As theatre artists, we look out at the stars and discover that what frightens us is not the vast emptiness of the universe but its unwavering obedience to itself. Every galaxy, every atom, every dying sun follows a script that will never be revised—a production immune to rehearsal notes, audience feedback, or last-minute rewrites. There is no director calling for another take. No playwright revising Act Two. No actor deciding to play the scene differently tomorrow night. Worse still is the realization that we are not among its principal characters. We are not even supporting players. The universe has not cast us at all. We have somehow wandered onto the stage without an audition. Eight billion people in search of an author

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And yet the performance continues. The cosmos moves through its cues with the calm professionalism of an actor who has never forgotten a line and never once wondered what the critics might say. Galaxies enter on schedule. Stars make their exits precisely on time. Planets cross the stage, comets sweep through the scenery, and entire civilizations appear and disappear between scenes.

Our hopes, fears, victories, and griefs register no more than a fleck of dust caught in the spotlight. The stars burn. The galaxies drift. The stagehands of physics continue their work unseen. And the universe performs exactly the play it has always intended to perform—without pausing for notes, listening to audience feedback, or showing the slightest concern over whether anyone approves of the ending.

We look up at the clouds and see beauty. Yet we seldom stop to consider that those drifting formations of liquid droplets have no choice but to become exactly what they are. They do what they do, what they have always done, and what they will always do, obedient to forces beyond their control.

They may be beautiful, but beauty alone is not art. Art begins with choice. A playwright may send Hamlet to England or keep him in Denmark. An actor may play a line with tenderness or rage. A director may darken the stage or flood it with light. At every moment, another decision is possible. Another color. Another gesture. Another ending. Another love.

A cloud has no such freedom. It cannot decide to linger for dramatic effect. It cannot reject the wind’s direction, rewrite its entrance, or improvise a different shape. Nature performs its role exactly as written. A painting, a dance, a sculpture, or a play is art precisely because it did not have to become what it became. Every work of art is evidence that, for at least a moment, someone stood before necessity and said, “No. Let’s try it another way.”

Freedom places theatre—and art more broadly—in tension with nature, but it also makes self-understanding possible. Human beings can step outside themselves, question their assumptions, examine their motives, and imagine different futures. Nature cannot.

This suggests something unsettling. Nature is immeasurably powerful, relentless in its laws, and wholly indifferent to value. It closes hit shows and flops without distinction. It demolishes theatres and anthills by the same means. It preserves mediocrity while erasing brilliance, buries civilizations, destroys masterpieces, and silences standing ovations without pausing to comprehend what any of them meant. To nature, a great tragedy and a forgotten rehearsal are merely different arrangements of matter.

And this is why humanity recognizes nature’s power but does not think especially highly of it. If nature were truly great—if it were perfect—why would there be such a relentless effort to revise it? There is scarcely a part of the human body that has not been rewritten. From shoes to eyeglasses, from vaccines to Prozac, civilization is one long set of script notes addressed to creation, insisting that what has been given is not quite good enough.

Nor does the argument end with the body. Hardly an atom of the earth has escaped human revision. Forests become farms. Rivers become reservoirs. Mountains become highways. The raw material of existence is continually cut, rearranged, edited, and staged into something more useful, more comfortable, more beautiful, or at least more tolerable.

Yet even after all this effort, the production still refuses to open as planned. The scenery wobbles. The lighting misses its cue. The ending remains unsatisfactory. Nature stubbornly resists every rewrite. The world remains a draft in need of revision, and humanity remains convinced that one more pass through the script will finally fix Act Three.

One would think that after all the great minds that have occupied this planet, someone would have come up with a scenario that works. Since that has not happened, several possibilities present themselves. The problem may be too large. Human brains may be too small. Perhaps humanity does not actually know what it wants. Or, more likely, the opponent itself is uncooperative. Nature has never shown much interest in helping with the project.

Like any good boxer, the universe is constantly dancing, so humanity is forever trying to trick it into standing still long enough to land a clean punch. This is what religion, philosophy, art, and science are about. Each, from a human point of view, forces the dim-witted universe to pause so that our mind can study it.

When art is created, a religion followed, a scientific discovery made, or the world examined through philosophy, the effort is not much different from that of a mother who places her young daughter against a colorful doorframe on a bright Saturday morning and marks her height with a pencil. The artist, philosopher, scientist, priest, and mother are all attempting the same impossible act: making the universe stop. They are saying that today, at this moment, it is an unalterable fact that a child is three feet tall. It is an unalterable fact that five hundred years ago, Leonardo saw an Italian noblewoman smile in a particular way. An unalterable fact that penicillin stops bacterial infections.

But everyone knows what happens next. A moment later, the noblewoman smiles differently. The bacteria evolve. And the child, without anyone noticing, becomes a fraction of a fraction taller.

The universe never really stands still. It merely indulges our consciousness for a moment, allowing a pencil mark, a painting, a scientific law, a philosophical proposition, or a sacred text to pin it briefly in place. Then, with the impatience of a boxer slipping a jab, it begins moving again.

Consciousness is a painful gift. It tells us that we can dance, but when we leap into the air, we have no choice but to come down. We can imagine anything, yet we must live within the stubborn boundaries of nature. Those boundaries are the source of much human frustration and suffering, for imagination consistently outruns the world it inhabits. Our ability to imagine God is greater than any god we are able to prove. Our ability to imagine traveling faster than the speed of light exceeds nature itself, which imposes the speed of light as a limit. Our ability to imagine perfection surpasses anything found in nature. A perfect circle, a perfect society, a perfect love, a perfect justice—these exist more easily in the imagination than in the world.

Even happiness suffers from this problem. The happiness we can imagine is often far larger, far richer, and far more complete than the happiness we experience. The imagination is forever constructing heavens that reality cannot quite deliver. And so humanity lives suspended between two worlds: the world that is and the world that could be. All progress emerges from that tension, but so does much of our disappointment.

And so, faced with defeat, most of us lower our sights and surrender to the push and pull of nature. We become as fixed as an autumn leaf, destined to yellow at a particular rate and fall at a particular time. We cling to hope but seldom recognize that our capacity for hope is far greater than anything we can hope to obtain.

Knowing our constraints, we seek power in money, relief from loneliness in a company of “likes,” imagined victories through sports, forgetfulness in routine, and temporary transcendence in laughter, opera, religion, love, sex, drugs, music and theatre.

The woman next door who vacuums her rugs every day while listening to Beethoven is not really vacuuming. She is occupying time so that her thoughts do not wander too close to reality. But everyone knows how the story ends. No matter how much time is wasted, no matter how profound the transcendence, no matter how much wealth is accumulated, gravity always gets the final vote. Like the dancer, we rise. We soar for a moment. We reach an apex. And then—always, always, always—gravity takes charge.

Religions and parents understand this, which is why they become experts at distraction. They hand us vacuums. The Bible is a kind of vacuuming. Sports are a kind of vacuuming. Careers, hobbies, committees, television, social media, and even many noble causes can become forms of vacuuming. They occupy the mind. They fill the hours. They keep consciousness from wandering too close to the uncomfortable facts of existence.

But when the task is finished, what remains? The rug is cleaner. The score has been settled. The sermon has ended. The meeting has adjourned. Yet nature remains exactly where it was before: stubborn, powerful, and magnificently stupid. It continues its indifferent march, unimpressed by our distractions and untouched by our attempts to negotiate with it. We may succeed in occupying our attention, but we never succeed in altering the terms of the bargain.

Perhaps that is what tragedy really is: the knowledge that our tiny creative selves will always burn up like shooting stars upon reentering the atmosphere of reality. Imagination soars, but gravity waits patiently below.

Some try to soften the word tragedy by pairing it with optimism. Perhaps they are right. As Viktor Frankl argued, tragic optimism allows human beings to transform suffering into achievement, guilt into opportunity, and the limitations of existence into occasions for meaning. It permits us to add, however briefly, something of our own making to the world.

And perhaps that is enough. For in the brief act of creating, a human being possesses something that fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution do not. The universe can generate stars, galaxies, black holes, and oceans, but it cannot possess them. It cannot reflect upon them. It cannot claim them as its own. A conscious individual who creates even the smallest thing—a poem, a painting, a philosophy, a kindness, a love, a play—introduces into existence something nature lacks: a sliver of self.

The only thing imagination seems unable to imagine is how bleak the ending really is, for every one of us will someday make our exit. The curtain falls. The stage is struck. The audience goes home. And what remains? Very little. A handful of snapshots. A few stories. Most lives are remembered no better than the photographs tucked inside forgotten yearbooks at flea markets or the pencil marks on a child’s doorframe that disappear beneath the next owner’s coat of paint.

Even our greatest triumphs prove surprisingly fragile. That game-changing, rip-roaring opening night that brought the audience to its feet and left the theatre buzzing until midnight will, in a hundred years, be unknown even to the most diligent theatre historian. The standing ovation fades. The reviews yellow. Today’s astonishing scientific breakthrough becomes tomorrow’s routine fact, as ordinary and unremarkable as washing your hands.

So what is left to us? Acceptance? Perhaps in novels and plays. Almost every play ends with some version of acceptance. As the reader turns to the final page, the protagonist pauses amid the wreckage and says, in effect, In light of all I have been through, I accept what I have. The music softens. The curtain falls. The audience leaves satisfied.

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More Theatrical Dialogue, Less Conversation

Conversations seldom spark surprises. Most talk proceeds like a music box wound long ago. We turn out the same opinions, the same polished anecdotes, the same small, obedient laughter. Each of us knows our part: where to nod, where to laugh, where to offer the consoling phrase. We meet with friends and talk about sports, television, work, gossip, disappointments, old grudges, and whatever fresh absurdity the internet has delivered that day. Even when we turn to politics or deeper matters, we usually do so with people who already agree with us—or at least with people around whom we feel safe.

Such conversations can be comforting, but they would make for a terrible play. Nothing changes. No one risks anything. No discovery occurs.

Then there is another kind of dialogue—the kind that arrives at a crucial moment in a good play. These conversations do not merely pass the time; they become events. Something is discovered that neither person fully possessed beforehand. A thought appears between the speakers, created by the encounter itself.

The Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning.” Alone, a belief can seem smooth and absolute, a sealed white room with no door through which doubt might enter. It mistakes its solitude for completeness. Only beneath the pressure of an alien gaze does meaning discover how deep—or how shallow—it truly is.

In good dialogue, people do not simply defend positions or score points. They allow the encounter to enlarge them. The conversation becomes less about winning an argument and more about expanding the boundaries of experience itself. This does not require agreement. Sometimes disagreement is precisely what gives a conversation life. What matters is that each person remains present enough to be affected by the other.

Bakhtin also wrote, “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through dialogue.” If this is true, then who we become depends, in part, on whom we are willing to speak with—and whom we are willing to hear. Every real conversation carries a small possibility of transformation. We may leave with a revised idea, a sharpened doubt, a new sympathy, or simply a better sense of the size and strangeness of another person’s world.

Most people do not particularly want these heightened dialogues. They can be exhausting. They can also be risky. To enter one honestly, we must loosen our grip on the person we were before it began. We must admit the possibility that our language is inadequate, our position incomplete, or our certainty misplaced.

The trouble with many theater people is that they breathe only the air of their own small rooms. They befriend the like-minded, cast the like-minded, and produce only those plays that return their convictions to them, polished and applauding. Anyone who disturbs the reflection—anyone whose political or social ideas strike a dissonant note—is rejected, cast out, or blocked.

This is hardly astonishing. Most people build such rooms and call them worlds. But theater people are not supposed to be like most people. We are a peculiar breed, raised on the great, insoluble questions: Why do we live? What do we owe one another? What darkness waits behind the civilized face? As this Substack has argued before, we are philosophers—or ought to be.

Our conversations should resemble the coffee salons of the French Enlightenment: alive with contradiction, danger, wit, and intellectual appetite. The theater should be a table at which foreign ideas meet and test one another, not a tribunal where everyone recites the party creed and waits to hear who will be expelled for doubting.

The solution: Break the routine of your conversations once in a while. Have at least one conversation each week—with a lover, friend, student, colleague, or stranger—that feels genuinely alive: an improvisation of thought rather than an exchange of rehearsed positions. Ask a question whose answer you do not already know. Follow an idea beyond the point at which it becomes comfortable. Listen not merely for an opening to reply, but for something that might change you.

Such dialogues make life feel less repetitive and more theatrical—less like maintenance and more like an event. For a moment, you stop feeling like a spectator to existence and begin to feel that you are actually inside a play, engaged in meaningful dialogue that changes who you are.

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This week’s Substack continues our exploration of how the art we create can teach us to live better. Last week, we considered when we should—and shouldn’t—take our cues from characters onstage. This week, we turn to the “isms” of theatre and ask how their ideas might illuminate life beyond the stage.

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Don’t Limit Yourself to One Ism

Theatre is full of isms: realism, expressionism, romanticism, melodrama, absurdism. As writer and theatre critic Joseph Wood Krutch observed, these various isms are “invented by the author for the purpose of constructing a world far more regular and simpler than the real one.” Each comes with its own rules, its own style, its own neatly arranged universe.

But in actual living, all the isms happen at once. One moment your life is pure romanticism turn the corner and suddenly you are in absurdism. By afternoon you may be wandering through melodrama. Real life, stylistically speaking, is a complete mess.

The trouble begins when we get stuck in one ism and mistake its conventions for reality. How many of us are currently trapped in absurdism, buried beneath the debris of a universe that seems to have misplaced its instructions? Or living inside a flimsy melodrama in which everyone must be either hero or villain? Perhaps you are stuck in expressionism, where your anxieties repaint the entire world in their darker colors. A delayed train becomes evidence of social collapse. A distracted friend becomes proof that you are unloved. The facts have not changed, but the scenery has.

Even romanticism has its own dangers. It invites us to cast ourselves as gloriously misunderstood protagonists, certain that our feelings are profound and that society simply lacks the imagination to appreciate them. Realism, supposedly the sensible alternative, can become a trap as well. Its devotees pride themselves on seeing things as they are, when often they have merely decided that disappointment is more intelligent than hope.

Comedy and tragedy may be the most consequential styles of all, because they can occupy the same set. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed that “the tragic and the comic are the same, except that the tragic suffers and the comic understands.” The difference is not always in what happens but in the distance from which we are able to see it. A humiliation suffered this morning may be a catastrophe at noon and a story by dinner. Some people insist on living inside a tragedy when a perfectly good comedy is waiting in the wings. There is no reason to treat every inconvenience as if it were King Lear when the rights to Noises Off are readily available.

This does not mean that grief should be laughed away or injustice treated as entertainment. Some moments are tragic and deserve the full gravity of tragedy. The point is not to deny the genre but to notice when the scene has changed. Sorrow becomes a prison when we continue performing it after the curtain has fallen. Comedy becomes cruelty when it is used to avoid compassion. No single ism is adequate to an entire life. Each reveals something, and each conceals something.

Happiness may depend less on arranging a life without pain than on recognizing the style in which we are currently living—and remembering that style is not destiny. We can ask: What story am I telling about this moment? What role have I assigned myself? Is this truly a tragedy, or merely a farce with poor timing? We may not control the event, but we can sometimes revise its meaning. That modest freedom is one of the consolations of consciousness.

So play one ism for a while. Embrace romanticism wholeheartedly. Give realism its due. Let tragedy speak when tragedy is called for, and welcome comedy when it arrives. Just don’t get stuck in any of them. Be the playwright of your own life: not its absolute ruler, perhaps, but an alert and occasionally mischievous collaborator. Rewrite a line. Allow a villain to become complicated and a disaster to become an anecdote. Variety is not merely the spice of a good play. It may be one of the secrets of a happy life.

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The emotional health of artists is often called into question. So why in hell does the public pay good money to watch us wrestle with the world’s problems? Wouldn’t everyone be better served by listening to healthier minds? One Introduction to Theatre textbook—a competitor to my own The Art of Theatre, published by Cengage—claims that “playwrights, by their creative natures, generally have vivid imaginations, which can and often do lead to both mania and paranoia.” If that is true, why would anyone go to the theatre to learn about life from a playwright?

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Perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps playwrights and other theatre artists are emotionally healthy precisely because we spend so much time thinking deeply about life. That doesn’t make us paranoid. It makes us attentive.

Where we sometimes fall short is in listening to our own stories. We rarely take our plays apart to discover what they might teach us about our own lives. We build elegant structures—carefully shaped, emotionally sound, occasionally even wise—and then, like contractors with commitment issues, hand over the keys and quietly walk away. Theatre people, it turns out, are very good at exporting wisdom. Importing it is another matter.

Reality is far too complicated for the equipment we are issued at birth, so we simplify it. We tell ourselves stories just to get through breakfast. The philosopher Hans Vaihinger called them “useful fictions,” which sounds much nicer than “things we make up so we don’t panic in the cereal aisle.” The idea is that not everything we rely on has to be strictly true. It simply has to work well enough to carry us from one end of the day to the other. Theatre, of course, is in the business of manufacturing useful fictions. Night after night, we create tidy little worlds in which problems can be confronted, endured, and occasionally resolved in under two hours.

So why not steal from ourselves? We have already done the hard part. We have built the stories, tested them on strangers, and adjusted the lighting. Yes, they are fictions—but so are many of the beliefs that keep us upright and moving forward. If a play can help an audience make sense of life for an evening, perhaps it can do the same for the people who made it—or at least help us get through the cereal aisle.

Over the next few Substack posts, we’ll explore techniques for living better by learning from the works of art we create. Let’s begin with character.

Become More Like a Stage Character

Stage characters are existential beings: they become who they are through the choices they make and the actions they take. In this respect, they differ from characters in novels. A novelist can spend three pages explaining a character’s inner nature while the character does absolutely nothing, and the reader will politely nod along. A playwright does not have that luxury. Plays are written for actors, and actors need something to do.

Onstage, a character cannot simply be. A character must act—chasing love, dodging danger, telling lies, revealing secrets, slamming doors, changing course, and occasionally ruining everyone’s life in the process. Action is the engine of drama. A character becomes who they are through what they do.

Onstage, romantics are not lovers until they declare their love—or at least try to. Geniuses are not geniuses until they produce something worthy of the name. Heroes are not heroes until they do something heroic. Cowards are not cowards until they behave like cowards. Intention is not action. Temperament is not action. Backstory is not action. Onstage, action is what counts. That is what makes theatrical characters so distinctive.

Playwrights write for actors who confess the truth, conceal the truth, break a heart, or save a life. Someone must do something that alters the course of events. If the playwright fails to provide that action, the audience soon discovers that the characters speak at great length, but nothing actually occurs. And when nothing happens, the story quietly evaporates.

The lesson is simple and, surprisingly, cheerful: live a little more like the characters you put onstage.

Act on your intentions. Declare your love. Fail. Try again. Write the play. Send it out and risk rejection. Leave the job that is quietly draining the life out of you. Forgive someone. Apologize to someone. Defend a friend. Ask the question everyone else is carefully avoiding. Admit that you were wrong. Begin the project you keep talking about. Board the plane. Move to the city. Start over. In short, behave like a stage character.

That is the difference worth borrowing: stage characters do not merely think about life. They live it.

You have spent years learning how to write, design, and portray such people. You understand their courage, their foolishness, and their sudden leaps into the unknown. Now try becoming one. Happiness, more often than not, seems to favor those who step onto the stage of life and do something.

Be Less Like a Stage Character

If you have ever taken a playwriting class, you have heard the standard mantra: theatre is about conflict. One character wants something. Another character stands in the way. Conflict follows. The moment it is resolved, the audience politely gathers its coats and goes home.

It says something curious about human beings that we willingly pay good money to watch stories built around situations we would desperately avoid in our own lives: betrayal, jealousy, revenge, and broken hearts. If any of these arrived uninvited on a Tuesday afternoon, most of us would call a friend, a therapist, or possibly a lawyer. Place those same miseries under stage lights, however, and suddenly they become entertainment.

