve, let’s look at something indisputable: the numbers.

This article contains casting data on five years (seasons 2021-22 to 2025-26) of Equity theaters in Chicago and surrounding. For the purposes of measuring increasing whiteness on Chicago stages, actors have been separated into two groups: White and Global Majority.

The term Global Majority, coined by educator Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, includes all people who are “Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as ‘ethnic minorities’” and is about 80% of the world’s population. What I love about this term is that it consciously de-centers the rhetoric of Whiteness as the racial majority, which it isn’t.

Here, we’ll be looking specifically at the disparity between white actors and actors in the global majority. They are grouped this way to highlight the scope of Chicago’s casting practices, illuminating the fact that every single other race can easily be grouped together and come up with comparable numbers to White performers. It shouldn’t be this clean or easy to package, but it is.

Chicago vs. Chicago Theater

The most striking aspect of primarily white casting is that demographics on stage vary so deeply from the population it claims to serve. If theater is a dramatized reflection of life, and the stories on stage are meant to reflect the experiences of (or at least relatively inspired by) real people, it seriously begs the question: where are all these white people coming from?

Chicago’s population is primarily split between white, black, and hispanic/latino populations, almost evenly. As you can see, a similar split is nonexistent on Chicago Equity stages. Of course, there is a bigger conversation to be had about access, segregation, and the pipeline from educational institutions to stages. But most glaringly, our stages get whiter while our population does not.

The farther we get from 2020, the whiter casts become. Plain and simple. Immediately post-2020, the actors in the Global Majority make up just over 51%— just over half— of the actors hired in the 2021-22 season. One race– white– makes up the other half. And that year is the best it gets.

In 2025, white actors were 23% more likely to be cast in an Equity production than in 2021. Meanwhile, actors in the global majority are 7% less likely to be cast. This is a huge jump in just five seasons, especially considering that the 2021-22 season featured 745 actors, while the 2025-26 season cast 1,056 actors. Even with more total actors being cast, actors in the global majority are still less likely to make it onto an Equity stage.

This data isn’t meant to neglect all of the work at Equity theaters that may be happening behind closed doors. Instead, it’s meant to be a vehicle for measuring how fast change can happen (and if change is happening) on the surface. There is no role more front-facing than the actors on the stage, in the costumes, saying the words. The actors that school buses of school kids come to see, college students model their aspirations after, and designers spend hundreds of hours designing for.

So, if the majority of the people on Chicago area stages are white, this begs the question: Who is theater for? And who does it represent?

Subgroup Isolations

No Equity theater is quite like the other. They vary enormously in resources, geography, and national exposure. All aspects that inform their target audience and, subsequently, programming. Because of this, there’s no way to engage with this data without isolating some crucial sub-groups.

First, let’s talk geography. A vast majority of Equity theaters are in Chicago proper, with only nine out of twenty-nine theaters located outside of the city. However, these nine theaters (see below) cast over 50% of the Equity season’s actors year over year, making a huge impact on hiring practices and employment for actors in the city and surrounding:

• Writers Theatre

• Northlight Theatre

• Paramount Theatre

• Marriott Theatre

• Music Theater Works

• Drury Lane Theatre

• Oak Park Festival Theatre

• Buffalo Theatre Ensemble

• Artists’ Ensemble Theater

Curious about where all these theaters are? Check out The Plotter’s Equity theater map.

Unsurprisingly, suburban stages are much whiter than Chicago stages. And while Chicago generally casts more diversely, the only year the demographic split comes close to resembling the actual demographics of the city is 2021-22. Every other season is whiter. For those counting, that’s the theatrical season immediately post-2020 Instagram DEI commitment posts.

It’s worth noting that the middle of the venn diagram between suburb-based theaters and theaters that exclusively (or, almost exclusively) do musicals is almost a circle. And while suburban theaters are famously not in the city proper, a majority of those theaters’ casts commute from within city limits. It’s also noteworthy that a straight play cast is typically between 2–10 actors — with a 5-actor cast being a recent favorite — the typical musical cast can span anywhere between 8–40+ actors.

Below are casting stats isolating the following musical-theater specific companies: Paramount Theatre, Marriott Theatre, Music Theater Works, and Porchlight Music Theatre.