This raises a useful question: are plays really about conflict, or are they about its resolution?

In many ways, a play functions like a flight simulator. It presents a crisis so that we can study how people behave when the turbulence begins. The goal is not to crash the plane more spectacularly. The goal is to observe what happens when people refuse to cooperate, refuse to listen, and refuse to work together.

Much conflict grows out of something surprisingly simple: a failure to compromise. Pride stiffens. Fear interferes. Misunderstandings multiply. Before long, the situation has spiraled into a crisis large enough to require three acts and a lighting designer.

We have all seen small acts of stubbornness grow into large disasters: an apology not offered, a truth left unspoken, a grievance quietly nursed. A misunderstanding becomes an argument. The argument becomes a grudge. Before long, the situation begins to resemble the second act of a tragedy.

The lesson of drama is not how to manufacture more conflict in our own lives. It is how easily conflict begins and how quickly it expands when no one chooses to stop it.

The wiser response is to end the scene early. Offer the apology. Speak the truth. Resolve the matter while it is still small—before we, too, become characters wandering through a drama that could have ended with a single line.

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Over the next few Sunday mornings, I’ll post a new lesson on what our plays can teach us about living—from super-objectives and dramatic questions to exposition, dialogue, and all those theatrical “isms.”

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In this week’s Substack, I’m stealing an idea from one of my favorite books — Peter Thorpe’s gleefully contrarian Why Literature Is Bad for You — and setting it loose backstage. Fair warning: reading this may cause doubt, irritation, mild existential vertigo, and the creeping suspicion that your years in the theatre have been one long, underfunded rehearsal for disaster. I’ve stolen Mr. Thorpe’s premise outright, slapped some stage makeup on it, and shoved it under the lights.

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Why Theatre Is Bad For You

Theatre is usually sold to us as good for the soul. It enlarges the imagination, deepens empathy, refines moral judgment, and gives schoolchildren somewhere to stand while wearing fake beards. That’s the official line, anyway — repeated by actors, teachers, critics, grant committees, and anyone who has recently paid seventy-five dollars to watch a Dane stall a decision for three hours.

But what if it isn’t improving us at all? What if theatre is quietly making us gloomier, more excitable, a little paranoid, a little rebellious, and weirdly forgiving of spectacular incompetence? Maybe the curtain shouldn’t rise to applause. Maybe it should rise to a warning label.

Start with the obvious problem: theatre is obsessed with misery. Nobody writes a five-act tragedy about a well-run kingdom where the monarch takes good advice and the zoning disputes get settled by mediation. Drama needs conflict, and conflict needs something to go badly wrong, ideally before intermission — the earlier the better, really, so there’s time for a second betrayal after intermission.

So the picture of life you get from the stage is wildly skewed. People fall in love, fall out of love, murder a relative, avenge a father, misplace a kingdom, discover a shocking parentage, and stab the wrong man behind a curtain (Hamlet, again — the guy just can’t help it). A character who’s contentedly married, reasonably employed, and emotionally regulated isn’t a protagonist. He’s furniture.

Spend enough time watching this and ordinary happiness starts to feel underwritten. A quiet family dinner reads like a poorly structured first act — surely somebody at that table is hiding a secret inheritance, surely the soup means something. We end up disappointed that our lives lack the shape of a plot, forgetting that the shapelessness is exactly what makes most of life livable.

Then there’s the rebellion problem. Hand a playwright a functioning institution and watch how fast the hero decides it needs defying, exposing, escaping, or burning down with everyone still inside. Antigone ignores the king. Prometheus ignores Zeus. Romeo and Juliet ignore both families and nearly every well-meaning adult who tries to intervene. Hamlet ignores every deadline he’s ever been given.

Whatever the established order is in a given play, it gets painted as corrupt, oppressive, or hopelessly behind the times — and the rebel’s alternative rarely amounts to more than a very committed facial expression. Audiences learn to cheer the demolition of an imperfect system without once asking whether anyone involved has a plan for Monday morning.

It gets worse. Theatre lets us hand off our worst behavior to something else entirely. We’re not jealous, we’re “visited” by a green-eyed monster. We’re not aggressive, we“unleash the dogs of war.” Metaphor is very convenient that way — it turns a personal flaw into an exotic animal or a weather event, so a man who behaved atrociously doesn’t have to say “I behaved atrociously.” He can say ambition seized him, as if ambition were some large bird that carried him bodily to the throne. Fate, the gods, prophecy, the stars, heredity — everybody gets subpoenaed except the guy holding the dagger.

The psychology onstage is no more trustworthy. Every pause is loaded with backstory. Every childhood memory conveniently explains the adult catastrophe that follows it. Even madness shows up well-rehearsed — Ophelia loses her mind but keeps her imagery, her rhythm, and an impressively thorough knowledge of symbolic flowers. Actual insanity is rarely so considerate of its audience.

What this teaches us, over enough exposure, is that people have deep, coherent motives for everything, when in real life half of what looks like motive is just poor sleep, low blood sugar, or someone misreading an email.

And don’t get me started on competence, or the total absence of it. King Lear is a catastrophic father and a worse estate planner. Hamlet may be the least efficient criminal investigator in Denmark. Antony lets romance override military judgment at the worst possible moment. Macbeth gets the crown and somehow never once thinks about succession planning. None of these men could do the job they were given without producing a body count, and yet we hand them thunder, poetry, and flattering lighting. Competence, meanwhile, is theatrically invisible — nobody writes a soliloquy for the guy who quietly prevented a civil war.

We like to say art makes us tolerant. Theatre may just make us tolerant of the wrong things. We forgive indecision because Hamlet makes it sound gorgeous. We forgive recklessness because Juliet delivers it from a balcony with good lighting. Put a spotlight on incompetence and give it a few good lines, and it starts to look almost noble.

Last complaint: paranoia. In nearly every famous play, somebody is after the hero — a king, a ghost, a prophecy, a rival, a creditor, an ambitious cousin, or the entire Roman Senate. The lesson embedded in all of it is that importance and persecution come as a package deal, that every closed door is hiding a plot, and every friendly conversation is just exposition for a later betrayal. There is probably already more anger loose in the world than there are legitimate reasons for it, and theatre spends two and a half hours a night manufacturing more.

Theatre’s defenders will say, reasonably, that it helps us understand cruelty, weakness, conflict, and change. Maybe it does. But understanding isn’t the same thing as improvement, and the concentration-camp commandant who loved Goethe and wept at Beethoven is still the most devastating rebuttal to the idea that culture automatically makes people better. You can refine someone’s taste without touching their conduct at all. Plenty of people cry for Lear on Saturday and treat their own father badly on Sunday.

Mostly what theatre gives us is the feeling of moral progress without the inconvenience of actually making any. We sit in the dark, watch people suffer beautifully, feel several elevated emotions in a row, applaud, and go home fairly sure something important just happened. What actually happened, in most cases, is parking got validated.

None of this means the theatre should be shut down. Dangerous pleasures are usually the good kind. But maybe every ticket should come with a small disclaimer: Warning: prolonged exposure may cause gloom, rebellion, paranoia, a taste for metaphor, sympathy for bunglers, and unreasonable expectations about human motivation. And whatever you do don’t take advice from the protagonist.

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More About William Missouri Downs

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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a 1841 book by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay about how groups of people can collectively embrace irrational beliefs—especially when driven by greed, fear, fashion, or social pressure. In it he says that people think and go mad in herds and that they recover their senses slowly and one by one.

Today, too many theatres have developed a herd opinion about laughter: it is dangerous unless properly supervised. This is particularly true of comedy with crunch—the hard, disruptive comedy practiced by writers from Aristophanes to Sarah Kane. The poet John Ashbery once said that he did not want writing to slide down too easily; it needed “some crunch.” Comedy requires crunch because its job is not merely to please an audience. It exposes contradictions, interrupts certainty, and invites people to laugh at something they considered sacred five minutes earlier. Hard-hitting comedy has never been a polite guest. It arrives late, drinks too much, insults the host, and leaves with the silverware. That is why we invite it.

Or used to.

Today, many theatres now approach comedy with the confidence of a corporate human-resources department handling an incident near the photocopier. Every joke must pass an ideological background check. Every character must possess the correct credentials. Every production must anticipate every possible objection from every hypothetical audience member—including people who will never attend.

Under these conditions, rehearsal becomes a meeting of the Risk Management Committee. The playwright writes a joke. The artistic director orders a risk assessment. The dramaturg prepares forty pages of context. The director adds a trigger warning. The actors analyze and explain the joke. By opening night, the joke has been made completely safe. Unfortunately, it is also completely dead.

The theatre should be the place where these possibilities remain alive—where difficult questions receive rehearsal time, where irony survives administrative review, and where laughter is recognized as a form of thought. Comedy punctures certainty, exposes hypocrisy, and reminds audiences that the world could be otherwise. Tragedy purges pity and fear, comedy purges something far more dangerous—certainty.

A joke can expose hypocrisy faster than a committee can schedule a meeting about it. For one brief instant, the laughing mind becomes open to another interpretation. That opening may last only a second, but theatre is built from the power of seconds. A pause can change a scene. A glance can reveal a betrayal. A laugh can bring down a king. This is why authoritarians are rarely funny, except accidentally. Power prefers applause to laughter because applause confirms rank while laughter abolishes it. For the duration of a joke, the emperor is naked, the priest has appetites, and the revolutionary wants a corner office.

Comedy and tragedy sleep in the same bed. At the end of Plato’s Symposium, Socrates argues that the accomplished dramatist should understand how to write both. The distinction between them is often no more than timing, perspective, and whether the corpse sits up.

For example, Oedipus would make a fine bedroom farce. In the final scene, Oedipus and his mom would file for a no-fault divorce and provide for their hemophilic-Habsburg jaw sons, and instead of all that regret and self-harm, Oedipus and his mother would learn to laugh about their very human mistake. Then they’d have makeup sex. It is said that comedy comes from pain. That’s why so many standup comedians come from Somalia.

If you found absolutely nothing funny about the previous paragraph, or worse, found it offensive, it’s important that you not direct a comedy.

Part of the reason comedy is dying in the theatre is because so many plays are about identity and self-esteem. The requirement that plays must recognize everyone’s equal worth means comedy must go, because wit is always at the expense of someone or something. Now there is a cacophony of competing value systems that must all be admired and respected. As Quentin Tarantino said, “[today] Ideology trumps art. Ideology trumps individual effort. Ideology trumps good. Ideology trumps entertaining.” As long as political correctness is judged as more important than an artist’s imagination, craft, complexity, or ability to entertain, comedy is dead.

Napoleon said, “If the Pope had not existed, I would have had to invent him.” Voltaire said, “If God had not existed, we would have to invent him.” If comedy does not exist, we’re fucked. We will be no better than the Gods that rule us, or the sovereigns, barons, shahs and czars that operate us.

We escape our loneliness through sex, drugs and comedy. The first two have been regulated by the right and left, now they’re coming after comedy. If Friedrich Nietzsche is right and God is dead and we have killed him, then comedy becomes essential for our survival. The herds have ruled over comedy long enough; it’s time theatre people begin recovering their sense of humor… one by one.

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Theatre today remains a frequent target of moralists—people who are quick to tell others how they should behave. At Out Front Theatre in Atlanta, for example, Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told—a comic, queer retelling of Genesis—was denounced in a petition bearing 40,000 signatures. On Broadway, meanwhile, the suffragist musical Suffs was interrupted mid-performance by protesters demanding that it be shut down for the alleged crime of recycling “white feminism.” Different pulpits, same sermon: Art, behave.

One of the most celebrated rebukes of such moralizing came from the French novelist Théophile Gautier in 1835. After being mauled by the critics, journalists, and preachers of his day, Gautier struck back in the preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. Nearly two centuries later, his attack on moralists has lost none of its force. Today’s puritans may prefer platforms to pamphlets, but their sanctimonious litmus tests remain firmly in place on both sides of the aisle.

For this week’s Substack, I have recast a portion of Gautier’s preface in contemporary language, replacing nineteenth-century references with modern ones while remaining faithful to his defiant spirit. Moralists do not make theatre better; they make artists fearful. And a fearful theatre is a dying theatre.

P.S. Interestingly, Gautier’s 1835 novel follows a woman who disguises herself as a dashing young nobleman so she can move freely through male society. Her disguise proves so convincing that both men and women fall in love with “him,” creating a delightfully gender-bending love triangle.

***

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Théophile Gautier’s Thoughts on Moralists

(Abridged, Updated & Condensed)

I remember a time when people scoffed at the earnest reformers who rushed to shield the public from every conceivable offense—the ones demanding longer hemlines, cleaner books, safer paintings, fewer temptations. Compared with our modern guardians of morality, though, those old reformers seem almost quaint in their restraint.

Today, some people can stand before a masterpiece and see only the one detail capable of causing offense. They move through museums, novels, films, and plays like metal detectors calibrated exclusively for impropriety, passing cathedrals of beauty only to condemn a stray ankle. Give them a three-hundred-page novel containing a single ethnocentric paragraph, and they will find it before finishing the dedication. Show them a ceiling fresco with one culturally insensitive image among a thousand painted figures, and their eyes will snap to it like a compass finding north. The beauty, architecture, ideas, craftsmanship, and imagination—all of it disappears. They march past everything the artist created toward the one small thing they believe should never have been there.

This grand performance of morality would be entertaining if it weren’t so exhausting. Every column becomes a sermon. Every podcast becomes a pulpit. Every commentator becomes a prophet. The internet overflows with moral instruction. One can hardly unlock a phone without learning that civilization is collapsing because someone told a joke or failed to apologize with sufficient speed or sincerity.

What would happen if humanity suddenly became virtuous? The outrage industry would collapse overnight. There would be no scandals to dissect, no controversies to amplify, no public figures to condemn, no old tweets to exhume, no novels to denounce, no films to boycott. People might spend their time reading books instead of arguing about them. They might attend concerts instead of picketing them. They might grow so unfashionably content that nobody clicked on anything at all. For those whose livelihoods depend on outrage, vice is not the enemy. It is the business model.

One of the more fascinating species in modern media is the Professional Protector of Public Decency. You know the type. To qualify, one need only possess a spouse, several children, perhaps a friend or two, and a permanent state of alarm. One then waits patiently for a novel, a television series, a play, a film, or an art exhibit to appear, secure in the knowledge that the review has already written itself. “This work demonstrates everything that is wrong with contemporary culture. It is offensive, irresponsible, harmful, and deeply troubling. I attended with my family and was forced to leave in distress. My wife was uncomfortable. My daughter was shocked. My friend is still dealing with the emotional trauma this caused.” The modern moral critic is invariably accompanied by a large and astonishingly fragile family and assortment of friends, all of whom seem to suffer on cue.

The moral critic possesses a curious expertise. They claim to be horrified by vice, yet seem astonishingly well informed about it. They know every scandal, every forbidden book, every offensive joke, every controversial artist, every dangerous idea. Their knowledge is encyclopedic. One wonders where they find the time.

The truth is that people have always enjoyed stories about flawed human beings. Perfect people make poor protagonists. Virtue is admirable, but it is dramatically inert. Nobody buys a ticket to watch a responsible accountant make excellent decisions for two acts and arrive safely home. Drama requires temptation. Comedy requires foolishness. Tragedy requires weakness. Without vice, half the world’s stories go dark.

Which brings us to another peculiar habit of moral criticism: the assumption that an author endorses everything depicted in a work. A novelist writes about a criminal and is accused of encouraging crime. A playwright depicts racism and is suspected of approving it. A filmmaker portrays cruelty and is blamed for inventing it. By this logic, every mystery writer is a serial killer, and every actor who plays Macbeth should be arrested before curtain call. The distinction between artist and artwork, once obvious, now seems to require constant explanation. A character may be wicked without its author being wicked. A play may contain corruption without endorsing it. A novel may explore darkness without celebrating it. This is not a particularly difficult concept, although one would not know it from reading cultural commentary.

The modern moralist insists on confusing the creator with the creation because it simplifies the argument. Criticizing a work requires effort. Criticizing a person requires only suspicion. And suspicion is much easier to market. What strikes me most is the strange confidence with which these guardians of culture patrol the boundaries of acceptable thought. They move through art and literature like TSA agents inspecting luggage, hunting for contraband identities, unauthorized lived experiences, and improperly labeled ideas.

Every generation produces a few of these figures. They never succeed in eliminating vice. They never improve human nature. But they do produce an astonishing quantity of commentary. And commentary, unlike virtue, appears to be inexhaustible.

***

Théophile Gautier’s preface ranges across many other subjects. In future Substacks, I’ll explore his entertaining thoughts on art-for-art’s-sake and his merciless attacks on critics.

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Philosophy is dead and we have killed it. We are surrounded by opinion, outrage, and performance, yet rarely encounter genuine wisdom. What may be missing is not merely philosophy itself, but the deeper habit of thought that philosophy cultivates.

You might argue that Americans have never been especially philosophical. Yet those old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s may recall a more intellectual era of late-night television. Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and James Baldwin appeared on The Dick Cavett Show. David Susskind and Steve Allen devoted entire broadcasts to ideas rather than celebrities promoting their latest projects. Yes, television was filled with shows like The Brady Bunch, but it was also an era when Johnny Carson invited Ayn Rand onto The Tonight Show three times and interviewed the outspoken atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

In today’s theatre, there are plenty of plays that announce their themes loudly and leave little doubt about where the playwright stands. But few wrestle with ideas or dramatize philosophical conflicts in which competing worldviews are allowed to collide honestly. Why? Because philosophical arguments can be as dull as a lecture.

At many modern customer-service universities, professors are encouraged to avoid lectures and other “passive” learning experiences because students supposedly cannot concentrate. In fact, what needs to be avoided is not lectures, but boring lectures. A good lecture is not an encyclopedia article. It is a dramatic intellectual journey shaped into a story. It poses questions, creates tension, challenges assumptions, and leads an audience toward discovery.

In a sense, theatre is a lecture disguised as action—a dramatic argument conducted through dialogue. But if lectures are dead, is theatre dead as well? Can audiences still endure a sustained argument, complex ideas, and a story that asks them to think rather than merely react? As attention becomes increasingly fragmented, many people seem to have less patience for complexity, ambiguity, and the sustained engagement that difficult ideas require. Just as important, they often lack the vocabulary needed to grapple with such ideas.

For example, the Princeton Review once analyzed transcripts from the 2000 Gore–Bush debates, the 1992 Clinton–Bush–Perot debates, the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon debates, and the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates. Using standard readability measures, it estimated the minimum education level required to understand what the candidates were saying.

In the Lincoln–Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln spoke at an eleventh-grade level (11.2), while Stephen Douglas addressed audiences at a twelfth-grade level (12.0). During the 1960 televised debates, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon both spoke at a tenth-grade level (10.0). In 1992, Bill Clinton spoke at a mid-seventh-grade level (7.6), while George H. W. Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot spoke at roughly a sixth-grade level (6.8 and 6.3, respectively). In the 2000 debates, George W. Bush spoke at a high sixth-grade level (6.7), while Al Gore—widely regarded as the intellectual in the race—spoke at a mid-seventh-grade level (7.6).

The trend is difficult to ignore. Political language has become progressively simpler. Donald Trump communicates at an even lower reading level, relying on short, memorable phrases and easily repeated ideas. Public life is increasingly shaped by slogans designed for maximum reach rather than complexity: “Read my lips.” “Hope and Change.” “Make America Great Again.” “It’s the economy, stupid.”

And the most famous one of all. “To be or not to be?”