Due to the inherent demands of producing a musical, these four theaters cast between 34-40% of actors in a given season, while their productions only represent 16-19% of the total Equity theater shows that season. While non-musical focused theaters walk either side of the 50% White line, musical-specialized theaters range from just over 57% white in 2021-22 to 65% White this current season (2025-26), and peaking in the 2024-25 season at a whopping 66% White.

The TLDR on that sprawling list of numbers is this: the Equity musical theater houses cast a disproportionate number of Chicago actors while casting overwhelmingly white casts that steadily increase in whiteness year over year. (Yes, even if they do Dream Girls.)

For our final sub-group, theaters have been separated by annual budget with the separating threshold being $2M, with an exact even split of theaters on either side (and Music Theater Works hopping below the $2M threshold for the 2022-23 season only).

Unsurprisingly, theaters with bigger budgets do more shows, cast more actors, pay more, have bigger audiences, and so on forever. Generally, we’re seeing the same trend repeated: seasons get increasingly whiter year after year. Something interesting, though, is that the higher-budget theaters tend to cast more actors in the global majority than their counterparts.

Initially, I found that shocking: theaters such as Goodman, Lookingglass, and Steppenwolf — whose subscriber bases are by-and-large older, whiter, and wealthier — are casting more diversity on their stages than younger, “grittier” Chicago companies whose financial stability isn’t necessarily as directly tied to their subscribers?

How is this possible? Perhaps it’s a matter of admin power — more employees following institutional promises through to the end. Perhaps it’s new leadership — all three of these major institutions have had new Artistic Directors step in during this five-year period. Perhaps it’s the level of platform — bigger theaters with bigger audiences holding them accountable to their promises. Impossible to know for sure, dealers’ choice on what feels believable to you.

CONCLUSION

For years, each casting announcement that found its way onto my feed caused feelings. Feelings of doubt, confusion, and mistrust in the industry that promised to improve. Now, seeing the numbers — tangible, measurable, and real — I’m left feeling conflicted. It feels good to know that my instincts were right, that the casts did trend whiter every year across every kind of theater, no matter how I sliced it. It’s validating. But I’d rather be wrong than witness the whitewashing of our theaters year over year. Chicago theater is getting whiter. The City of Chicago isn’t.

I felt motivated to look at casting specifically because, at the end of the day, to be cast is to be hired. To be offered money for your work. Money that pays the bills, money to spend on seeing another play, money that places a value on craft (for better or for worse).

I’m not the first person to offer musings on racial casting in Chicago, not even by a mile. I hope this conversation inspires more conversation, inspires action. I hope, with the numbers right in front of us, we can actively work to make a change. To cast Chicago theater with the stories, experiences, and people of the Global Majority. Because, after all, it’s Chicago’s majority, too.

METHODOLOGY

For a full list of theaters, scope, and sourcing, check out the preface. Below is some methodology specific to this piece.

Chicago Census Source. Chicago Health Atlas counts hispanic/latino as a separate racial designation from other racial markers. This group has been counted within the Global Majority throughout the dataset.

Cast Lists. These were sourced from the internet. For some theaters, this means thorough production history pages directly on their website, and for others it meant instagram announcements, Broadway World articles, and other sources.

Actor Race. Recorded as white or global majority. This is not an exact science, and racial identity is nuanced and individual. Actors’ identities are not disclosed publicly by theaters, agencies, or the like, and is not reliably inferable. Data was collected based on character descriptions, publicly available headshots, production-specific marketing, and general play demands. Any future version of this research that wants to do better on this dimension will need direct, voluntary disclosure from actors — which is a different kind of research project than this one. Race percentages in this analysis are over 500 productions and 4,957 roles cast.

The dataset is public. If you spot an error or omission, please send it and I will happily update the numbers accordingly. My priority is that this information is as correct as possible, and that this can be the start to a larger conversation.

We were, as theatre people are wont to do, discussing all of the shows we had recently seen. Someone brought up Definition’s production of Fairview. Most of the group gushed – they loved that play, they loved that production, they’ve loved that script for years and thank GOD someone finally did it here – but one white person in the group had an issue with it. They told us that they “wished it offered a path forward.”

No one wants an essay where one white person debates another white person on the value (or lack thereof) of Fairview, but that comment has stuck with me. I don’t understand why “a path forward” is an expectation anyone needs to place on theatre, but I think it’s an expectation more and more people hold. There has come to be a sense, among this theatre community and its gatekeepers, that a good play should hold some sort of utilitarian function.