But there is a difference. While many politicians speak at the lowest level their audience can understand, theatre often seeks to elevate its audience. Hamlet begins with a deceptively simple line composed entirely of one-syllable words, none longer than three letters. From there, he builds an argument, weighing evidence, considering consequences, and following his reasoning toward a philosophical conclusion. The speech culminates not in a meditation on death, but in the revelation of its final line: “And lose the name of action.”

Hamlet’s words are ultimately about whether our awareness of death and uncertainty will become an excuse for paralysis. The philosophy is not “To be or not to be?” but rather: Are you going to let the fact that you are a temporary creature, limited by time and trapped in uncertainty, become an excuse for stagnation? Or are you going to take action? That question lies at the heart of existentialism. Hamlet starts as George Bush (6.8), moves to Al Gore (7.6), rises to Abraham Lincoln (11.2), but by the end of the speech is Jean-Paul Sartre (15.5).

What makes it a great philosophical lecture is that Hamlet does not know the conclusion when he begins. He is not delivering a prepared speech or defending a settled belief. He is thinking his way through a problem in real time, following one idea to the next, testing assumptions, weighing evidence, and discovering where the argument leads. The destination remains unknown even to him until he arrives.

That is why the speech is dramatic. The audience is not listening to a character explain a conclusion he already possesses (as so many modern plays do); it is watching a mind at work. Tension comes not from physical action, but from intellectual discovery. The drama lies not in what Hamlet knows, but in what he is struggling to understand.

Hamlet’s audience stood through a four-hour play in 1600. Modern audiences will gladly devote ten hours to a streaming series. The capacity for attention has not vanished; the threshold for earning it has simply become much higher. Hollywood often captures attention through spectacle, but theatre’s greatest strength has never been spectacle. It is thought. It is philosophy. The challenge is not persuading audiences to pay attention but to giving them ideas, to turn on their brains and make them realize that life should not be lived at a minimum education level, but we should all try to, like Hamlet, rise up to a level of complex thought.

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Postscript: Is there a point of no return when a society loses so many philosophers that it can no longer sustain complex thought? During the 2015 presidential primary, Marco Rubio observed, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” He may have gotten his wish.

According to the American Welding Society, there are roughly 771,000 welding professionals in the United States today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, reports fewer than 20,000 philosophy and religion professors combined. That works out to roughly forty welders for every philosophy professor.

Depressing, perhaps. But let us take Hamlet’s advice and not lose the name of action.

William Missouri Downs

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In the theatre we spend an astonishing amount of time psychoanalyzing characters. Entire rehearsals disappear while we debate motivation. Table work turns into a kind of group therapy session for imaginary people. But perhaps we should all pause and look at character, and ourselves, from a different angle. Instead of asking why a character acts, we might begin with a simpler and far more dangerous question: what does the character perceive?

Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations… These successive perceptions constitute the mind… and the identity of a self.” Hume’s point is that the self is not a fixed object but a shifting stream of perceptions and impressions. Psychology is useful. But the quickest path to understanding a character is to ask how they perceive reality. Characters act not only from what they feel but from what they think the world is. Understand how they see the world and their behavior will make perfect sense. Just as our own behavior always seems perfectly sensible to us.

For example, Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard has spent most of her life as a wealthy landowner. When the play begins, she is nearly destitute, yet her perception of herself as wealthy has been so constant that she simply cannot see the new reality. So, she does what people have always done. She constructs a patchwork of perceptions that eventually harden into identity. Character, in this sense, is a comfortable distortion of reality. And once we have built that comfortable distortion, there’s almost no amount of contrary evidence we can ignore in order to protect it. If we look at life from Madame Ranevskaya’s point of view (not our own) her behavior is not odd but makes total sense.

Another example appears in Gulliver’s Travels, after living for months among the Lilliputians, a people barely three or four inches tall, Gulliver grows accustomed to towering over everyone like a colossus. Size, after all, is relative, and habit is persuasive. When he finally returns to London, the perception lingers. Walking through the streets, he shouts warnings to passing carriages and pedestrians to step aside before he accidentally crushes them. In his mind they are still miniature and he is still a giant. From his point of view his behavior is perfectly sensible. A responsible giant would warn people. Of course, to Londoners he looks absurd. They see only a grown man yelling at normal-sized strangers and waving traffic aside like a lunatic crossing guard. But that is the quiet trick of perception. Once we grow accustomed to a particular scale of things, it begins to feel like reality itself. Change the environment and suddenly the reasonable person appears ridiculous, not because they are irrational, but because they are still living by the habits of another world.

Schopenhauer reminds us that we never encounter the world “as it is,” only as we experience it. There is no sun or earth in any absolute sense, only “an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth.” The world exists for us as representation, inseparable from the consciousness that perceives it. What we call reality is not something we stand outside and examine, but something that appears within us, shaped and sustained by the act of seeing. For each of us, the world is not the thing itself, but our idea of it.

From this angle, theatre finds its purpose. The stage becomes a place where one person’s idea of the world is made visible to others. The audience agrees, quietly and collectively, to inhabit another mind, to see as someone else sees, moment by moment, breath by breath. Theatre does not imitate life so much as it imitates perception. And if that is true, then understanding another person requires more than judgment. It asks for a harder, rarer act: to set aside our own view long enough to enter theirs. Not to correct it or compete with it, but to experience it. To perceive another’s perceptions.

Which raises an interesting possibility for actors and playwrights: perhaps motivation is not some hidden psychological engine buried deep within a character. Perhaps it is simply perception—the particular set of impressions currently occupying the stage of the mind.

It’s very difficult to change your psychological background. It’s a little easier to change your perceptions.

As theatre people we have an advantage when it comes to perception. Because we spend so much time analyzing and understanding characters, we possess tools that most people seldom develop. All we have to do is turn those studying eyes back on ourselves. Treat yourself as a character in a play. Do the table work on your own life. Ask how your personal character perceives the world.

Begin with a generous assumption that your behavior is perfectly logical. Then ask what perceptions make that behavior seem reasonable to you. Next, examine the results. Is that perception leading the character toward a satisfying life or toward misery? If the outcome is unhappy, the solution may not be to force new behavior but to change the perception that produced it. You are a theatre person. If you can do this work for a character you’re writing, acting, designing or directing, you can do it for yourself.

The world presents us with endless events, disappointments, accidents, and small absurdities. We cannot control most of them. What we can control is our perception. In that sense, happiness is a kind of authorship. You decide what the moment means.

This is also what allows for a character arc. A character arc occurs when a person allows new information to alter their understanding of the world. They revise their perceptions. They see things differently than they did before.

Unhappy people often refuse this revision. They cling to a single interpretation of events and defend it stubbornly. The insult remains an insult. The wound is preserved like a museum exhibit. But growth, both in drama and in life, requires a certain flexibility of perception. A willingness to reconsider the story you have been telling yourself. In other words, happiness is not simply a pleasant mood. It is the freedom to rewrite the narrative when the evidence suggests a better one. And that’s what opens the door to change. Without that shift in perception, there is no character arc. Only repetition.

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Identity is our name carried through the years, our history, our loyalties and beliefs, the tribes we gather around, and the qualities we wear. It is the sum of our days and the lens through which the world comes into focus. Memory and desire, love and sorrow, happiness and hurt, all are stitched together into a single living tapestry. From the cradle’s first cry to the quiet reckonings of age, identity is the story we tell ourselves about our place among the living. It is our answer to the oldest question in the human heart: Who am I?

Many plays, whether written or devised, are built around questions of identity. But they are also built around stage characters, and identity and character are not the same thing. Identity is the self. Character is invented. Identity grows out of self-reflection. Character is assembled from observation, imagination, and a handful of borrowed human traits. Identity emerges from lived experience. Character emerges from research, sympathy, empathy, invention, and imagination.

A playwright may pour elements of their own identity into a role, drawing on personal experience and a private understanding of the world. But the other people who populate their scripts are not the playwright. They are constructions. They may resemble real individuals. They may even contain fragments of the playwright’s own personality. Still, they are imagined lives. Only you can write your identity. Anyone with enough skill, curiosity, and imagination can create a character. With identity, you stay in your lane. With character, there are no lanes.

But isn’t imagination limited by our lane? Most of the time, yes. We tend to circle what we know, remixing experience with a measure of invention. But not always. Now and then, imagination slips its leash. Creative people routinely conjure ideas, stories, and ways of seeing the world that lie far beyond their personal experience. That is the quiet miracle of theatre. If we relied only on memory, there would be no light bulbs, no airplanes, no scientific breakthroughs, no leaps of thought that arrive before the evidence. Progress in any field depends on someone imagining what does not yet exist and then insisting, against all available proof, that it might.

The playwright begins with what they know: a voice, a history, a set of instincts. But the work demands something more. It asks them to imagine a mind that is not their own, a life they have not lived—not as a stereotype or a guess, but as something textured and real. At its best, imagination is not an escape from reality. It is an expansion of reality. A reaching beyond the boundaries of the self.

Of course, it doesn’t always land gracefully. Sometimes imagination overshoots, producing ideas that are baffling, excessive, or oddly specific. Consider candy-corn-flavored Oreos. They prove that imagination can wander far beyond experience—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes inexplicably. But even in its stranger forms, that wandering matters. Without it, we would remain confined to the narrow territory of what we already know. Theatre, of all arts, depends on the willingness to step beyond that border and see what might be waiting on the other side.

If plays relied only on identity, theatre would shrink quickly. Playwrights could write only one-person shows. Actors would be permanently typecast. Directors could direct only plays that perfectly matched their own lived experience. And designers could not design the musical Cats because they are not, in fact, cats. Taken to its logical conclusion, such a view would leave theatre trapped inside autobiography.

Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, wrote, “Taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that ‘lived experience’ trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, illustrated by people who looked like us, reviewed and read only by people who resembled us. If we all wrote only from personal experience, our films, performances, and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription. What an impoverished culture that would be.”

If we stay in our lane we will fail to bring complexity to the theatre, our stories quickly collapse into simple melodrama, where the good identity battles the evil character. The result is a thinner, less nuanced theatre, one that is far less capable of engaging with the complicated realities through which we are actually living. Identity brings truth. Character brings reach. Identity roots us in lived experience; imagination allows us to venture beyond it. Without identity, the work feels hollow. Without imagination, it becomes small.

Zoom In and Out

As an artist, you have to ask an uncomfortable question: Are you creating work that speaks only to people who already agree with you? If so, how is that any different from the algorithms on Google or Facebook that quietly feed people the opinions they already hold? The arts and humanities should aspire to something larger. At their best, they allow us to encounter lives, ideas, and experiences that are not our own. To do that, artists must learn to zoom in and zoom out. We zoom in to explore a specific experience, a particular human story, a unique point of view. But we also zoom out so that people from different backgrounds can recognize something of themselves in one another.

Only when artists do both—holding the particular and the universal in the same frame—can their work reach those who are unfamiliar with it, uninformed about it, or simply unlike them. That is where transformation begins. The goal of theatre is not merely self-expression. It is connection. If we become too absorbed in our own identities, we risk losing sight of the larger purpose of art: to carry us beyond ourselves and into the lives of others.

It also means that we will sometimes write, design, direct or portray characters whose beliefs we find ethically troubling or morally wrong. Yet to create them honestly, we must understand what drives them and why, from their own point of view, they believe they are right. To do that, we must be willing to explore difficult territory: misogyny, racism, homophobia, cruelty, and the countless ways human beings justify harmful behavior. None of this is comfortable, especially when those attitudes are directed toward communities that include us or the people we love. But the craft demands it.

A playwright, director, designer or actor cannot simply condemn a character. The task is to understand them deeply enough that their actions make sense within their moral universe, not our own. That requires curiosity and a willingness to see the world through another set of eyes. Only then does a character become believable. Only then can an audience confront the unsettling truth that most harmful acts do not arrive disguised as evil. More often, they arrive wrapped in certainty, righteousness, necessity, and positive intentions. Theatre’s strength lies in its ability to place different moral worlds on the stage and invite us to wrestle with them. Not to agree with every identity or character, but to understand why they believe what they believe.

Theatre Is a Passport

Theatre gives us a peculiar privilege—a kind of emotional passport. It allows us to cross borders that remain closed in ordinary life. We enter the private weather of other people’s lives, stand inside their contradictions, their longings, their worst decisions. Most people, quite sensibly, avoid such terrain. They change the subject. They scroll past. They close the door. Theatre does not offer that luxury. We are asked to stay. To look longer than is comfortable. But this is not an exercise in endless excavation. Theatre demands shape. It demands movement. It asks us to take the raw material of experience and give it structure, language, action. The work is not simply to feel, but to translate feeling into something another human being can recognize.

In that sense, theatre trains a particular kind of attention. We learn to hold two ideas at once: empathy and distance. You must care deeply about the characters and, at the same time, see them clearly. You must temporarily believe in their choices while also understanding their consequences. It’s a balancing act between immersion and awareness, between surrender and craft.

Identity anchors us to our place. But character asks us to loosen that grip. It asks us to imagine the world through another set of eyes and to consider that our certainty may not be the only truth available. That movement—from self to other and back again—is where the work begins to breathe. Theatre lives at that intersection: between what we know and what we do not yet understand. It is a space where experience and imagination argue, collaborate, and occasionally surprise one another.

Theatre is not merely an expression of identity. It is also an act of invention. Identity gives the work its roots; imagination gives it wings. One grounds us in lived experience, the other allows us to venture beyond it. That is the risk. And also, the reward.

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Actors often describe their work as restorative. Playwrights say they write “to get well.” Theatre is frequently spoken of as a kind of therapy—but what, precisely, is being healed? How does assigning logic and meaning to invented events reach back and touch real pain? Our wounds are not fictional. Our anxieties are not dramaturgical devices waiting for a clever act two reversal. Life rarely offers a clean arc, a well-timed revelation, or a curtain line that makes sense of everything that came before.

And yet we speak of plays as if they carry insight, even truth. Which is strange, if you stop to think about it. We would never attend a fake therapy session. We would not sit across from an actor playing a licensed professional and nod solemnly while they dispense carefully scripted cures—beautifully phrased, no doubt, perhaps even in iambic pentameter. We would call it what it is: performance.

So why does theatre sometimes feel like it heals? Because it does something therapy cannot. It doesn’t treat the wound directly. It stages it. It takes the chaos of experience and gives it shape—compresses time, sharpens conflict, arranges consequence. It offers not life as it is lived, but life as it can be seen. And in that act of seeing—clearer, more concentrated, more deliberate—we begin to recognize patterns we could not otherwise hold. The insight does not come from believing the fiction is real. It comes from recognizing that it isn’t—and seeing ourselves in it anyway. A performance doesn’t discover truth the way a scientist discovers a particle. It distills it. Not by documenting the world exactly as it is, but by compressing it into something we can finally see. Theatre does not cure us. It rehearses the cure.

The contemporary performance artist and critic Andrea Fraser once observed that therapy “intensifies certain versions of ourselves.” So does theatre. By the final curtain, we are not so much transformed as heightened. Some dormant frequency of the self is turned up. A sharper outline appears. For two hours, we feel more articulate than our daily vocabulary allows. Then the house lights rise and we reach for our phones. Are we changed, or have we simply returned to our original factory settings?

A Comprehensible Universe

In Experience and Art, Joseph Wood Krutch argues that our deepest desire is for a universe that feels comprehensible, meaningful, not wholly indifferent to the judgments we cannot help but make. Art, he says, is not a stenographer’s report of events nor a narcotic dream. It’s an ordering of experience so that logic and meaning emerge from the blur. Which sounds suspiciously like religion. In a cathedral, chapel, temple, mosque, or gurdwara, a worshipper may feel momentarily aligned with something vast. The air seems charged. Meaning feels legible. Yet outside, in the parking lot, transcendence competes with traffic and lunch plans. We drift back into habit. Still human. Still distracted. Perhaps this is not failure. Perhaps it is simply the pulse of being human. Brief intensifications. Then ordinary time. A flare of clarity. Then the long practice of living.

Both theatre and religion, in their own ways, reorder reality so that it briefly appears logical and meaningful. They arrange the chaos of experience into a pattern the human mind can recognize and inhabit, at least for a while. Consider Death of a Salesman and the doctrine of transubstantiation. In one, Willy Loman’s death seems to redeem his life with a tragic symmetry that any real-life insurance adjuster would quickly dismantle. In the other, consecrated wine becomes sacred substance, though a chemist would confirm it remains, materially speaking, Merlot. In both cases the result is significance. An ordinary sequence of events is lifted into meaning. Whether we believe the story completely is almost beside the point. For a moment the pattern holds, and the world appears arranged rather than accidental. Perhaps the real distinction between theatre and religion is how they acknowledge their stories. Art admits that it is constructed. Religion presents its truths as revealed. Yet both, in their own ways, answer the same human need: the desire to live in a world that feels intelligible rather than indifferent.

Does the Therapy Work?

Why does theatre (and therapy) sometimes fail? Perhaps because it offers only a temporary remedy. The magic is real, but it rarely lingers. The session lasts for two hours, the world sharpens. Emotions clarify. Meaning feels attainable. The chaos arranges itself into a pattern. We sit in the dark and believe, if only provisionally, that the story holds. Then the lights rise and ordinary life resumes with remarkable efficiency. Theatre doesn’t fail because it lacks truth. It fails because it competes with habit. Illumination is brief. Routine is relentless.

So how might theatre become more than temporary therapy? Other institutions have solved this problem. Religious traditions surround insight with ritual. Hats. Beads. Prayer rugs. Repeated words. Shared gestures. Small physical acts that tether revelation to routine. The moment does not end at the door. It’s carried home in muscle memory. Recovery programs do something similar. The clarity of a meeting is reinforced by sponsors, daily check-ins, shared language. The insight is not left to evaporate. It is structured into repetition.

Theatre, by contrast, is episodic. If it hopes to extend its influence, perhaps it must think less like an event and more like a practice. Not just a performance, but a community. Not only a script, but a shared vocabulary that survives beyond closing night. Conversations that continue. Partnerships that persist. Rituals that repeat. The question may not be how to make theatre louder, but how to make it linger—to echo beyond the curtain, to accompany people back into ordinary time, and to remain, however quietly, after the applause is gone.

Imagine if theatre borrowed a few strategies from religion and therapy. After the curtain call, you would not simply drift into the parking lot and resume ordinary life. The play would continue its supervision. You might check in with the playwright five times a day to confirm that you still remember the theme. A gentle text at noon. A probing question at dusk. “Have you strayed from the lessons in Act Two?” Perhaps every audience member would be assigned a theatre sponsor. Someone to call when you feel yourself slipping back into old interpretations. “Remember what the protagonist learned,” they would remind you patiently.

Each production might include a hotline for moments of moral relapse. Press one if you are tempted to ignore systemic injustice. Press two if you have forgotten the metaphor. Directors could host weekly reflection groups. Actors might lead guided rehearsals for the soul. The ushers, having taken a brief training seminar, would gently intervene if anyone attempted to leave the building before achieving sufficient character growth. It would be exhausting, of course. But at least the message would stick.

Instead, we offered the world Brechtian alienation. We dismantled the fourth wall. We taught characters to rhyme and sing. We let them pause with Pinteresque gravity and wander through absurdism, surrealism, and existentialism. We installed trapdoors, pyrotechnics, rhinoceroses, and the occasional falling chandelier. We experimented, deconstructed, reconstructed, and theorized the rubble. And yet, for all this invention, we have not devised anything quite as effective as a hat.

All of this is slightly tongue in cheek. Still, it points to a real limitation of thinking about theatre as therapy. Theatre lacks many of the practical tools that therapists and therapeutic religions rely on. There are no weekly check-ins, no assigned exercises, no small hat to remind you of the theme on the way to work. What theatre does possess, however, is something those systems rarely employ so freely: make-believe. And make-believe, oddly enough, may be the most powerful tool of all. For a few hours, it allows people to step outside themselves, suspend their usual assumptions, and imagine how the world might be arranged differently. In that brief imaginative space, audiences rehearse possibilities. They encounter other lives, other choices, other endings. And sometimes—quietly, without anyone noticing—they return to their own lives carrying a slightly altered idea of what might be possible.

Theatre raises the bar of what human beings might be capable of, if only for an evening. It allows an audience to glimpse a truth slightly better than the one they walked in with. In that sense, theatre is a wish. And over centuries, a wish can accumulate a quiet power.

This leaves only one defensible conclusion: just stage the play knowing it may go nowhere. Knowing it may be forgotten. Knowing it will not bend history, topple injustice, or send a ripple all the way to the edge of the pool. Admit the absurdity and move forward. Perhaps you will untangle something in your own life. Perhaps, in the privacy of fiction, you will finally hear your cool-hearted father say he loves you. Perhaps someone in the audience will listen and remember. Perhaps they will listen and forget. Both outcomes are common. Neither is fatal.

Because while you are creating the wish, something undeniable happens. You enter into therapy with yourself. You test your own thoughts. You argue with them. You refine them. You surprise yourself. Theatre may not grant immortality. It may not deliver revolution. It rarely produces permanent transformation. What it offers instead is presence. A mind meeting itself honestly on the page and on the stage. That kind of company is rare. And in its modest way, that little wish is enough.

Better Than Therapy

Social psychologist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, suggests that human beings are marked by a peculiar and unsettling awareness: we know that we exist, and we know that we will die. That knowledge estranges us—from nature, from one another, and even from ourselves. In that sense, consciousness is a kind of rupture. It separates us from the animal world, where life is lived without commentary.

We, by contrast, know the ending. And once the ending is known, everything that precedes it begins to arrange itself into segments. We start to treat life like a story. What’s strange — and oddly unsettling — is realizing that those segments do not actually exist in the cosmos. Reality itself is simply one impossibly long run-on sentence. It is we who add syntax. We search for shape, for meaning, for some coherence that might justify the final curtain.

Death, in this sense, becomes the playwright. It gives the whole thing structure. But it also creates a problem. Life does not naturally unfold in clean arcs or satisfying conclusions. The meaning we pursue is not discovered but imposed. Which is why consciousness can feel like a kind of violation—an intrusion into a world that would otherwise move along just fine without explanation. And yet, here we are aware of the ending and still trying to make the middle matter.

Fromm writes that we long “to leave the prison of our aloneness.” Therapy is one attempt to do that—to pause, to examine, to make sense of the fragments. Theatre attempts something similar, but by other means. It is not an escape from solitude so much as a passage through it. The work becomes a bridge—from self to an imagined other, from silence to dialogue. Something speaks. Something answers. For a time, we are met.

This is why theatre is live. Actors and audience gather in the same room, breathing the same air, sharing the same moment. For a few hours, strangers experience the same story—the same tension, the same laughter, the same charged silences. Nothing permanent may change. The world outside remains where we left it. But inside, the walls of that lonely prison grow thinner.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” The trouble, of course, is that we never quite reach the vantage point from which life resolves into clarity. Understanding is always late to the scene. Therapy attempts to manufacture that vantage point—an hour set aside for reflection, a pause in the forward rush. Theatre does something similar in public. It stages understanding. It takes the unruly fragments of experience—loss, confusion, longing—and arranges them into patterns we can briefly recognize. Does that make theatre a kind of group therapy? In a sense, yes. It is where chaos is given form, where private disarray becomes shared narrative. And in that shared recognition, something shifts. We are, for a moment, less alone. As Louise Glück suggests, if you can make something out of bad luck, loss and pain, “then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.” Theatre does not eliminate suffering. But it does something quietly radical: it turns experience into meaning and meaning into company.

If an audience wishes to attend the session, they are welcome. If a theatre offers a few coins in exchange, we accept them with gratitude. Applause is pleasant. Payment is practical. But neither is the point. What we seek is simpler: to see life not as the universe sees it—each of us alone—but as we might see it together, if only for a moment. As long as live theatre exists, the actor is not alone. The audience is not alone. Even the solitary playwright at a desk late at night is not alone. That is theatre’s quiet truth. And in a world that scrolls endlessly past itself, it may also be its most necessary therapeutic gift.

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Welcome to the modern world. It has the polished chill of The Hunger Games, where power smiles for the camera while quietly tightening the screws on arts funding. It hums with the watchful unease of 1984, promoting newspeak while rationing free expression. On the political stage, demagogues and despots denounce artists. Behind the curtain, philistines ban books, slash budgets, and treat curiosity as a threat. As PBS, NPR, and the NEA drift toward the iceberg, artists don’t always rush to save the ship. Too often, they argue about what to call the passengers in the water. They aren’t “lifeboatless.” They’re “individuals experiencing a temporary lack of lifeboat access.” This isn’t some distant dystopia flickering across a midnight screen. It’s here. It’s now. But it’s also yesterday’s rerun and tomorrow’s preview. Welcome to life in the theatre: rehearsing on the edge of the abyss, arguing over terminology while the zombies gather in the lobby. For those working in the theatre, it can feel like a precarious moment. Then again, when hasn’t it?

It’s Never Been Normal

At the outset of World War II, writer and scholar C. S. Lewis delivered a sermon at Oxford’s University Church that was later published as Learning in War-Time. In it, he observed that war creates no entirely new situation. It merely intensifies the permanent human condition, forcing us to confront what we would rather ignore. As Lewis put it, “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” Lewis argued that if we waited to pursue knowledge, beauty, and meaning until the world felt secure, we would never begin. Life has never been stable. Even the eras we remember as peaceful reveal, upon closer inspection, a landscape crowded with alarms, upheavals, and uncertainty. There will always be crises. There will always be conflict. There will always be reasons to postpone the things that matter most.

Theatre, perhaps more than most callings, has never been a normal life. It has always required a certain willingness to create in the midst of uncertainty, to build something fragile and fleeting while the world lurches from one disruption to the next. We might as well face that reality with clear eyes and a touch of hard-earned humor. Few of us, however, imagined just how far from normal it could become.

Around the same time that C. S. Lewis was writing Learning in War-Time, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin was publishing Social and Cultural Dynamics, a sweeping study that now reads less like scholarship and more like prophecy. Sorokin argued that truth and beauty would increasingly dissolve into marketing language. Conscience would be outsourced to special interests. “Might makes right” would harden into an unofficial creed. The family would weaken. The home would become little more than an overnight parking place. Genuine creativity would recede, replaced by confident mediocrity masquerading as excellence. Bigger would be mistaken for better. Classics would yield to bestsellers. Genius would be replaced by technique. Thought would give way to information. Freedom would shrink into a slogan. Rights would become ornamental. Governments would offer bombs instead of bread. Anxiety would cease to be an occasional visitor and become the atmosphere itself.

Reading Sorokin today can feel unsettling. Not because every prediction proved correct, but because so many of his observations seem uncomfortably familiar. He understood that civilizations rarely collapse all at once. More often, they drift. Standards erode. Language loses precision. Institutions lose credibility. Citizens become distracted, fragmented, and exhausted.

Sorokin did not regard decline as a final act. Collapse, in his view, was merely an intermission. Once a culture exhausts itself chasing novelty, spectacle, and glitter, people eventually begin to recognize the emptiness beneath the performance. They grow weary of distraction. They hunger for meaning. What once seemed exciting begins to feel hollow. What was dismissed as old-fashioned suddenly appears wise. From the wreckage, Sorokin believed, a more serious and integrated culture could emerge—one less obsessed with consumption and image, and more concerned with truth, beauty, and purpose. Renewal would not come easily, nor would it arrive all at once. But history, he argued, moves in cycles. Periods of excess are often followed by periods of reflection. For those of us in the theatre, that possibility matters. If Sorokin was right, then theatre’s task is not merely to survive cultural turbulence. It is to help prepare the ground for what comes next.

Theatre Must Never Go To War

The possibility of cultural renewal places a special responsibility on theatre artists: observe carefully, question honestly, and create boldly. Our task is not to echo slogans or carry water for ideologies. The moment we trade inquiry for certainty; we cease being artists and begin drifting toward propaganda. Art begins in uncertainty. It asks questions before it offers answers. It explores before it concludes. If we start with a predetermined message and construct a play merely to confirm it, we are not creating. We are campaigning. And campaigns rarely change hearts. More often, they harden them. The more certain we become of our righteousness, the deeper the trenches grow. The deeper the trenches, the more fractured the culture becomes.

Theatre is uniquely positioned to resist that fragmentation because its greatest strength is not advocacy but inquiry. It invites us to inhabit other lives, confront competing truths, and sit with complexity rather than flee from it. If theatre is to help mend our divisions, it cannot begin by digging new ones. Its role is not to close the conversation but to keep it alive.

Increasingly, some people no longer see the arts as a place for exploration, empathy, and human understanding. Instead, they see artists as ideological activists, more interested in enforcing orthodoxy than encouraging inquiry. To them, theatres, universities, and cultural institutions can appear less like forums for conversation and more like reeducation camps—places where certain conclusions are expected and dissent is unwelcome. Whether that perception is fair is almost beside the point. Perception shapes reality. If large portions of the public come to see artists the way many artists view partisan media—as narrow, doctrinaire, and polarizing—then trust begins to erode.

Theatre’s task is not to reinforce the camps, but to gather strangers in the same room and remind them that they share a common human story. If we become didactic mouthpieces for a single point of view, we risk losing everyone. Those who disagree will leave because they feel scolded. Those who agree may leave because they feel patronized—or simply bored. Certainty, however righteous, rarely makes for compelling drama. Audiences are drawn to questions, conflicts, and discoveries, not conclusions. The audience does not need to be struck over the head. It needs to be invited in with ideas.

Theatre of Ideas

One of the great causes of war is the inability to listen. Once again, we turn to World War II, but this time to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who became one of the earliest and bravest voices to resist Hitler and the genocide of the Jews. While imprisoned awaiting trial, Bonhoeffer wrote some of his most penetrating reflections. None feels more urgent today than his observations on stupidity and ignorance.

Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity can be more dangerous than malice. Evil can be confronted. It can be exposed, challenged, and, at times, restrained. Stupidity is far more difficult. Facts glance off it. Evidence is dismissed. Contradictions are ignored. The foolish person, unlike the malicious one, is often convinced of his own righteousness and therefore resistant to correction. Attempts at persuasion fail. Reason cannot penetrate. For Bonhoeffer, the problem was not a lack of intelligence but a surrender of independent thought. People absorbed the assumptions of their tribe, party, or movement and repeated them as if they were their own. In such circumstances, argument becomes largely ineffective because the issue is no longer one of evidence, but of identity.

His warning remains unsettlingly relevant. The more we divide ourselves into competing camps, the less willing we become to listen. We stop asking questions. We stop entertaining doubt. We stop seeing opponents as fellow human beings and begin seeing them as obstacles, enemies, or threats. Once that happens, conversation collapses, and conflict becomes far more likely.

How can theatre respond to ignorance? How can it respond when life is increasingly framed as us versus them by pulpits, politicians, billionaires, and media empires? We cannot compete at that scale. Nor should we try. What we possess is something different. We can step back. We can pay attention. We can create spaces where certainty loosens its grip and complexity is allowed to breathe. Our task is not to harden doctrine or sharpen dogma. It is to make room for reflection, ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt. If we are to make a difference, it will not come from preaching more loudly than everyone else. It will come from seeing more clearly. Theatre invites us to inhabit lives unlike our own, to wrestle with competing truths, and to resist the temptation of easy conclusions. In an age of slogans, theatre can offer inquiry. In an age of certainty, it can offer humility. In an age of tribes, it can offer conversation. It can create a theatre of ideas.

This starts with the playwright. If a playwright knows the theme before writing the first scene, there is a good chance they are not creating a theatre of ideas. They are creating an argument. The conclusion has already been reached, and the characters and plot exist largely to confirm it. But when a playwright begins without knowing the answer—when the theme is discovered rather than imposed—there is a greater chance that genuine exploration can occur.

The theatre of ideas dramatizes conflicts between competing visions of existence. It places beliefs under pressure. It allows playwrights to discover that what they believed when they began writing may be incomplete, naïve, contradictory, or even tragically wrong. Such works unsettle audiences because they first unsettled their creators. The theatre of ideas does not flatter the playwright’s assumptions or the audience’s certainties. It asks us to take risks. To question our convictions. To entertain the possibility that we may be mistaken. It invites us to reconsider ourselves and the world we inhabit. And perhaps that is precisely what modern culture—and, at times, modern theatre—has become increasingly reluctant to do.

To The Success Of Our Hopeless Cause

Is that journey more difficult now? Certainly. Theatre has been declared dead for more than a century. It survived film, television, and the internet. What may prove more dangerous than any technology is the spread of intellectual laziness, ideological certainty, and cultural noise. Yet the theatre’s task is not merely to defend its shrinking territory. It is to remind society that the map is unfinished and the horizon still generous. To make us feel that there are entire continents of ideas yet to be explored, questions yet to be asked, and stories yet to be told. Beneath that ambition lies a deeper faith: that art can still help a bewildered culture understand itself.

Perhaps it is worth reviving the old dissidents’ toast, spoken under the shadow of prison and exile: “To the success of our hopeless cause.” It was offered by clear-eyed idealists who understood the odds and chose to act anyway—not because victory was likely, but because integrity required it.

C. S. Lewis reminds us that human beings are peculiar creatures. We “propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb our hair at Thermopylae.” This, he wrote, “is not panache; it is our nature.” Theatre people recognize that instinct immediately. We rehearse in borrowed rooms that are falling apart. We argue about meaning in hallways five minutes before curtain. We crack jokes in the wings while everything hangs in the balance. We debate a new play while walking straight into disaster. We make theatre regardless of the circumstances. This is not bravado. It is who we are.

So let us raise a glass: to opening night, to ideas that still matter in a time of war, to artists stubborn enough to keep asking questions, and to the success of our hopeless—yet somehow hopeful—cause.

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This short essay enters a crowded room. Anxiety is already there, pacing. Deficiency sits beside it, taking notes. Jealousy pretends not to notice anyone while noticing everything. Grief occupies the corner like an old tenant who refuses to leave. Boredom checks its watch. Fanaticism has commandeered a chair and is making speeches. Narcissism studies its reflection in any available makeup mirror. Drugs and drink linger by the door, patient as seasoned bartenders, waiting for someone to give up resisting. In other words, everything that tends to stand between us and happiness made its entrance early. Which is why a little philosophy can be surprisingly useful. Not as decoration, but as equipment.

Enter Bertrand Russell, one of the great troublemakers of the twentieth century—a man who poked at the largest questions of freedom and human happiness with the cool precision of a mathematician and the moral impatience of someone who suspected the world could be run a little better. Born into the British aristocracy and then spending much of his life politely arguing with it, he believed that if people learned to reason more carefully, life might become not only more understandable, but happier. In The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Russell conducts a brisk, almost cheerful inventory of the usual culprits behind human misery: boredom, competition, envy, fatigue, guilt, and the relentless pursuit of status. It reads less like a philosophical treatise and more like a diagnostic manual for modern life.

His central point is simple: much of our unhappiness is not imposed on us. It is manufactured. We suffer not only from hardship, but from comparison. Not only from failure, but from the fear of it. Not only from desire, but from misdirected desire. We envy, we compete, we brood, we rehearse grievances, we inflate our importance, then collapse under the weight of it. We are, in short, extremely talented at making ourselves miserable. If this begins to sound familiar, it should. On certain days, Russell’s list reads less like a theory of human unhappiness and more like a casting breakdown for a play about theatre people.

Anxiety

Today, anxiety is everywhere. Many people seem to be living on the far edge of a nervous breakdown. The modern world offers a steady diet of headlines, notifications, deadlines, and opinions, each arriving with the urgency of a five-alarm fire. Our nervous system, which evolved to worry about wolves and lions, now spends its days multitasking with email, social media, and the possibility that someone somewhere on the internet disagrees with us.

For theatre people, the situation is slightly worse. Our profession already comes with its own specialized anxieties: auditions that lead nowhere, reviews that arrive like storm warnings, and the constant suspicion that someone more talented is waiting just outside the stage door. Add the ordinary stresses of modern life to that mixture, and you have a population of artists who spend their days manufacturing emotional crises onstage while quietly managing their own off.

Russell said that one of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. How many of us were told in school—especially in graduate school—that theatre is a great art demanding total commitment and absolute concentration? We hear, again and again, that countless others want it more, work harder, sacrifice more, sleep less, and somehow still find time to network. One begins to wonder whether these well-meaning teachers are quietly preparing us for a nervous breakdown.

Historically, theatre may not be as important as we sometimes hope. No political revolution has ever begun because of a single play. Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro stirred the air before the French Revolution, but it didn’t cause it. Augusto Boal invited audiences to rehearse resistance by turning spectators into participants, though the larger movements would likely have marched on with or without him. Eve Ensler ignited global conversations about violence toward women, and Ntozake Shange gave voice to Black women’s lives long ignored by mainstream stages. Each mattered deeply. But each was only one ingredient in forces far larger than theatre itself.

If you are doing theatre because you believe it’s terribly important, you may indeed be heading toward a nervous breakdown. When the script is finished, the show produced, the role performed, the lights rise—the world you hoped to fix will remain stubbornly unchanged. At best, a play nudges the world slightly, and often that world is only a few people sitting together in the dark. Worse still, many of them agreed with you before the curtain rose. Audiences today tend to choose plays that confirm what they already believe. You will not dismantle patriarchy, injustice, corruption, or colonialism in two acts and a glass of wine at intermission. But you might move one person. And in the long history of theatre, that is no small achievement.

Theatre is not worth the headaches, stomach pain, racing heart, deep sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, insomnia, stress, or burnout that come from believing everything depends on your play. Take a breath. What you are doing is meaningful, but it is not the hinge of history. Knowing this may help you live longer, enjoy the work more, and, by staying healthy enough to continue, perhaps nudge a few more people along the way.

Do not condemn theatre for being small and temporary. Celebrate it for being profoundly human. Like us, it flickers, glows for a moment, and disappears. Theatre is a bubble—fragile and fleeting. Yet once in a while it bursts at exactly the right moment and wakes the eyes. The trick is not to mistake the bubble for the ocean. Theatre can move us, provoke us, and sometimes illuminate the world, but it is still only a small part of life. Hold it with care, but not with panic. Let it glow while it glows. Then let it pass. The stage goes dark. The audience goes home. And the calm, ordinary business of living resumes.

Deficiency

You are not good enough. Your transgressions, imprudence, blind spots, bad timing, questionable headshots, and uncanny ability to choose the wrong audition outfit will trip you at every turn. It’s hopeless. You should probably give up now, spare yourself years of rejection, and take up something stable. Dentistry, perhaps. Or anesthesiology. At least then your audience will be comfortably unconscious.

Or, if you prefer a little philosophy with your panic, you might borrow some perspective from Bertrand Russell. Growing up, he received a stern Puritan education that encouraged constant reflection on his sins, follies, and shortcomings. As he grew older, however, he discovered a more useful skill: indifference to his own deficiencies. He realized that most of what we call failure is microscopic when measured against the vast and largely indifferent sweep of existence. Your missed cue is not a cosmic tragedy. Your uneven monologue will not disturb the stars. Human imperfection is the default setting, not a manufacturing defect.

So shrug off the mispronounced “nuclear” in the audition, the review that implies you should be legally restrained from performing, and the standing ovation that turns out to be people trying to reach the parking lot. Be peacefully indifferent to your minor deficiencies. Notice them, certainly. Improve where you can. But do not build a personality around them. Perfection is a terrible collaborator. It slows the rehearsal, stifles risk and insists on being consulted long after everyone else has gone home. A better approach is a kind of cultivated calm. A refusal to grant every mistake the dignity of a crisis. A willingness to continue despite the evidence. You miss a line, you keep going. You bomb a joke, you keep going. You question your entire life’s direction somewhere around tech week, and still, somehow, you keep going. This is not denial. It’s proportion. Because the theatre will offer you many opportunities to take yourself too seriously. It will tempt you to believe that every success is definitive and every failure permanent. Both are exaggerations.