I don’t get this at all.

The Zone of Interest doesn’t offer a path forward. Parasite doesn’t offer a path forward. Works of art in other media, like film, or literature, or even more broadly into music and visual art, aren’t burdened with an assumption that they will, to justify their existence, solve a problem. They are allowed to be art: to crack open questions, to let people feel without resolution.

For some reason, theatre is not allowed to be art in and of itself. In order to be valuable, worthwhile, or important, theatre has to do something outside of theatre. It has to change minds. It has to open conversations. It has to urgently meet the moment that we are in. It has to perform some sort of measurable and tangible social good, or else it’s frivolous. Unlike a novel, or a film, or a painting, a play has to offer a path forward.

Maybe there is a historical justification for this. Something about the Greeks and the polis, but I don’t have the kind of academic background to follow that thread to the present. What I do have is years of experience working as a Literary Manager of a local storefront, where I witnessed so much programming in service of grant narratives and donors.

Everyone knows ticket sales aren’t enough for nonprofit houses. An actor tells us so after every show before soliciting donations. When you are put in a position where you have to constantly beg for money in order to continue to exist, it makes sense that you would be incentivized to point to a social value your work can perform. Fuzzier artistic values — humor, heartbreak, structural innovation, really really exceptional craft — won’t cut it. At least not for new work. You can get grants for proven entities like Chekov or Ibsen, but if you want to program new plays, you have to convince DCASE and the Donnelly Foundation that those shows are doing something actually valuable. Teaching us a lesson about gun violence, perhaps. Or making a queer child feel seen. And that is not to say that there aren’t great plays about gun violence or queer kids out there, but that is to say that it is hard to get a $20,000 grant by saying a show is simply extremely cool — even when some of the very best shows are just that.

In the best case scenarios, companies find plays that are still really cool, and spin narratives of their social function around them. Many great plays slip through the cracks of the nonprofit industrial complex. Dance Nation, Primary Trust, and X are all plays that have stuck with me for years that are by no means “issue plays” but which could, by a deft marketing and development department, be twisted to look like them with the sexiest little blurb ever.

In the worst case scenarios, checked-out artistic directors program mid-to-bad plays that should have been essays. This results in a lot of mildly entertained audiences leaving the theatre with the same opinions they entered with, perhaps with an added sense of self-satisfaction for having “done something” by going to see an “important” show. But consuming is never active. And while the act of making art can sometimes be activism, passively absorbing art never is.

Playwrights play this game too. When I applied for grants for my self-produced production of The Best Damn Thing at The Understudy, every other sentence was some bullshit about queer girlhood and how important it was to offer representation. But that was never what I cared about as I was writing the play. I wrote The Best Damn Thing to reckon with a deep loneliness that I felt at one point in my life, and to dig into the tragedy of a friendship that had run its course. Unsurprisingly, these are the parts of the play audiences most resonated with, but these aren’t urgent social issues, so I had to spin it.

Theatres everywhere are spinning narratives about the social goods that their shows can achieve that aren’t theatre itself. Especially now, as the Trump administration cuts arts funding and pushes attacks on “woke programming,” there is a mounting pressure placed on companies to present a meaningful resistance.

But theatre is not good at doing that at all.

For one thing, theatre moves way too slowly to meet the moment. Five years ago, when I was a literary manager, I read so many plays about the bees dying. Some of them were great — someone here should produce The Apiary! — but unfortunately, none of them are relevant anymore, because the bees are coming back. Now, when I meet with current literary managers, they complain about all the AI plays coming their way: plays that will inevitably efface themselves as the technology they are trying to capture is developing faster than any nonprofit production calendar ever could.

I wrote The Targeted in 2019. It didn’t get programmed until this summer. The fastest path from first draft to production I’ve ever had for a script of mine was two years for DOGS. With global events as they are now, how could any script written two years ago be expected to offer a tangible solution for the crises we’re currently facing? How could anything someone is writing now predict where we will be in two years’ time?