Drugs and Drink

Theatre is a high. As the old wisdom goes, the higher the high, the lower the low. Theatre dispenses an intoxicating compound of applause, attention, and the brief illusion of importance. Like any powerful drug, it deserves wary respect. Actors line up for auditions like patients waiting for a prescription. Playwrights send out scripts chasing the next hit. And when the dealer doesn’t deliver, the addict starts looking elsewhere for relief.

Bertrand Russell once described drunkenness as a form of temporary suicide. The happiness it provides, he argued, is mostly negative. It does not create joy so much as suspend unhappiness for a few hours—an intermission from the self. Many theatre artists understand the appeal of that bargain. The work is intense, the stakes feel personal, and the emotional weather can turn quickly. When the curtain falls, the body is still buzzing, the mind still performing. Something has to bring it down.

Research from the University of Sydney suggests this is not merely anecdotal. Actors report significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress than the general population. In one study, more than forty percent said they drink to “let go” after demanding performances, and a large majority reported using legal or illegal substances. Associate Professor Ian Maxwell, a co-author of the study, noted that the findings confirmed what many in the industry already suspect: actors are highly skilled, often underpaid workers living with substantial anxiety and stress, along with troubling levels of depression. Their patterns of alcohol use, he warned, may place them at genuine risk of long-term health problems.

The first step, as every recovery program likes to remind us, is admitting you have a problem. In this case, the problem is fairly straightforward. Somewhere along the way, you confused theatre with ordinary life. The boundaries blurred. The role followed you home. So begin there. Admit that you are powerless over theatre and that, however thrilling it may be, it is not a condition meant to be inhabited twenty-four hours a day. Theatre is something you do, not somewhere you live. The practical solution is to construct two lives: one onstage and one off. Both deserve attention. Both deserve daylight.

Next, cultivate friends who are not in the theatre and who remain deeply unimpressed by your résumé. These people perform an essential civic function. They remind you that the world contains other concerns besides greasepaint, lighting gels, and who received the better review in the local paper. Spend time with people who have never heard the phrase “tech week” and would not care if they did. They will gently reintroduce you to the radical idea that life continues even when the curtain is down—and that this is not a tragedy.

Finally, develop small rituals after the show, quiet ceremonies that return you to gravity. Walk home if you can. Wash off the makeup. Change your clothes. Let the nervous system settle. Resist the urge to keep performing for the evening. Remind yourself, gently, that this too will pass. Do not cling too tightly to triumph. Do not drown in despair. Applause fades. Silence fades as well. Both are temporary weather systems passing through the same sky.

Happiness, in the end, is rarely found at the bar or in the greenroom haze. It tends to appear in smaller, steadier places: a comfortable bed, a pet that doesn’t care about your reviews, a lover who prefers you unlit, a long conversation that goes nowhere in particular, a life of the mind that continues whether or not you are cast. These pleasures are modest, even stubbornly ordinary—but they have one advantage over intoxication. They last. And they are difficult to enjoy if you have misplaced your mind somewhere between the bar and the stage door.

Jealousy

What we often fear is not failure itself but failing to outshine our neighbors. Jealousy may be the most dependable affliction in the theatre. Who among us has not lain awake at night quietly hoping a rival receives a devastating review, preferably containing the line, “One longed not for intermission, but for mercy.” The problem, of course, is arithmetic. Too many theatre people. Too few jobs. And so, we perform a delicate emotional balancing act: publicly supportive, privately condemning. We are not, strictly speaking, jealous of talent. Talent we can forgive. It’s the booking we can’t abide. We are jealous of the chosen—the ones who seem, by some mysterious arrangement of luck, timing or privilege, to have slipped past the velvet rope.

Jealousy grows from fear: fear of losing affection, status, or proof that one matters. The less secure we feel in our own worth, the more jealousy flourishes. Worse, it serves no useful purpose. It prevents nothing, softens nothing, and produces only continuous unhappiness. Russell even called it a disease, noting that it thrives most easily in minds with nothing better to occupy them. His cure was disarmingly simple: fill life with friendship, affection, curiosity, and meaningful work. When the mind is fully engaged, jealousy has far less room to grow—and, like a bad review, it is eventually forgotten. He also warned against the common belief that life is merely a contest in which honor belongs only to the victor. That view breeds a kind of stubborn, blind resolve while starving the senses and the intellect.

Nietzsche once called envy “the ulcer of the soul,” which is a memorable way of saying that resentment is a terrible long-term health plan. Consider the basic arithmetic. You are going to die. The colleague you are trying to outshine is also going to die. In a hundred years, no one will remember either of you. The oceans may have risen, the theatres may be flooded, holograms may be playing Hamlet, and arts budgets will still be under review. So, when you don’t get the job, ask yourself a harder question: are you sad because you lost the role, or because you failed to outshine your neighbors? Not getting the job causes sadness. Failing to outshine your neighbors causes humiliation. And humiliation is useless. It only keeps you from auditioning, networking, and training.

Grief

It’s one thing to suffer for your art. That’s in the job description, wedged somewhere between “unpaid” and “opening night panic.” But it is another thing entirely to be proud of suffering, to polish it, frame it, and hang it in the lobby next to the donor board. Bertrand Russell once observed that unhappy people, like poor sleepers, often take a certain pride in their condition. And the theatre has no shortage of such curators of misery. Yes, there are tortured geniuses. But their numbers are dramatically smaller than the number of people who enjoy announcing they are tortured in a tone carefully designed to invite talk-back follow-up questions.

Besides, who wants to be miserable, and why would anyone brag about it? Russell suspected that this kind of pride resembles that of a fox that has lost its tail and then insists that taillessness is the new elegance. His cure was simple: show the fox how to grow a new one. Theatre, unfortunately, is crowded with tail-less foxes hosting panel discussions about the pain of being tailless.

Among theatre people, playwrights may be the most devoted collectors of tasteful anguish—the kind that photographs beautifully in a program bio or a carefully lit social media post, complete with a distant gaze and meaningful shadows. And yes, they do suffer. Their lives are genuinely chaotic: underpaid, underproduced, and occasionally underwater—if not this season, then next. At one point, The Dramatist (the magazine for playwrights published by the Dramatist Guild) devoted an entire issue to grief. Page after page offered raw, poignant accounts of loss—along with complaints about others mishandling the playwright’s “grief space.” It began to feel less like a shared reckoning and more like a quiet competition, as if grief itself were a credential. What the issue notably lacked was any real discussion of how to move beyond it.

Grief has its place. It asks to be felt, honored, and, in time, released. It belongs with friends and family, even in the public square where we sometimes gather to share it. But it does not belong in rehearsal. Theatre depends on the ensemble, and the ensemble depends on shared attention. When private sorrow overtakes that space, the work begins to fade. To hold grief in a measure of discipline is not a failure of feeling. It is a form of respect—for the work, and for the people who have come together to make it.

If theatre itself is the source of your sorrow, you might consider leaving. Become a farmer, perhaps. Of course, farmers report higher rates of depression than theatre people, so take that advice lightly. Stay, if you can. Suffer moderately. Complain affectionately to friends over cheap wine about the collapse of culture—but leave it at the door. Let go of the injury from rehearsal ten years ago. It was not a tragedy. It was a Tuesday.

Learn the difference between inconvenience and injustice. Not every note is an attack. Not every rejection is a verdict on your worth. Sometimes it is simply a director with poor judgment, or a theatre with a schedule to keep. Take the work seriously, but not yourself. Show up. Do the job. Say the line. Miss it. Try again. Laugh when it falls apart. Avoid those who feed on grievance. Remember that the world contains suffering far greater than anything rehearsed on a stage. And remember, too, what theatre is for. It’s not about you. It’s about the audience—and about the fragile, necessary, human act of gathering in a room and trying, against all odds, to make something live.

Back in A.D. 40, the Stoic playwright and philosopher Seneca wrote to a woman who had mourned her son for three years and, with brisk Roman efficiency, urged her to stop. Grief, he argued, has its season. Extend it too long and it curdles into something else—less a tribute to the dead than a habit of mind. Prolonged sorrow, in his view, can become a kind of indulgence, even a pleasure. He was genuinely baffled by people who chose to remain in pain. Clearly, he never attended a new play festival.

Seneca’s point still lands. There is a difference between honoring a loss and curating it. Between feeling something deeply and building a small, tasteful shrine to it. The danger is not grief itself, but our tendency to linger—because it is familiar, because it feels important, because, in a strange way, it gives us something to do. Pain can be a role, and like any good role, it is hard to give up once you know your lines. The Stoic alternative is less dramatic but far more useful: feel what you feel, then release it. Do not audition your suffering for a longer run. Do not extend its contract. Take the note, close the scene, and move on to the next beat. The show, as they say, must go on.

Boredom

Life in the theatre is, paradoxically, rather boring. Not the performances. Those are the fireworks. The rest is smoke. Rehearsal notes, long stretches of waiting, followed by even longer stretches of waiting. Much of theatre is simply tedium, and no one handles tedium well. Theatre people, however, are unusually inventive at escaping it. You can spot them in rehearsal, bravely manufacturing controversy over a line reading or a prop placement, not because the art demands it but because their soul cannot endure another quiet minute before lunch. Human beings will do astonishing things to avoid boredom. Empires have collapsed over it. Marriages have ended over it. Entire rehearsal rooms have been derailed by it. Our fear of boredom may be one reason people go to the theatre in the first place. And why some of us, against all good judgment, decide to stay.

Drama thrives on crisis. Real life, by contrast, runs mostly on routine. Aside from a few blazing moments, existence is calm, repetitive, and occasionally—let’s be honest—boring. The real skill, then, is not escaping boredom but learning to inhabit it with a certain grace. There is quiet pleasure in the small rituals of the craft: learning lines, reading plays, lingering in unhurried conversations, taking a morning walk, tending the side hustle that keeps the lights on. These are not interruptions of the work. They are the work. They build the stamina, attention, and patience that the larger moments require.

Quiet days are not the enemy. They are the training ground. If you cannot live well in the ordinary, you will not recognize the extraordinary when it arrives—and even if you do, you won’t be ready for it. The artist’s life is not made in the spotlight. It is made in the long stretches when nothing much seems to be happening, and you keep going anyway.

Noise & Strangers

Theatre is full of noise, and noise produces fatigue. That is simply the nature of the beast: rehearsals, notes sessions, seven-hour tech runs where the director and crew loudly despise one another, and the one actor who insists on warming up at a volume normally reserved for emergency sirens. Bertrand Russell once observed that fatigue also comes from what he called “the constant presence of strangers.”

Theatre, of course, is a carefully organized festival of strangers: collaborators, audiences, donors, directors, designers, critics—all making noise. The art form runs on togetherness, which is beautiful, noble, and completely exhausting. Theatre people, by temperament, are extreme people-persons. We thrive on collaboration, connection, community, and long, emotional conversations in poorly lit rehearsal rooms. And yet people cause fatigue. Even wonderful people. Especially wonderful people. Human beings are marvelous creatures, but they take a toll on the nervous system when encountered continuously.

Because of this, creative people need to occasionally retreat from the noise and the constant rustle of other human beings. Step away for a while from partners, theatre people, and even the art itself. Find quiet—the kind where nothing is asking for a rewrite or a restaging. No cues. No notes. No one explaining their character’s childhood trauma. Not forever. Just long enough to remember why you loved it in the first place. Only then will the noise of strangers begin to sound like happiness again

Worry

Worry is simply fear in work clothes—exhausting, unnecessary, and curable with a sturdier philosophy of life and a little mental discipline. Unfortunately, theatre people suffer from a more advanced strain: creative worry. We possess the rare ability to invent disasters so elaborate that your average tinfoil conspiracy theorist would dial back. Add an overactive imagination, and you have a reliable recipe for emotional disaster.

Have you ever imagined a scene so vividly that you began arguing with it—perhaps even losing? Congratulations. You may be experiencing creative worry, which sits only one theatrical costume change away from creative paranoia. This, of course, is also the engine of playwriting. Playwrights are condemned to live inside their own heads, endlessly staging intrigues, entanglements, and elaborate machinations. That’s their fate. The rest of theatre people might consider aiming slightly higher.

Russell’s prescription was refreshingly unsentimental: face facts, act where action is possible and refuse the useless mental rehearsal of catastrophe. Happiness, he suggested, comes from the full possession of one’s faculties rather than the decorative use of anxiety. Calm grows from habitual rational thinking—not from optimism or scented candles. And rationality, despite its poor reputation in rehearsal rooms, does not make life dull. Quite the opposite. It creates inner harmony and frees a person to look outward instead of circling personal melodrama. Nothing is so dull as being sealed inside oneself and nothing so exhilarating as directing attention toward the wider world.

The wise person, he wrote, thinks about troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so. At other times, they think about something else—or, if it is night, about nothing at all. There is, after all, a time for analysis and a time for sleep. A time to solve and a time to set the script aside. Not every thought deserves an encore. Some are better met with a polite closing night. Turn off the lights, strike the set, and let the mind go dark. Morning will provide fresh cues.

Unrecognized Talent

How often have you heard a playwright, director, actor, or designer described as a genius? The word circulates through the theatre with such frequency that one begins to suspect that most of the world’s geniuses must be hiding somewhere in the lighting booth. The truth is simpler. The theatre contains many talented people and a great deal of dedication, but very few geniuses. In fact, most geniuses are probably smart enough to avoid a life in the theatre altogether. Because the word is tossed around so casually, the rest of us—the vast population of non-geniuses—can begin to feel like our talent is unrecognized.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is true that there are in history cases of unrecognized merit, but they are far less numerous than the cases of recognized demerit.” If you’re a genius the world has cruelly overlooked, then by all means keep writing, acting, designing, and haunting rehearsal rooms with noble persistence. But if you are, in his less cuddly phrase, an “untalented person puffed up with vanity,” it may be kinder to everyone involved if you quietly step away from the arts and choose a profession that doesn’t include ensembles. The difficulty, of course, is that most theatre people have no reliable way of knowing which category they occupy. If you are an unrecognized genius, continuing is heroic. If you’re an untalented person puffed up with vanity continuing is absurd.

So how do you tell? There is a simple test: Are you making art because you must—because some idea or feeling is clawing its way out of you—or are you doing it for the applause? A real artist, even one who greatly enjoys applause, treats it as a pleasant side effect rather than the power source. They want to create a particular kind of work. They hope people will love it. But if the room stays silent, they still make the same stubborn, inconvenient, deeply personal thing. The applause-driven artist has a different problem. There is no inner compass, no voice insisting this must exist. Tomorrow, they could just as easily produce something entirely different—whatever earns the quickest cheer or the most approving clicks. In short: If you would still make it in an empty room, you are an artist. If you need the room first, you are in customer service. But if others consistently fail to rate your abilities as highly as you rate them yourself, do not assume they’re mistaken. That path easily leads to the comforting belief in a conspiracy against your genius—and almost certainly to an unhappy life, along with far too many bitter social media posts.

Discovering that you’re not a genius may sting for a moment, but it is a pain with an ending. On the far side of it lies something unexpectedly pleasant: perhaps happiness in a field you are suited for. More likely, you will realize that, like most of the people around you, you are not a genius at all—but you do have talent, perhaps even a great deal of it. And the theatre, for all its talk of brilliance, doesn’t run on genius nearly as much as it runs on talent, persistence, and people willing to keep showing up. In other words, the theatre still needs you.

Fanaticism

Bertrand Russell warned that people who care deeply about their work are always in danger of becoming fanatics. Fanaticism begins, he argued, when we fix our attention on one or two goals we desperately want and quietly forget everything else. In that condition, collateral damage starts to look reasonable. After all, the mission must succeed.

The theatre, like any passionate profession, has its share of such devotion. Artists take their work seriously, sometimes so seriously that they’re willing to sacrifice almost anything to get ahead. Now and then that zeal spills into less admirable territory. Rivalries are stirred, suspicions whispered, and social media is enlisted for the occasional public scolding. A dash of outrage here, a sprinkle of moral indignation there. If immediate success is the only objective, these tactics can appear tragically efficient.

If you keep in mind the larger story of humanity, how slowly we have crawled out of violence, tribalism, and ignorance, you might hesitate before winning a small victory by making the world slightly worse. No opening night, no grant, no glowing review is important enough to push civilization backward by even an inch. And if you lose because you refused to play that game, the loss need not crush you. The moment was small. The work belongs to something larger, the long and rather fragile project of civilization. Seen this way, life becomes less about winning today’s theatrical skirmish and more about joining the longer human story. From that perspective, even failure carries a quiet reward: the satisfaction of knowing you nudged things forward, however slightly, rather than backward.

Fanaticism can also attach itself to career goals. We seize on a single vision, polish it until it gleams, and then refuse to question it. This is the role. This is the path. This is what it must look like when I arrive. Having decided, we proceed to ignore every other door in the building. The difficulty is that success in the theatre is rarely that obedient. It has a habit of arriving sideways. Actors become agents. Directors discover they can write. Playwrights wander into film and television. Careers do not unfold. They detour.

So yes, set a goal. It gives you direction. But hold it lightly. Treat it less like a destination and more like a working hypothesis. In theatre, it pays to cast a wide net. Be open to diversion. The fanatic insists on one outcome and calls everything else failure. The wise artist recognizes there are many ways to become successful, most of them unrecognizable at the beginning. Narrowness feels disciplined, even admirable. But the tighter you cling to a single version of success, the more likely you are to miss the one that is trying to happen.

Narcissism

With the narcissist, nothing can be seen except in relation to the self. The world becomes a mirror, and every reflection must confirm one’s importance. Theatre artists are not exempt from this tendency. In fact, they are especially vulnerable to it. Even the most generous soul in the cast carries an ego sturdy enough to survive bad reviews and unpaid stipends. That ego is not a flaw. It is equipment. Without it, no one would step onstage, offer strangers their inner life, and ask to be believed. But the same ego that makes the work possible can, if fed improperly, distort it. When it is nourished by craft, discipline, and curiosity, it remains a useful engine. When it is fed only by admiration, it begins to swell. At that point, narcissism is no longer a risk but a companion.

Admiration behaves like salt water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become. There is never enough applause to sustain a career. Some nights, there isn’t even enough to carry you through intermission. Theatre is a poor place to search for lasting glory because it is built on disappearance. Even at its peak, it is already fading. The show closes. The set is struck. The cast party thins into tired hugs and lukewarm white wine. By morning, everyone has gone home and you are once again an ordinary citizen, standing in your kitchen, staring into an empty refrigerator, wondering why someone left a script in the crisper.

The problem is not admiration itself. It is the decision to build a life around it. Unhappy people tend to pursue a single form of satisfaction and give it too much authority. Everything else is neglected. When admiration becomes the primary measure of worth, disappointment is not a possibility. It is the outcome. There will always be less of it than you require, and it will always vanish faster than you expect.

The remedy is simple, though not easy. Love the theatre, but do not make it your only desire. Anchor your life in things that endure: the work itself, the relationships that outlast a run, the quiet satisfaction of doing something well. Accept praise when it comes, enjoy it briefly, then set it down. If you organize your emotional life around applause, you will eventually resent its absence. If you organize it around the work, you may find something steadier, a satisfaction that does not depend on being seen at all.

Happiness

Unhappiness grows out of certain patterns of mind: envy, boredom, fear of public opinion, and an unhealthy preoccupation with oneself. The remedy is disarmingly simple: cultivate interests beyond the self, form genuine human connections, engage in useful work, and maintain a sense of proportion. The message is both comforting and demanding. Happiness is not something we stumble upon. It is something we construct, gradually, through attention and discipline. By widening our interests and directing our energy outward rather than inward toward our anxieties, we loosen the grip of the ego and make room for a quieter, more durable contentment.

Bertrand Russell once observed that the life of a scientist contains many of the ingredients of happiness. The scientist exercises their abilities fully and produces results that are assumed to matter, not only to themselves but to the wider world, even when that world has only the faintest idea what those results mean. In this sense, scientists are luckier than artists. Their work arrives pre-approved. Artists, by contrast, must continually make the case that what they are doing is worth anyone’s attention at all.

Russell noted a revealing quirk of the human mind. When people encounter a painting or a poem they do not understand, they are inclined to conclude that it must be bad. But when they fail to grasp the theory of relativity, they respond with admirable humility and assume the deficiency lies in their own education. The consequences are predictable. Einstein is revered, while the artist, no less devoted to their craft, is often left arguing for the basic legitimacy of the endeavor. One is granted authority. The other must negotiate for it. And so, Russell suggests with a touch of dry amusement, Einstein is happy, and artists are not.

But things have changed. Today, modern scientists are not exactly basking in universal admiration. They are misunderstood by politicians, dismissed by climate deniers, and occasionally denounced by those who find facts ideologically inconvenient. In that sense, theatre artists and scientists now share something rather profound: a long, confusing, and occasionally strained relationship with the general public. But we share something better, too.

Both artists and scientists serve a purpose larger than themselves. We are members of the same long human relay team, passing along ideas, insights, and half-finished understandings, each of us trying, with uneven funding to move civilization forward a few inches. Adopt that perspective and something quietly remarkable happens. A deeper kind of happiness begins to settle in. Not the loud, performative kind that requires constant affirmation, but the durable variety that can withstand a failed experiment, an empty house, a bruised ego, or a review that describes your work as “ambitious but uneven.”

Because once you see yourself as part of a longer effort, (like scientists do) the daily fluctuations matter less. You are no longer working only for applause or approval. You are contributing, however modestly, to a larger conversation that began long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave. And there is a certain peace in that. The work becomes less about proving your worth and more about participating in something worth doing. Your work begins to feel less like a desperate solo performance and more like a long conversation with the great minds of every age—most of whom were also confused, underpaid, and worried about opening night.

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Because of the current political climate, this week’s essay turns its attention to censorship.

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There are two principal ways the modern theatre artist encounters censorship. One arrives in a business suit. The other arrives in jackboots. The first is economic. There are no art-burning bonfires, only spreadsheets. The state and the culture follow the money, and everything is translated into profit and loss. In this arrangement, theatre becomes product. The playwright becomes a content provider. The season brochure reads like a theme park pitch. Plays are no longer judged by what they disturb but by what they gross. No one forbids the work. They simply ask whether it will “perform,” meaning financially, and if it doesn’t, there’s no attempt to build and audience, there’s no time for that. The work is censored by cutting funding. Applause becomes analytics. Risk is rebranded as poor strategy. Art survives. It always does. It simply learns to invoice.

The second is totalitarian. Here power does not subsidize culture, it scripts it. Dictators, oligarchs, juntas, and theocrats control content. But the force need not always wear a uniform. It can just as easily be a dominant monoculture that believes art exists only to reaffirm its own assumptions. CUT CUT CUT CUT In such a climate, theatre is judged not by artistic merit but by its usefulness to the prevailing order, and art not by profit but by loyalty. In the first, art is asked what it earns. In the second, it’s asked whom it serves. In both cases, the stage remains lit. The question is who controls the switch.

Economic Censorship

Under economic censorship, arts funding is reduced or withdrawn if the artist cannot demonstrate clear monetary value. Economics prefers returns that are immediate, visible, and easily graphed. The arts tend to yield something less cooperative. Their value ripens slowly, often privately, sometimes decades later, and in forms no forecast can predict.

How do we quantify an afternoon with the Impressionists? Which budget line absorbs that quiet expansion of perception? Did stepping on a stage in an introductory acting class give a STEM major just enough empathy to one day understand a child she has not yet conceived? In which ledger is that dividend entered? Did the janitor watching from the wings during “The Nutcracker” leave with a sharpened sense of beauty, delicacy, perhaps even an understanding of the poetry of snow? If so, under what heading is it filed? Spreadsheets prefer numbers that arrive on time and behave predictably. Art yields consequences that surface slowly and often without receipts.

In this respect, art and religion are remarkably alike. Both promise meaning. Yet no one demands that religion submit a quarterly earnings report. CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT National Endowment for the Humanities CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT We do not ask a church to justify its return on investment. Quite the opposite. We subsidize it through tax exemptions and, increasingly, through direct streams of public money. Why the difference? Because religion has long been woven into the fabric of the state. It blesses inaugurations, opens legislative sessions, and sanctifies the nation. Theatre, by contrast, sanctifies doubt. It traffics in inconvenient questions. It asks whether the story we are telling about ourselves is true.

Economic censorship rarely announces itself. No one burns the syllabus. They simply trim it. Funding disappears in small, almost courteous adjustments. For example, at many universities, budget cuts have reduced the humanities to a single required course sometimes labeled “Appreciation.” Literature Appreciation. Art Appreciation. Theatre Appreciation. Observe. Admire. Then move on to something that promises a healthier tax bracket. Engagement becomes elective. Depth becomes decorative. Imagine applying that logic elsewhere. Gym Appreciation. The treadmill is rolled into a lecture hall. The professor gestures toward it with academic reverence. Students take careful notes. But no one is permitted to exercise.

CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT Absurd, of course. Except in the arts, where participation quietly yields to observation because participation costs money. Studios require space. Rehearsals require time. Creation requires risk. Appreciation requires only fluorescent lighting and a PowerPoint. No decree announces the downgrade. No manifesto declares the arts expendable. The shift happens off stage, in the wings, through budgets, revised requirements, and the slow migration from doing to watching. In such moments, censorship and cost cutting enter into an unholy alliance.

Totalitarianism Censorship

Under totalitarianism, theatre doesn’t wander. It marches. The stage exists to serve the state. Heroic narratives are preferred. The national past is polished to a patriotic sheen. Leaders loom. Enemies are neatly outlined. Sentiment triumphs over ambiguity. Irony is suspect. Allegory is riskier still. If a story can mean more than one thing, it might mean the wrong thing. Totalitarian aesthetics prize clarity and scale. Spectacle. Pageantry. Mass choreography. Bodies move in disciplined unison, as if history itself has been carefully rehearsed. The curtain rises not on possibility, but on certainty. CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT

But totalitarianism does not have to be obviously forceful. It can be subtle. If you write a play that asks questions too difficult, too destabilizing, it’s not banned. It’s overlooked. Quietly. No memo is issued. No decree announced. The season simply fills with safer titles. Because upsetting the state has consequences. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Upsetting the audience leads to backlash. And in an ecosystem dependent on donors, boards, and public approval, survival often masquerades as prudence.

Totalitarians censor through force. CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Orwellian CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Economic systems censor through funding. One padlocks the theatre. The other declines to renew the grant. In the first case, the script is banned. In the second, the script cannot afford rehearsal space. Power silences directly. Money silences indirectly. The result is strikingly similar. One narrative is amplified. The others fade, not because they have been defeated, but because they cannot secure a microphone.

Both Are Effective

Whether censorship arrives in jackboots or spreadsheets, it is equally efficient. Vocabulary narrows. Certain phrases become taboo. Others become mandatory. You absorb the new diction the way you once learned table manners. Carefully. Publicly. Ideas are rarely outlawed outright. That would be crude. They are edited. Softened. Rephrased. Redacted. CUT CUT CUC CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUC CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUC CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Nudged into compliance. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT approved boundaries. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUC CUT CUT CUT CUT Donald Trump CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT

It is not as though we cannot afford freedom of speech. We are a nation that spends more on our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines than the next several countries combined, and maintains more than 700 military bases around the globe. We can project power to the farthest corner of the earth. Surely we can tolerate a play down the street. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Or endow a poet or risk plays that ask difficult questions.

Self-Censorship

The result of both totalitarianism and economic fascism is self-censorship. No decree is required. The memo never arrives. Whether the pressure is political or financial, writers begin to anticipate what will be cut. Directors soften the tone before anyone objects. Actors sand down sharp edges that might attract attention. The edits happen upstream. Over time, the censor relocates. It no longer waits at the door. It takes up residence inside the artist’s head and begins offering helpful suggestions. It speaks in the language of prudence. And that is the most efficient censorship of all. The kind that feels like wisdom.

In Hollywood, the process is refined. Screenwriters rarely pitch stories they know the corporate parent will dislike. You do not submit what cannot be sold. For example, when was the last time a major studio made a film about labor unions? There was On the Waterfront. Norma Rae. Silkwood. Admirable films, all of them. All written more than forty years ago. Older than many of the executives now approving sequels about superheroes protecting multinational real estate. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Wall Street CUT CUT Today, such scripts would not spark outrage. They would spark silence from the union hating massive corporations that feed us our entertainment. In private, screenwriters proudly support their own union. Publicly, that solidarity never migrates into their screenplays. The stories are not rejected. They simply never get written.

Theatre is not immune. Few playwrights would dream of writing a play that openly challenges the prevailing political assumptions of the theatres most likely to produce their work. The boundaries of acceptable opinion are usually understood without needing to be explained. Take, for example, Indigenous land acknowledgments. Where is the comedy that gently skewers them? Speak privately with theatre artists and you will find a surprising number who quietly suspect that such statements can drift into moral pageantry. Publicly, however, the subject remains untouchable. And so, the familiar pattern emerges. Publicly, silence. Privately, candor. Which is another way of describing censorship. It is not always imposed from above, but often practiced in advance, carefully and voluntarily, by the artists themselves.

Self-censorship is remarkably efficient. It requires no police, no protests, no spectacle. Only the quiet arithmetic of what is fundable, programmable, politically correct, corporately correct. The artist performs the edit in advance. Once that calculation hardens into instinct, risk begins to feel irresponsible. The bold choice seems impractical. Prudence masquerades as professionalism. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT When self-censorship becomes second nature, the work remains safe. And safety, in the arts, is often another word for silence.

There are many more examples of such self- censorship. For example, CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUTundermining CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT Stepen ColbertUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT And let us not forget CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Mike Pence and Bad Bunny CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT What we are left with is entertainment.

Entertainment and Censorship

Entertainment has always held more power than art, and art more than philosophy. The masses held Aeschylus in higher esteem than Plato. Sophocles moved more hearts than Aristotle. Shakespeare eclipsed Montaigne and Bruno. Dickens, Poe, and Bernhardt captured more minds than Marx or Nietzsche ever stirred.

Unlike art, entertainment is never in short supply. In the United States, we rival ancient Rome in spectacle. Screens glow in every hand. Algorithms anticipate boredom before we can name it. The Coliseum has been replaced by streaming platforms, but the crowd remains well fed. Entertainment distracts. Art distills. To be an artist is not merely to amuse, but to shape. Not diversion, but design. The artist does not add more noise to the marketplace. The artist selects, emphasizes, arranges. From the swirl of accident and impulse, something coherent begins to form. A pattern. And, more importantly, meaning. CUT CUT CUT CUT NPR CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT PBS CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT

Entertainment thrives on narrative templates that endure precisely because they disturb very little. They are recipes handed down through generations. Familiar ingredients. Predictable flavors. The formulas have been tested, trimmed, focus-grouped, and certified safe by society, religion, government, and whichever sponsors happen to underwrite the spectacle. Nothing too abrasive. Nothing that lingers uncomfortably after the credits roll. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Entertainment reassures. It confirms that our tribe is justified and our worldview intact. It may portray conflict, even suffering, but rarely the kind that compels us to revise who we are.

As Dana Gioia, former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, observed, “Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure – humor, thrills, emotional titillation or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenging us with a vision of who we might become.” Entertainment flatters the present self. Art imagines a different one.

Philosophical Illness

A society that underfunds and censors art while drowning in entertainment risks what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a philosophical illness. It begins by confusing repetition with truth. What is heard often enough starts to sound inevitable. Orthodoxy hardens. Political, ideological, and religious assumptions go unexamined because nothing presses against them. Without friction, belief congeals into certainty. CUT CUT CUT CUTCUT CUT CUT CUT Then comes the quiet paradox. People conclude they have no need for the arts precisely because the arts have been thinned out. When nothing challenges perception, challenge itself begins to seem unnecessary. The absence of disturbance is mistaken for health.

The theatre critic and producer Robert Brustein warned, “The channels that support serious advanced expression are quickly drying up. The big cultural dinosaurs will probably survive, and some theaters and dance companies may hang on if they fill their schedules with the equivalent of crowd-pleasing holiday shows like A Christmas Carol and Nutcracker, but high art in America is dying, and dying along with it are our hopes for a still significant civilization.”

Holiday chestnuts will survive. Spectacle will thrive. The familiar is resilient. But when art is underfunded and carefully trimmed, what disappears is risk. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT This is what’s happened in Hollywood. Martin Scorsese pointed this out when he wrote, “In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.”

Certainly, a parallel can be drawn to theatre: Mrs. Doubtfire - The Musical. Groundhog Day - The Musical, Tootsie - The Musical. If theatre becomes like Hollywood, what will multiply is sameness. And sameness, over time, breeds ignorance. And an ignorant culture rarely experiences its decline as decline. It experiences it as comfort. As familiarity. As everything being exactly as it should be. The lights stay on. The applause continues. The questions grow quieter.

What Tyrants Fear Most

But there is hope, because the United States hums with a low-grade revolution. Not organized. Not televised. Just a steady vibration rising from the shadow class, the overworked, the underinsured, the indebted, the one medical bill away from collapse. CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Occasionally, the pressure breaks the surface and becomes a headline. If all that frustration ever synchronized, it would be called a movement. For now, it is static. Scattered sparks. A protest here. A riot there. Each flares brightly, then fades.

We are a nervous people. Under-rested, economically stretched, medically anxious, perpetually busy. The conditions for change exist. The ignition does not. Unregulated capitalism has one enduring talent. It fragments its opposition. The greatest threat to concentrated power is not dissent, but organized dissent. The word “grassroots” unsettles boardrooms because it implies something dangerously simple. People aligning. Until that alignment occurs, the revolution remains background noise. Hardly audible, but persistent. Waiting. Perhaps waiting for the right work of art to strike the match.

When it comes to censorship, we must CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Trump and ABC CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT Trump and the Kennedy CenterT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT

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More About William Missouri Downs

For most of human history, people believed the universe had a director. Not a metaphorical one, but a literal, intelligence cueing the entrances and exits of existence. Growth, decay, catastrophe, redemption. Nothing happened by accident. Everything was part of a script. The Greeks called it telos, the final cause, the reason the story was moving in the first place. In this cosmology, the universe was not improvising. It was performing. This invisible playwright was assumed to be rational, spiritual, and conveniently omniscient. Nothing occurred in vain. Every storm, every harvest, every heartbreak advanced the plot toward its destined conclusion. The cosmos, in short, had dramaturgy.

And once you believe the universe is written that way, the human project becomes clear. Our task is not to invent meaning but to discover it. Meditation, moral reasoning, philosophical speculation. All attempts to decipher the author’s intent. It was metaphysics before physics. Theology before laboratory notes. The search for truth resembled script analysis. Somewhere behind the curtain, we assumed, the playwright knew exactly where the story was going.

Modern science has complicated this tidy production. The universe now looks less like a carefully plotted drama and more like a rehearsal where the cast has misplaced their script. Yet the theatrical instinct remains. We still suspect there must be meaning behind the chaos, some hidden structure beneath the improvisation. Which may explain why theatre exists at all. When you go to the theatre isn’t it comforting to know that someone in the greenroom knows the ending.

Darwin complicated this tidy production. His theory of natural selection showed that growth and change could unfold without an invisible playwright guiding the plot. Species evolved through the interplay of variation and the blunt editing process of survival, rather than from any fixed design or predetermined purpose. The drama of life, it turns out, might not have a script at all. For a world accustomed to cosmic direction, this was a shocking rewrite. If there is no predetermined ending, then the universe is not a carefully plotted tragedy or comedy. It’s improvisation. Worse, bad improvisation.

Oddly, this discovery made human beings both less important and more responsible. Less important because we are no longer the centerpiece of a divine narrative. More responsible because meaning is no longer handed down from above. We must all be playwrights. This means the burden of authorship shifts. Destiny rests not on divine will but on our own carelessness or responsibility, our stupidity or our intellect. We do not discover purpose waiting for us in the wings. We invent it.

In many ways, this condition can feel like a kind of poverty. We have only ourselves, along with a scattered company of scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and artists, trying to make sense of things as we go. And it can feel like poverty. Even the greatest minds are limited when compared with the idea of an omniscient perspective. A deity, one might imagine, would know the motives and the structure of the whole play. We, by contrast, are eight billion people in search of an author. It is unsettling to imagine the curtain rising on a production consisting of little more than a bare stage, a few props, and the uneasy realization that the actors must help write the play themselves. And they must shape it even as they perform it. Faced with that possibility, we naturally reach for comfort. For movie stars. For royalty. For political leaders. Even for space aliens. Almost any oracle will do, so long as it suggests that someone—anyone—might have a clearer sense of how the story is meant to unfold. So why not A.I.?

A.I. The New Oracle

Now our search for an author has created a new oracle: artificial intelligence. Particularly if it soon becomes superintelligent and self-aware. For the first time in human history, we may be building something that resembles the old theological dream. An intelligence vast enough to process more information than any human mind. A machine capable of answering questions with frightening speed and apparent certainty. An oracle made of code.

If such systems continue to grow more powerful, their conclusions may begin to look suspiciously like fixed truths. Humanity, always fond of a clear script, might once again imagine that a superior intelligence is steering the story toward some final purpose. Not divine providence this time, but algorithmic providence. A day may come when artificial intelligence guides our choices so thoroughly that its outputs feel like revelations. Its models become doctrine. Its predictions become prophecy. The machine begins to resemble what theology once promised: an omniscient presence.

And if that happens, human beings will do what human beings have always done. We will build rituals around it. We will consult it for guidance. We will treat its calculations as wisdom rather than computation. A new metaphysics may grow around the circuitry, less physics than faith. Nietzsche famously declared that God was dead and that we had killed him. The irony is that we may respond by manufacturing a replacement. A god that is faster, smarter, and perhaps closer to omniscience than any deity we previously imagined. Technology, it seems, has accomplished what centuries of theology struggled to secure. It has convinced people they are truly being watched. Omniscience has migrated from heaven to the cloud. And once again, we may avoid the uncomfortable possibility that the universe has no director at all. Only actors. But now actors do not have to write their own plays because AI will do it for them.

AI-Driven Theatre

In this new AI-driven world, actors seem relatively safe—at least until holograms get good enough to take a bow, which may not be far off. ABBA is already doing it. Technical staff may survive a little longer, at least until the robots learn to hang lights and politely ask the assistant stage manager for coffee. Designers, however, are in trouble. Artificial intelligence can already generate production concepts, lighting plots, cue lists, equipment plans, fabric selections, renderings, sketches, color palettes, ground plans, final drawings, 3D models, and construction blueprints in seconds. Directors, naturally, will be delighted. They’ll get exactly what they want, the moment they want it. No delays. No artistic disagreements. No emails from designers that begin, “I’ve been thinking…”

Directors will also be delighted when all scripts are written by AI. They will simply enter a few practical details — the cast available, the budget, perhaps the theme of the season — and press return. Within seconds the machine will produce a perfectly calibrated script: four actors, simple set, one emotional breakthrough in act two, and a perfectly structured running time of ninety minutes. No literary managers. No associates, interns, or volunteer readers heroically working through stacks of submissions. No unsolicited scripts. No rejection letters. No playwriting contests, festivals, or development workshops that produce fifteen readings and no production. And most importantly, no problem playwrights. No playwrights refusing to cut their favorite speech. No stubborn playwrights defending a line that “absolutely must stay.” No playwrights hopelessly in love with their own metaphors. Theatre will finally achieve the dream of a perfectly cooperative author who never suffers from writer’s block, who rewrites cheerfully, charges nothing, and best of all never insists on attending rehearsal. Eventually, directors may find themselves left off the callback list as well.