For another thing, within a nonprofit ecosystem like Chicago’s, companies keep catering to the same audiences again and again. There are very few meaningful efforts to bring new patrons in. Instead, we program shows for other theatre makers and for the older patrons who have stuck around. It’s a small, small community obsessed with a ritualistic taking of medicine. No one outside of the group ever buys a ticket. Why would they? It doesn’t seem particularly fun. If we just keep regurgitating the same opinions to a group of people we know already agree with them, how are we doing anything that matters?

On top of that, while companies want to program plays that offer solutions, theatres can’t offer anything that good, lest the other reliable income source — the donors — don’t like it. So companies wind up in a bind: they have to do activism, but they can only do activism if wealthy, well-meaning liberals approve of it. The activism has to inspire hope.

So shows have to be urgent, but not despondent. And timely, but not too radical. And essential, but never bitter or angry. Never alienating or rageful or so unsettling that people might hate it. Shows have to effect change, but only in ways that a big cross section of people won’t be too scared by. But when has that kind of lowest-common-denominator decision making ever led to real progress?

Artistic leaders will insist that a meaningful act of transformation can occur when you see their shows. But transformation never comes from telling people what they should think, and art that is truly revolutionary is not being programmed two years in advance by well meaning liberal artistic directors with well meaning liberal boards of directors in their 50s or older. Art that is revolutionary isn’t happening within a capitalist apparatus at all. It is happening when Gazans write poetry about the genocide and and share it online. It happened with the guerilla theatre tactics of Act Up.

Nonprofit institutions are trying again and again to do something that they fundamentally cannot, and something has to change. Theatre should not stitch a wound up, it should rip it open. I don’t think a play can change someone’s mind. And I don’t think theatremakers are the right source to lead the revolution. But that does not mean theatre is useless.

Theatre is essential because of what theatre singularly offers: arenas for collective thought and feeling.

In a world that is increasingly mediated, with distractions encouraged and available everywhere (even the Alamo Drafthouse lets people have phones now!) any experience that requires full focus is something we have to cherish. It is very easy, all the time, to turn away. Theatre offers a space where that is not possible. Theatre brings together groups of people from wildly different backgrounds, with different interests and lives, and insists they sit together and lose themselves in the same emotive experience. It insists we sit with the same thorny questions. I don’t know where that happens these days outside of church. And when done right, I truly think theatre can feel holy.

I wonder, too, if this insistence on utility in art is a symptom of a broader illness in our culture: a consequence of the capitalist, Protestant creep that encourages us to treat every moment as a means to an end. Don’t go on a walk without tracking your step count. Don’t enjoy a meal without logging your macros. Optimize. Synergize. Looksmaxx. It’s not surprising, in a world that prioritizes productivity above all else, to develop an expectation that art always serve a purpose. But so often what makes art special is the opportunity it offers us to step outside of this constant current, and relish in a kind of radical purposelessness.

The best theatre, in my opinion, forces audiences to sit in emotions they might not like. Perhaps that’s empathy for someone they might otherwise dismiss. Perhaps that’s discomfort with a kind of group-think that feels hauntingly familiar. Perhaps that’s a deep and almost scary recognition of self.

The best theatre leaves audiences with questions. It creates lobbies for different ideas to bounce against each other. It doesn’t baby an audience or hold anyone’s hand so they can feel good in the end. It allows characters to be reprehensible in one breath and then deeply sympathetic in the next. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t offer answers at all, because it can’t. Instead, it lets the audience leave a bit cracked open and unsettled. Not self-satisfied, but reflective. It doesn’t offer hope or optimism in the way donors or granting bodies well-off subscribers might want. It reflects back the reality of what we are facing, which can be messy, and awful, and deeply hopeless, and it trusts people to be adults and handle that.

The best theatre doesn’t apologize for being theatre; it doesn’t insist that it’s doing something beyond just being art, because it understands that art itself is valuable. Art itself is important.

I don’t think this is just my opinion. Look at two of the most successful shows of the past season: Birds of North America and Octet. These are shows you walk out of feeling ripped apart and a bit helpless. Like Fairview, these shows don’t offer a path forward, they hold up a mirror. They give audiences an opportunity to look closely at parts of themselves they might otherwise want to avoid. They’re not topical, they’re timeless. (Yes, even Octet, because the internet is not new.) These shows both premiered in 2019, and they are both still totally absorbing because they engage with fundamental terrors of being a human being — being online and having a father. They both just announced a remount and another extension respectively.