And why stop there? No screenwriters. No television writers. No novelists or poets. No reporters or copyeditors. And, best of all, none of those tedious complications involving copyright or ownership. Eventually, the entire literary ecosystem is reduced to a single button labeled “Generate.” But who pushes that button?

Uncharted Territory

Audiences, too, will receive precisely what they prefer. But they will also lose something. They will no longer stumble upon a script they didn’t know they needed. The strange play that unsettles them. The voice they never expected to love. In Solitude, Michael Harris warns that algorithmic systems trap us inside “an algorithmically defined notion of our own tastes. Put in a less wonky way: you won’t be exposed to things you don’t know, things you haven’t loved yet. Personal growth becomes stunted, and the idea of what you ‘like’ grotesquely caricatured.”

Picking up an unknown script is like entering uncharted territory. It means being lost for a while and then, if you’re lucky, finding an answer. But if we are never allowed to get lost, what exactly are we discovering? AI promises to remove the wandering. No more stumbling into the unknown. No more accidental detours into ideas you didn’t know you needed. Everything will be recommended, optimized, mapped.

In the modern world, maps are everywhere. Religion maps salvation. Porn maps lovemaking. Television shows like Law and Order maps our sense of law and order. Google maps the fastest way home. Gradually our instincts for wayfinding begin to atrophy. In Solitude, Michael Harris puts it plainly: “We all know that the hero must leave home and trek through uncharted territory to fulfill their potential. Yet the ‘hero’s journey’ that Achilles and Luke Skywalker experience is not an option for most of us.” And perhaps that is the quiet loss. The hero’s journey was never really about the destination. It was about getting lost long enough to become someone else on the way back.

We are already seeing a simpler version of the AI future on websites like the National New Play Exchange (NNPX), which hosts thousands of scripts by playwrights. On the site, directors can quickly search for the exact kind of play they want. Dial up a playwright’s identity, select the theme or subject they need, and two dozen suitable options appear instantly. Efficient. Precise. Curated.

But something quietly disappears in the process. Directors no longer stumble across plays they didn’t know they would love. They rarely encounter work written by someone outside the identity they’re searching for. So, the strange and wonderful collisions vanish. The great Christmas play written by a Jewish playwright. The gay play written by a straight writer. The white family drama written by a Black writer. You might think such plays don’t exist. They do. The system simply doesn’t help you find them.

Eventually a subtler shift occurs. When artists realize no one is searching for those stories, they stop writing them. Not because the ideas disappear, but because the map suggests there is no road there. Soon theatre artists begin to assume that playwrights cannot write beyond their own identity, or that it is somehow improper to try. And once that assumption takes hold, something even more fragile is lost—Writers and theatre artists stop imagining lives beyond their own, and soon imagination and understanding quietly fade away.

Unknown Knowns

During the Iraq War, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously observed that there are known knowns—things we know we know. There are also known unknowns—things we know we do not know. And finally, there are unknown unknowns—things we do not know we do not know. Rumsfeld, however, left out one category that may be just as important: unknown knowns. These are the things we are convinced we understand but, in fact, do not. Assumptions we mistake for knowledge.

This is where AI and algorithms quietly enter the story. AI systems often present us with a curated list of possibilities that feels complete. The recommendations appear exhaustive. The results seem authoritative. But what we think we know, but don’t, is that we have seen all the options. We assume we are choosing freely. In reality, we are choosing from a menu someone—or something—has edited. Gradually we become synchronized with our own preferences. The algorithm feeds us what we already believe, what we already like. And because we see it repeatedly, we begin to assume it must be true.

Imagine if the human genome no longer made errors when it duplicated. If every generation were simply a perfect copy of the last. Evolution would freeze on the spot. Thought works the same way. Without surprise, nothing grows. Without error, nothing new appears. Discovery depends on the wrong turn, the odd idea, the moment that doesn’t quite fit. When we try to eliminate all risk, we don’t become clearer. We become repetitive. Predictable. We start to think like our own algorithm, repeating what we already know, mistaking consistency for truth.

And then something quieter happens. We grow cautious about other points of view. Not because they are wrong, but because they might change us. Even theatre people, who trade in imagination, can begin to avoid that discomfort. But without it, the work stops evolving. And so do we.

Outsourcing

One day—when the human condition is no longer a mystery but a code that has been decoded, when AI has located the seed of sorrow, the neural tangle of depression and joy, the blueprint for greed, love, war, and desire—art will still exist, but it may no longer be needed. There will still be great artists. But they may no longer need to create, because their labor will have been outsourced. AI may decode the human psyche so thoroughly that art’s original task—to help us understand ourselves—is quietly handed over to the machine, the new God. If we no longer need to paint the abyss in order to face it, if we can be told precisely why we suffer, how to heal, what to feel, then what remains for art to do?

When machines learn to simulate beauty faster than we can feel it, and generate catharsis with the click of a button, art risks becoming tranquilized. Like grief managed by pharmaceuticals. Like love reduced to data. What remains then is entertainment: the last anesthetic, the final lullaby, the ultimate distraction. And art becomes decorative. Like a flower in a hospital room. Pleasant, but not required to keep you alive.

These words are depressing, yes, and many theatre people will prefer to ignore them. They will retreat to the comforting idea that theatre is live, and that liveness alone will save it. But that’s a narrow defense. The problem is larger. If theatre hopes to survive the technological tide that is already gathering, its artists cannot simply repeat old assurances. They must face the challenge directly and begin thinking seriously about how theatre adapts, evolves, and defends its place in human life. How can theatre fend off this new God? Not tomorrow. Today.

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FAME

A lawyer, a doctor, a dentist, and a playwright find themselves seated at a singles table during a wedding reception. They don’t know one another, so they begin the polite ritual of professional disclosure. “I’m a lawyer,” the lawyer says, and the others ask questions about cases. “I’m a doctor,” says the doctor. Instantly the table becomes a walk-in clinic—questions about back pain, mysterious rashes, and a cousin’s thyroid. “I’m a dentist,” says the dentist. This produces an animated discussion about flossing habits, crowns, and treatments for gingivitis. Finally, the playwright says, “I’m a writer.” And the first question asked is, “Are you famous?”

No one asks the dentist, “Have I seen any of your crowns?” No one asks the surgeon if they’re a household name in appendectomies. But in the theatre, identity and fame sit far too close together. In our world, the first question is rarely “What do you do?” It’s “Have I heard of you?”—which carries the quiet implication that if the answer is no, the conversation may not be worth continuing. In most professions, competence is enough. In the theatre, competence is only the opening act. We are not simply trying to make a living. We are trying to escape the dreadful suspicion of being ordinary. It isn’t enough to make art. We want significance.

For theatre people, beneath the branding, beneath the hustle, beneath the curated confidence, there is often a quieter anxiety whispering in the wings: What if I’m just one more mammal on a damp rock circling a fairly ordinary star? What if I’m not the protagonist of the story but a supporting extra with no lines and no character arc? So we begin to assemble evidence. Résumés are built. Followers are collected. We compete, network, and position ourselves carefully near whatever passes for power. We pursue reviews, grants, awards, and the small digital metrics that promise to confirm our existence. The hope, rarely spoken aloud, is that somewhere in this accumulation of credentials and applause there will be proof that our presence in the vast machinery of the universe has been noticed. In short, we want to look out into the cosmos and hear it whisper back, “You’re trending.”

The irony is that this hunger is universal. Every lawyer, dentist, and doctor carries, somewhere in the quieter corners of the mind, the suspicion that they too were meant for the spotlight. The difference with theatre people is not the longing. It’s the invoice. Some of us are willing to sacrifice anything for fame—family, friends, lovers, sleep, stability, sanity. The applause, when it comes, lasts about sixty seconds. The anxiety required to earn it has a far longer run. The spotlight is generous with warmth and adoration. It is far less generous with perspective.

Because once you begin to measure your life in applause, everything else starts to feel like silence. A quiet dinner becomes an underperforming evening. A steady relationship feels suspiciously like a lack of reviews. Even happiness begins to seem inadequate if no one is commenting on your Facebook page. Fame, after all, is not a destination. It is a condition—one that requires constant updating.

Are You Becoming Willy Loman?

The ancient Stoic philosophers are excellent contractors for installing perspective. Personal freedom, they argued, does not begin with rearranging the world. It begins with asking, calmly and repeatedly, “Is this my department?” The weather? Not yours. Fame, applause, trending status? You may influence them, but you do not control the verdict. Public opinion? Famously unstable. What remains within your jurisdiction are your judgments, your choices, and your responses. That small interior territory is sovereign ground. Refuse to become a plaything of praise, panic, or public opinion, and you reclaim authority over the only domain that cannot be foreclosed upon: your own mind.

Of course, living this way requires discipline. It means not confusing events with the stories we tell about them. It means releasing a few cherished illusions, loosening your grip on old injuries, and resisting the urge to rehearse your wounds like a well-loved monologue. It also means not unraveling at the first sign of bad luck. And much of fame, if we are honest, is exactly that—luck. The Stoics had a simple approach: prepare well, act well, and accept the results. Let fortune spin her wheel. Then, with a certain quiet composure, decline to lose your mind about it.

Few of us manage this. We are less Stoic than we imagine. We’re tugged by headlines, status, memories, ambitions, and slights. More often than not, we’re in the grip of forces we do not control. And so, in the play that is our life, we sometimes feel less like actors than props. The Stoic challenge is not to leave the theatre. It is to detach just enough to remember that while we do not control the script, the casting, or the reviews, we do control how we deliver our lines.

There’s a great deal we can learn about Stoic detachment from plays, mostly by noticing its conspicuous absence. Stage characters are rarely Stoic. They are yanked around by forces outside their jurisdiction. Drama thrives on attachment. Characters cling to status, love, reputation, revenge, and wounded pride—things they control poorly and examine even less. A fully detached Stoic would be a catastrophe on stage. Insert a thoughtful pause between event and reaction, and half the tragedies would quietly pack up their props and go home. Both drama and comedy depend on that missing pause. They feed on characters who react before they reflect. They may think endlessly, but they rarely think with patient clarity. They attach themselves to causes, wants, and needs without much examination. And so the plot tightens. That’s why we go to the theatre—not to witness serenity, but to watch attachment catch fire.

In real life, however, the absence of that pause is far less entertaining. Unexamined attachment—particularly our attachment to fame—doesn’t produce applause. It produces unhappiness. We become a real-life version of Willy Loman. In Death of a Salesman, Willy is committed to a vision of the American dream. He wants to be well liked, admired, economically successful. He clings to that creed with near-religious fervor. As Terry Eagleton notes, Arthur Miller’s protagonist is committed to a self-definition—and a view of the world—that is, from an objective standpoint, false.

Dramatically, however, the issue is not whether the belief is true. What matters is the intensity of the commitment. The more fiercely you believe you must be famous, the more intense your unhappiness becomes. Eagleton writes, “To live with faith—any old faith, perhaps—is to infuse one’s life with significance.” There is something deliciously unsettling in that phrase. Not true faith. Not noble faith. Any old faith. Attachment itself is the engine. In that sense, faith and fame begin to resemble one another. Willy Loman lives on faith in himself. His tragedy is not emptiness, but overinvestment.

Many theatre people pursue fame the way Willy Loman pursued the American Dream. Both offer the same seductive promise: you matter. We call Willy deluded, yet we celebrate the famous as though visibility were evidence of value—as though being seen were the same as being significant. If your identity is attached to fame, you are not far from Willy Loman. You are chasing something that lives largely outside your jurisdiction. In both cases, your identity is defined by others.

The Stoic takes a different tack. Instead of wrestling the audience into admiration, they cultivate enough distance from society to see clearly. They participate fully, but they don’t mortgage their worth for reviews, rankings, or reputation. They deliver their lines well—and decline to panic over the rest of the script. It is a quieter way to live. Less theatrical. But it comes with far fewer tragedies.

Influencers

We should pause here and look more closely at who controls our identity. For centuries, religion handled the heavy lifting. It told people who they were, what mattered, and how a life should be measured. For all its virtues and vices, it offered a steady narrative. You were not drifting through chaos. You were placed. Named. Counted. Its quieter danger was not tyranny but completeness. It answered the question of the self so thoroughly that the self never had to ask. In some traditions, the script of life arrives prewritten.

Theatre, in its own way, can behave like a religion. It offers fellowship, a shared language, ritual, and a congregation that politely calls itself an audience. There are vestments, sacred texts, and pilgrimage sites. There is even incense, though it smells suspiciously like backstage dust and greasepaint. But tucked inside the calling is a bright, seductive clause: fame equals worth. Applause is evidence of purpose. More than that, proof of existence. And so very few theatre people pause to ask the dangerous question about identity: was this desire chosen, or merely inherited?

Back in ancient Greece, the Sophists were traveling teachers who sold a very useful skill: how to succeed in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, and the fine art of persuasion—how to win a case, sway a crowd, or survive a political skirmish. Truth was not always the point. Effectiveness was. If you could make the stronger argument—or at least the more convincing one—you could rise.

Today, the pulpit has changed hands. With capitalism and consumerism setting the terms, the modern equivalent of the Sophist may be the influencer—less a philosopher than a curator of attention. The message is familiar, even if the medium has improved: meaning through accumulation, identity through branding, redemption through visibility. You are what you own. You are what you display. You are how widely you’re liked. The catechism is subtle but relentless. Confession has been replaced by posting. Followers count their blessings in followers. Damnation is obscurity.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt draws a sharp distinction between the ancient Sophists and their modern descendants. The ancients, she suggests, were content to win arguments, sometimes at the expense of truth. Their damage was intellectual. The modern version is more ambitious. It seeks not just to distort arguments, but to reshape reality itself. The difference is chilling. Twist an argument and you confuse minds. Reshape reality and you redirect lives. In this sense, capitalism and consumerism do more than persuade. They construct atmospheres. They redefine what counts as success, value, even identity. Modern sophistry, like certain rigid ideologies, tells you who you are, who your enemies are, and what the script is. It quiets doubt. And once doubt goes quiet, attachment rushes in. People don’t just believe the story. They fasten themselves to it. The ancient Sophist trained you to win the room. The modern one trains you to win the feed. In both cases, the danger is the same: when persuasion becomes the highest good, identity becomes something less discovered than performed.

Vanity vs. Pride

Which brings us to Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German philosopher and tireless connoisseur of gloom—the old sourpuss—who surveyed the human race and found it less tragic than darkly, persistently comic. Humanity, in his telling, is a grand parade of very serious people, each convinced of personal stardom, marching toward some noble, glowing destination. Except, according to Schopenhauer, there is no glowing destination. No grand spotlight. Just endless wanting, long stretches of discomfort, and a few bright distractions tossed in to keep the parade moving. Life is an opera with no intermission and no final bow. The music swells, the actors emote, the audience waits for resolution—and the show keeps running until one day the stage, and the fame, simply drop away.

Seen through Schopenhauer’s eyes, fame begins to look strangely unimportant. One might even laugh at the common assumption that fame and meaning are somehow connected. They are not. Fame is a form of significance. But significance is not the same thing as meaning. Significance simply means something commands attention. It looms large. It has scale. But scale is not truth, and it certainly is not meaning. A stadium crowd has scale. A trending video has scale. A dictator’s portrait hanging from every building has scale. None of this guarantees wisdom, value, or depth. It merely guarantees visibility.

Schopenhauer drew a sharp distinction between vanity and pride. Pride is the quiet conviction of your own worth in some area. Vanity is the need for others to confirm it—and the uneasy hope that their approval might finally persuade you. Pride comes from within. It is self-assurance. Vanity comes from outside. It is borrowed confidence. That’s why vain people tend to talk more—they’re making their case. Proud people don’t need to. They’ve already decided.

From a philosophical distance, vanity begins to look faintly absurd: humanity rushing about, trying to become enormous in the eyes of others, as if visibility could substitute for substance. Meanwhile, the universe—indifferent as ever—remains unimpressed. It already has plenty of scale. Seen this way, fame becomes what it has always been—a passing condition, not a measure of worth. A bit of reflected light. Pleasant, perhaps, but not essential. The real question is not whether you are seen, but whether what you are doing would still matter if you weren’t.

A true Stoic life is not cynical. It is clarity. It is the ability to participate without becoming attached. Stoic calm is rare not because it is outdated, but because it asks us to loosen our grip on society’s ready-made narratives—the theatre’s included, along with Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The goal is not to reject fame. The goal is to place a deliberate pause between you and it. A breath. A beat. Long enough to see fame for what it is: fleeting, decorative, not an identity, not part of your soul.

The novelist Henry James observed that letting go of illusions is not pessimism. It is a kind of freedom. There is a quiet relief in releasing hopes that were never anchored in anything real. You discover you have not lost anything at all—only the weight of expectation. So, make the work. Pursue excellence with a steady hand. Give your time to what endures. And if fame happens to wander by and tap you on the shoulder, greet it kindly. Enjoy its brief shimmer. Then let it pass. Go back to your people, your table, your life. Return to the deeper, steadier business of living—the kind that does not depend on applause to know it’s worth.

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Theatre people fail in public, and we fail spectacularly. We spend extraordinary amounts of time failing, rehearsing failure, refining failure, and occasionally receiving excellent reviews for it. We spend weeks preparing auditions for roles we will almost certainly not get. We labor for months writing plays that may never be produced. We memorize monologues spoken once in a small room and then forgotten. Scenes are revised at midnight after teaching classes or waiting tables. We print headshots no one keeps and write grant proposals no one funds. We call this persistence. From the outside, it looks suspiciously like madness. Yet we continue. The set is struck, the lights go dark, and then we start all over again.

For a playwright with strong credentials, it may take ten to twenty-five queries before a theatre says yes. For someone just starting out, it may take a hundred or more. That means ninety-nine rejections. Or worse, not rejections at all but silence—where the query drifts off into the broad expanse of time and space like a message in a bottle no one ever opens. Actors face a similar arithmetic. There are no reliable statistics, but dozens of auditions before landing a role is common. A life in the theatre, therefore, involves an astonishing amount of professional waiting. Waiting for the email. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for someone, somewhere, to decide that today is the day your particular set of talents becomes useful.

Most playwrights never know why their script wasn’t chosen. Rejections rarely come with notes. In a strange way, notes would be comforting. If the letter said, “Your second act drags. The scene between Billy and Doris is a parade of exposition. And you never properly set up the ending,” at least you would have something to work with. Hell, even “Your play sucks” has instructional value. It may be crude, but it at least acknowledges your existence. Acting is no kinder. No notes. No explanation. Just “We went in another direction,” which is theatre code for: we have no intention of telling you the direction. Wouldn’t it be glorious to steal the director’s scorecard? To see the secret arithmetic? “Weak presence. Dubious choices. Slightly alarming jawline.” Or the immortal: “Dance ten, looks three.” At least then you could adjust. Or write a hit musical. Or warn your friends to never work with that director.

When you seek comfort after failure, famous people are always ready with advice. Samuel Beckett offers: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” With all due respect, Mr. Beckett—fail better? What the hell does that even mean? Then Confucius enters the conversation: “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Rise? Try rising when you’re surviving on starvation wages with six roommates in a fifth-floor New York walk-up that smells faintly of boiled cabbage and deferred dreams. Rising requires sleep. Sleep requires quiet. And in this capitalist quagmire, quiet requires money.