I hope that artistic directors learn from these shows.

I hope that’s their takeaway — not just that people like two-handers and musicals — and that they actually examine the artistic connective tissue between them.

I hope that collectively we can start holding theatre to the standards of other artforms. Let theatre be gripping, hilarious, terrifying, heartbreaking, confounding, and upsetting, and let that be enough. I think, if we release ourselves from the belief that theatre must enact change, the theatre we make will be better, and more people will come to see it. At the very least, it’s time to stop lying to ourselves about all the urgent challenges our work addresses and refocus on what made us fall in love with the work in the first place.

Theatre can’t change the world. Theatre maybe can’t change anything. But it shouldn’t have to, because it still does something nothing else can. And if we need a path forward for the artform, I hope we follow one that focuses on that.

“It’s not color, it’s culture. [...] There are cultural differences. I know, you know, we all know what it is when a hot comb hits your hair on a Sunday morning, what it smells like. That’s a cultural difference, not just a color difference.”

— Denzel Washington

In rehearsals we always say the final and most integral piece of a production is the audience. The final cast member. The king on the chessboard. The most informative part of the entire experience of putting on a play. The theater critic is the authoritative rook — unbelievably necessary, integral to the structure.

In practice, the reviewer has a responsibility both to the prospective audience member and to the budding production. We know two bad reviews from revered critics could destroy a production before it even gets its sea legs. So, in the current structure of theater criticism — with the same five white men over the age of 45 reviewing plays that don’t fit in their generational lexicon — how can we trust the amplification of new voices in the bursting canon of contemporary American theater? When we know there is a cultural ravine that divides understanding of experiences, why do none of the critics look like the stories they are forming critical public opinions on?

Speaking personally, when you lack the understanding of my humanity— how can I trust that there is care, consideration, and effort to understand my culture’s nuances? How do we move forward in the American theater canon with the support we know is needed to shape its future?

It’s been six years since We See You, White American Theater crystallized a reckoning that was already long overdue.

Or so we thought. The pendulum swings, we know that. It always does. I just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. With a surplus of foreboding casting announcements showing:

• All white casts of…

• plays written by white men with…

• all white production teams amid a sea of…

• all white seasons (with the exception of the annual August Wilson Black History Month feature)

It feels like we’re back in the early 2000’s again.

Then, to watch the respective reviews released, lionizing these productions as if they were at the forefront of theatrical revolution — I can’t help but feel a distinct shiver of restlessness up my spine. That restlessness turns to agitation when we see reviews of productions written by, directed by, and starring underrepresented groups getting panned or even attacked by those very same heterosexual anglo-saxons of a particular age reviewing them.

To restate: the pendulum has swung. Why hasn’t it started to swing back? And why hasn’t the pendulum ever seemingly swung to change the demographics of taste arbiters? Why aren’t critics, the people who can decide a production’s fate, also experiencing an upheaval?

This pendulum has yet to swing in this direction, and I humbly believe we are overdue.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lifelong fan of the Martin McDonoughs and Sam Shepards of our world — they are major influences in my voice as a playwright, interestingly enough. But, as I learned from the experience of premiering my first full length play this year, old white men seem distinctly less interested in my variation of their structures and tones than up and coming young white men doing the same. In many reviews, my play’s content was rarely spoken on, but my “style” was.

“Long winded.”

“Too complicated.”

“Convoluted.”

Such a list wouldn’t be complete without my favorite: “Even more troubling is a scene in which Ciara opens a bottle of Hennessy and mutters a racial slur. Rather than illuminating character or advancing the narrative, the moment feels gratuitous and awkwardly inserted for shock value”.

……

Nigga.

To be clear: this is not a case against critical rigor. A sharp, fair review is what many artists can use to grow. This is a case against criticism that mistakes cultural unfamiliarity for artistic failure — that calls a bottle of Hennessy gratuitous because the reviewer has never been in that room.

This brings me back to Denzel. Culture. Those folks don’t know the smell of a hot comb hitting your hair on a Sunday morning.

They don’t know the taste of grandmama’s catfish at the cookout.

They don’t know the lyrics to “Set It Off” by Lil Boosie.

They don’t know the pain of losing a family member to the prison system for a crime they didn’t commit — simply for being a nigga.

And yet, these white men are the jurists of a production’s life and its worth. Interesting. And we voluntarily continue the pattern of allowing them to decide on whether or not our stories have worth, both in our industry and in our sociopolitical system. Very interesting metatextuality.

What’s more: We all know a critical pan from someone like the Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones could tank a show before, or shortly after, opening weekend (it famously has in more than one case). What happens when one white man becomes the arbiter of theatrical truth for an entire city? What happens when one critic is expected to do so with over a century passing since the last explosion of Black art? With the knowledge of what impact relentless criticism had on people like Sarah Kane?

With all the respect and admiration to the older white male reviewers in town: as a Black, Asian and queer femme artist, I can not help but ask these questions every time I see a negative review on a new piece of work by an artist within my cultural alignment.

Let’s take a brief aside here. It’s been 100 years since the Harlem Renaissance: a time when Black voices were unafraid to live in abject poverty to throw shit at the wall, knowing it wouldn’t stick until likely after they died. This also brings the infamous (litany of) reviews on Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995 to mind. She was a white British woman to be fair, but the example stands stronger because of it. If critics were willing to call her work “a feast of filth” and “devoid of intellectual and artistic merit” only for her to be lauded after her death — because white men like Harold Pinter said the work was “too new, too complex, too good” for those who spoke poorly of her — what does that tell us about who gets to decide what art is worth, and when?

She was forced to walk her living years with those words in her mind as she tried her hardest to build out her now revolutionary and small canon — small because she died by suicide at the age of 28. If one of those major reviewers understood her burden as a woman suffering an illness at the time, would things have played out differently? Could they? Would we have more of her work?

Nella Larsen — the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing — published two celebrated novels, then had her career ended by a plagiarism accusation that was investigated, found baseless, and still destroyed her. She never published again, died alone, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn.

Langston Hughes, who in 1926 wrote that “the road for the serious Black artist is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high,” spent years being told his dialect writing was “low” and his characters degrading — by white critics who didn’t recognize the blues as literature and Black middle-class critics who called his work a sewer for not being respectable enough.

Zora Neale Hurston — one of the most prolific Black American female authors of the 20th century — died penniless in a county welfare home, her books out of print, her grave unmarked, her legacy only recovered nearly two decades after her death when Alice Walker went looking for her.

Are we down with allowing 100 years to pass with us in the same tired old boat going down the same tired old river? Or is it time to find people who look like us, sound like us, cook like us, laugh like us, empathize with us — and put them behind the influential and critical words being published on behalf of new art? That would require trust from major publications first and foremost, and I suppose that’s the question we need to be pressing.

Do you have the right to criticize us if you do not understand the words used in our culture — beyond the confines of Black suffering stories or the August Wilson canon? Do you have the right to criticize a story about Filipino immigrants playing into the model minority myth so they may survive a country built around your personal benefit? Again, we hope to use theater to keep our flawed humanity in conversation; but do these reviewers actually have the cultural literacy to form opinions with care for these stories? Can the voice of criticism be trusted to understand that undercurrent of pain? Of joy? Of its intent or its impact?

The new voices bursting into this historically straight white male centered narrative of theater are begging to be analyzed by people who understand our cultures, our voices, our orchestrations. They must be held to the same standard of evolution we hold theater companies to — critics should reflect the stories being put up onstage.

I’m no longer interested in waiting.

Born from a desire to do better for artists who want to do better, The Plotter seeks to frame criticism not as a negative nor as a make-or-break factor for ticket sales.

Criticism should be the long-term memory of an arts community. It is how we can remember what came from before and engage deeply with what’s in the present. Every review, every production, every installation is a point on a plot. Over time, as credits roll and sets go up and come down, we see more points populate the chart. We see the trend they form.

That is why we launched this magazine: to plot our past so we can chart our future.

As AI content and otherwise lowest-common-denominator “slop” takes up space on our feed, it’s incumbent on us, as consumers, to resist. We believe that resistance happens with thoughtful dialogue: writing it, reading it, and responding to it.

Thank you, to our incredible cohort of writers, for sharing your talents and time. You are/were instrumental in turning this idea into a concept and then into a fully-fledged project. We are so proud of the work you’ve created, and we are even more proud of what we know will be the many compliments you receive on it.

Thank you, reader, for clicking. Whether you stay for every article or skim headlines, you are proving why this magazine was created.

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