Honestly, the most practical advice on failure might belong to the comedian Steven Wright: “If at first you don’t succeed, then skydiving definitely isn’t for you.” Theatre is skydiving. You leap out of a perfectly stable life, plummet toward financial uncertainty, and hope something deploys before you hit middle age. Sometimes the chute opens. Sometimes you discover you’ve been jumping with a backpack full of rejection letters that all say, “We went in another direction.”

Before going any further, a few friends who read this section gently suggested that it was “a bit negative” and recommended adding something more “uplifting.” Fair enough. Here goes: Isn’t it comforting to know there’s a special place in hell reserved for actors who casually announce, “I got cast on my very first audition”? There. Positivity achieved.

Instead of reaching for The Power of Positive Thinking, starting a gratitude journal, and marinating ourselves in the warm bath of B.S. motivational slogans—Make happiness a choice. Dream big. Failure is a steppingstone to success. Lose the battle, win the war. Turn that frown upside down—perhaps we should pause and ask a simpler question: Why does rejection hurt so much?

First, we are up against a gigantic economic machine designed to condemn failure. From childhood, we are trained inside a system that rewards success and treats defeat as a character flaw. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills argued, many of our so-called personal troubles are rooted in larger social forces. We are built to compete—for food, status, sex. Capitalism simply straps a jet engine to that instinct. Mills once observed that in America the system is carried so far that a person who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground better than anyone else gains access to the President of the United States. That’s not satire. That’s golf. And football. And Hollywood. And, increasingly, the theatre.

The same logic applies to movie stars. Why should George Clooney meet with President Obama about Sudan and Darfur? Why should Jon Voight advise President Trump on cultural policy? Do they possess secret geopolitical expertise? Or do they possess something far more persuasive in America: victory. They are winners. And in a culture that worships winning, victory is treated as wisdom. Win enough trophies and suddenly you’re not just good at your craft. You are something.

Essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul puts it this way in Voltaire’s Bastards: “Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that to be the best is to be something. The fastest runner. The greatest inventor. The highest high C. The most beers in a half hour. The best chess player. The skater who turns the most times in the air. The highest marks at school. At university. At dart throwing. The term excellence is used as if we were seeking content when above all we seek a measurable result, a classification system or class system, with a king of the best at the top.” But just because the system is set up to reward the best dart thrower doesn’t mean you have to compete.

Sour Grapes

Everyone knows the fable. A hungry fox spots a cluster of ripe grapes hanging just out of reach. He leaps, strains, and fails. After several attempts, he strolls off and mutters, “They were probably sour anyway.” The moral, we’re told, is that it’s easy to despise what you cannot have. But the grapes of success are not sour. They are, in fact, quite good. Luscious, even. They taste exactly as advertised. Which makes the story more troubling than it first appears. The fox is not wrong about the grapes. He is wrong about himself. Rather than admit the distance between desire and ability, he rewrites the value of the thing—not because the grapes are lacking, but because he cannot reach them.

Now consider the unofficial sequel. An hour later, a second fox arrives. More talented, perhaps. Or merely luckier, which is often mistaken for the same thing. He takes a running start, leaps, and this time the grapes come down. Soon he is enjoying the fruits of his labor: success, fame, a sprawling house in Hollywood, and the occasional invitation to advise the President on matters of national importance. Meanwhile, Fox #1 discovers that disappointment has a way of settling in. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates. First as irritation, then as self-doubt, and finally as a quiet, persistent narrative that explains everything and forgives nothing. He becomes self-critical. The dishes begin to stack up. The laundry follows. Messages go unanswered. And somewhere along the way, he settles into a life of small distractions, spending his remaining days drinking beer and streaming Arrested Development.

The problem with this system is not that it makes everyone try hard. It does something far more efficient. It makes people quietly drop out. As John Ralston Saul observed, human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving others the power to eliminate us. In a culture obsessed with ranking, many people preemptively withdraw. Better to step off the field than wait for the scoreboard to light up your inadequacy. A society drunk on competition does not draw out hidden talent. It convinces people their talent is insufficient before it has even been tested. So they hide it. They hedge. They become careful. They choose the safe lane over the open one.

We then lament that we have become a nation of spectators. Of course we have. When winning is everything, most people eventually decide not to play. The math is brutal. Only a few can stand on the podium. The rest sit in the stands pretending they prefer the view. We are all caught in the merciless arithmetic of winning. And for too many of us, that arithmetic does not inspire excellence. It inspires retreat.

Capitalist Competition

When capitalist competition moves from the marketplace into the bloodstream, everything begins to look like a scoreboard. Amateur college football players drive Lamborghinis. College admissions resemble elite auditions. Success is measured in quarterly targets. Actor #1 is cast over Actor #2 not because she has more talent, but because she has more social media followers. When this logic seeps into the theatre, artists are pulled into the same calculation. The rehearsal room, once a laboratory, begins to feel like a marketplace. Process-based thinking gives way to outcome-based thinking, which quickly hardens into success-based thinking. The question is no longer, “Did we discover something true?” but “Did it sell?”

Capitalist competition is extraordinarily good at producing winners. It is far less skilled at producing meaning. And when meaning is replaced by measurement, even the arts start keeping score. The artist, who once measured life by depth of engagement, begins measuring it by placement in the hierarchy. Self-awareness collapses into social comparison. Am I booking more than him? Less than her? Is my name higher on the program? Is my run longer? Is my review stronger? Fate becomes comparative. Worth becomes positional. Identity is calibrated not by the work itself, but by how one ranks against everyone else. Soon, everything bends. Children become a liability. A party becomes a networking opportunity. Friends are chosen for their usefulness. Even intimacy starts to look like strategy.

Theatre people begin to feel themselves moved by forces they cannot quite name. Not critics. Not audiences. Not even talent. But a diffuse uneasiness that is larger and harder to locate. The air itself has become economic. It is shaped by the restless currents of a culture that quietly rewires the artist’s purpose. The transformation is subtle but profound. The artist becomes a strategist. The director becomes a marketer. The playwright becomes a content provider. The actor becomes a personal brand. And fitness, in this climate, no longer means depth or daring. It means visibility. Bankability. The ability to generate buzz not art.

How To Solve the Problem

What if you transcended the competitive side of theatre while still fully participating in it? Imagine you’re an actor. Your life is audition after audition. Failure after failure. Who is calling you a failure? Everyone. The casting notice. The callback list. The silence. That’s the system. It ranks, sorts, eliminates. But what if you removed competition from the equation? You love to act, right? Suppose you stopped treating auditions like sporting events and started treating them like theatre. Not tryouts. Performances. If the goal is only to win, the art itself becomes secondary. But if the goal is to perform, the experience regains its meaning.

So treat each audition as a miniature play. Don’t wake up thinking, “Another damned audition today that will result in nothing.” Wake up thinking, “Another opening.” Rehearse. Warm up. Put on your costume and perform. Ninety-nine audition failures become ninety-nine performances. Ninety-nine times you stood in a room and did the thing you love. That’s not a losing record. That’s a body of work. The system may still keep score. It always will. But you don’t have to live by its arithmetic. You can live by a different metric: Did I act today? A life in the theatre, then, is not a ladder. It’s a practice. And if you keep practicing, you’re not a spectator. The side effect? Your chances of being cast increase.

If you are a designer or a director, make theatre whether someone hires you or not. Design your favorite play on your own terms. Stage the musical you’ve always wanted to see, if only in your living room, your notebook, or the architecture of your imagination. Too many theatre artists spend years waiting for permission—waiting for a grant, a commission, a season slot, a producer, a phone call. They sit at the edge of the industry like guests who have arrived early to a party, convinced that at any moment someone will come over, take their coat, and usher them in. But theatre has never worked that way. It has always belonged to the people already doing it. So stop waiting for validation and start working. The act itself is the credential.

The irony is that once you stop asking for permission, you often start receiving it. Not because the gatekeepers have suddenly become generous, but because you’ve made yourself impossible to ignore. You are no longer waiting to be included. You are already in motion. And theatre respects motion.

If you’re a playwright, you have it easy. You don’t need anyone’s permission to practice the art. You simply wake up, ignore your inbox, and begin disappointing yourself on a blank page. It is a very pure form of freedom. Few professions offer such daily opportunities for quiet, self-administered critique before noon. And if, somewhere around page three, the familiar pang of failure arrives—as it always does—there’s a surprisingly effective remedy: nominate your play for a Pulitzer.

Yes, really. Anyone with a produced play can submit, which means you are, at the very least, “under consideration.” A phrase that has launched entire careers. You can now say, with admirable precision, that your work has been submitted to the Pulitzer committee. But clarity is rarely rewarded in the theatre. Better to streamline. “Pulitzer Prize entrant.” Clean. Respectable. Suggestive without being pinned down. Or, if you feel a sudden, reckless gust of theatrical courage, try on “Pulitzer Prize–nominated playwright.” It has a lovely ring. A certain gravity. The kind of phrase that causes people to nod slightly, as though they’ve misplaced an article about you. Is it technically precise? Not especially. But then, neither is most of what we say about ourselves in this business. Besides, who exactly is out there conducting background checks on playwrights? If they are, one suspects they are also writers—which means they’re far too busy disappointing themselves on page three to bother with you.

For the price of a decent lunch, you can upgrade your biography, give yourself a much-needed laugh, and hand your mother something irresistible to mention to the neighbors, the mail carrier, and possibly strangers in line at the grocery store. It’s all a bit of theatre. But then again, so is everything. And if this small performance gets you back to the desk—pen in hand, ego slightly inflated, hope cautiously restored—it’s money exceptionally well spent.

Seeing and Believing Are Two Steps

In his book Language in Action, S. I. Hayakawa argues that immaturity consists in collapsing seeing and believing into a single motion. We see something and immediately believe it. Maturity, he suggests, is the ability to separate the two. First we see. Then we decide what it means. It sounds simple. It is not.

By that measure, most characters in plays are spectacularly immature. Drama depends on it. Someone overhears half a sentence and assumes betrayal. Someone sees a glance and concludes infidelity. Someone reads a letter and decides their life is over. The engine of theatre runs on this collapse between perception and interpretation. Insert a thoughtful pause—just a breath—between the two, and half the canon quietly evaporates. Maggie the Cat would adopt, Walter Lee would realize that owning a bar is not his ticket to freedom, and Willy would pause long enough to consider what the relentless logic of late capitalism has done to his soul.

But in real life, we don’t have the luxury of being dramatically interesting. Actors, playwrights, designers, and directors cannot afford the one-step mind. We must make seeing and believing a two-step process. And nowhere is this more necessary than in the daily theatre of rejection. We see a sold-out run and believe it’s good. We see a grant rejected and believe we’re failures. We read a glowing review and believe we matter. That is the one-step mind at work, fast, efficient, and almost always wrong.

The mature artist slows it down. What am I actually seeing? A sold-out run may mean the marketing worked. A rejection may mean the panel had different priorities. A glowing review may say more about the reviewer than the work. Between the event and the conclusion lies interpretation, and interpretation is where most of the damage gets done. Insert the second step and something interesting happens. You begin to see the machinery. You begin to notice how capitalist competition quietly rewires your instincts, turning curiosity into comparison, process into product, art into outcome. You start to recognize how easily the love of theatre can be short-circuited by the need to win at it. And once you see that, you have choice.

Set aside, as best you can, the winner-take-all world theatre has become. Treat the audition not as a verdict, but as a performance. Write the script not to secure approval, but to discover something you did not know before you began. Stage the play not to climb a ladder, but to test an idea in the presence of other human beings. Reclaim the small, stubborn joy of doing the work itself. Because the truth is, theatre was never meant to be a ranking system. It was meant to be an encounter. A shared act of attention. A temporary agreement to see the world through someone else’s eyes. And that requires a pause. First you see. Then—if you’re careful, and a little wiser than your characters—you decide what it means.

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NEXT WEEK? HAPPINESS

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Let’s face it—you’re not normal. You’re a theatre person. Which means you’ve signed up, knowingly or not, for a life of rehearsals, rejection, rewrites, and the occasional standing ovation—just enough applause to keep you from making better decisions. This substack is for people like you. Along the way, we’ll tackle a few modest topics: failure, happiness, therapy, fame, artificial intelligence, money, war, censorship—and that small side project known as the meaning of life.

There are plenty of substacks on theatre history, theory, and criticism. Far fewer take on the kind of thinking theatre people actually need to get through a life. This substack is a modest attempt to fill that gap. It isn’t academic. This is street wisdom—tested in rehearsal rooms, sharpened in late-night arguments about motivation, and occasionally stress-tested in an artistic crisis. You won’t find long detours into analytic logic or the numbing thicket of aesthetics. These ideas were worked out in the daily labor of making theatre—and in the slightly larger project of making a life. If nothing else, they’ve survived opening night.

This is not a manual for success. Theatre has never been orderly enough to permit one. Think of it instead as a field guide to a peculiar profession. It won’t keep you from getting lost—that part is inevitable—but it may help you recognize the terrain, sidestep a few familiar traps, and make it through both opening night and the morning after. With your dignity mostly intact.

In the Beginning

The seeds of this substack were planted decades ago, when I was a far-too-young playwright living in a transient hotel at 77th and Broadway—long on character, aggressively short on sanitation. I was broke, hungry for work, and frequently unhappy, which in the theatre counts as a kind of apprenticeship. In my more sober hours, I waited tables and learned to write plays under the guidance of Marshall Mason, Lanford Wilson, and Milan Stitt at Circle Repertory Theatre on Bleecker Street. At the time, I believed theatre was glamorous, enduring, and—most importantly—essential. I was right about one of those.

One day, Lanford Wilson discovered I couldn’t afford a ticket to see his play Fifth of July on Broadway, so he left his personal tickets for me at the New Apollo Theatre box office. I arrived with the particular kind of pride reserved for young writers brushing up against greatness—and quietly hoping a little of it might be contagious.

“I’m here for Lanford Wilson’s tickets,” I said.

The box office manager looked at me blankly. “Who?”

“Lanford Wilson.”

A pause.

“Who’s that?”

“The playwright,” I said. “The one whose name is on the marquee directly above our heads.”

He squinted upward, then back at me. “Let me check on that.”

He disappeared, returned, and said, “What was that name again?”

That was the first moment it occurred to me that a life in the theatre might not be quite as glamorous as advertised.

Decades later, after building a career as a playwright, television writer, and textbook author, I returned to New York and wandered over to West 42nd Street to find the New Apollo Theatre. It was gone. The building, the stage, the dressing rooms, the box office where I had once proudly asked for those tickets—gone. In its place, an empty space. That’s when it hit me: theatre is the most fleeting of the arts. More than any other form, it belongs entirely to the moment in which it occurs. There are remnants—the script, an occasional recording, a handful of memories—but the work itself vanishes the instant the curtain falls.

Theatre people live with a peculiar truth: they devote their lives to creating something meant to disappear. For years, I took comfort in the idea that theatre was, at least, essential. Then AI arrived, and even that certainty began to wobble.

Why Do We Do It?

Acting begins with the desire to understand another human being by briefly becoming them. Directing is a noble attempt to impose order on a disorderly world. Design fills empty space with meaning—or at least the illusion of it. Playwriting, meanwhile, is therapy for the condition known as playwriting, a disorder for which there is no known cure. People who are perfectly satisfied with the world rarely write plays—just as people who are perfectly content rarely fall desperately in love.

The one trait all theatre people share is restlessness. No one spends hundreds of hours in rehearsal inventing lives, arguments, and resolutions unless something feels off—about the world, about life, about themselves. If the world were flawless, there would be no themes. No stories. No arguments. No endings to imagine. If heaven is perfect, we can safely assume there’s no theatre there—no need for conflict, no rewrites, no notes. Theatre exists because something is missing—and someone refuses to let that absence go unnamed.

Across cultures and centuries, theatre has shown a stubborn tendency to head straight for the wound. It begins with the suspicion that something is wrong—and the hopeful, slightly irrational belief that if we gather in a dark room and tell the story well enough, we might understand the damage and, if not repair it, at least give it a name.

Our Unique Challenge

Life in the theatre has never been easy. It has always required a certain comfort with uncertainty, the kind usually associated with people who invest in very small restaurants or fall in love with poets. Lately, though, things have become… more interesting. Technology is busy rewriting the rules of creativity, attention spans are shrinking to the length of a polite nod, and many of the institutions that once supported the arts now have the uneasy posture of a folding chair that may or may not hold. You find yourself wondering not just how to make the work, but whether there will still be a place to put it when you’re done.

Even the stories we tell don’t work the way they used to. Technology has quietly sabotaged a surprising number of them, which feels unfair, as many of these plots were already fragile to begin with. Take Romeo and Juliet. No dating app today would match a Montague with a Capulet. They’d be filtered out before the balcony scene even had a chance to misbehave. Or Othello. Instead of spiraling into jealousy, he could simply use his iPhone to check Desdemona’s location. “Oh,” he’d say, staring at his screen. “She’s not with Cassio, she’s at Pilates.” And Oedipus— with a quick visit to 23andMe might have spared him a great deal of messy self-discovery. With CCTV cameras, the authorities would have arrested him for regicide long before things became… personal. Technology has made many things easier. It has also, somewhat carelessly, removed a remarkable number of dramatic stories, leaving us with fewer misunderstandings and, consequently, fewer reasons to stand on stage and shout about them.

Add artificial intelligence to the mix, and storytelling becomes even trickier. How would Hamlet unfold today? The melancholy prince could save himself considerable time by running the Ghost through spectral analysis. A quick scan of Claudius’s browser history would flag his late-night searches: “fastest way to inherit a kingdom.” Why stage The Mousetrap when an AI-generated reconstruction of the murder would be faster, cheaper, and far less dependent on actors remembering their lines? Hamlet’s famous hesitation might shrink to a few well-phrased prompts. “Show me evidence,” he’d type, and something persuasive would appear. In a world where answers arrive on demand, doubt begins to look less like a philosophical condition and more like a failure to update your software.

All of this is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek. But every good joke is a smuggler. It slips a serious question across the border while everyone is busy laughing at the punchline. If technology—and now artificial intelligence—keeps solving the very mysteries that once powered dramatic stories, why do we still need theatre? It’s not a cheerful question, but it has the unfortunate quality of being honest. Sooner or later, every theatre artist runs into it, usually late at night, often after a rehearsal that went on too long. We are frequently assured—most often by other theatre people—that theatre is essential to life. I would very much like to believe this. It sounds noble. It also looks excellent on a grant application. And yet, the longer I watch the modern, AI-assisted world hum along quite efficiently without us, the harder it becomes to see how this increasingly fragile art form continues to make such a confident claim.

Theatre certainly makes us feel. It can stir wonder, sadness, even awe. That much is undeniable. But then again, so can drugs. Theatre offers moments of transcendence, but so does modern astronomy. At times in history, it has stirred people to action, but so can cable news. So what, exactly, is our art doing now? Is it still changing the world, or merely helping us endure it? If theatre once served as a catalyst for action, has it—through budget cuts, shrinking audiences, and political caution—quietly become a place where outrage is expressed, applauded, and then politely checked at the coatroom on the way out?

There is nothing wrong with comfortable theatre. A well-upholstered evening has its place. You sit, you watch, you feel something manageable, and afterward you go home and sleep exactly as you did the night before. But then there’s the other kind—the inconvenient kind. The kind that makes people laugh, cry, argue, text someone they shouldn’t, and stay up too late explaining themselves. The kind that sends you home slightly rearranged, as if someone has come into your living room and moved the furniture just enough to be unsettling. This is the theatre that gets under your skin. It doesn’t just pass the time; it interrupts it. It reminds you—sometimes rudely—that life is not meant to be watched quietly on a phone while waiting for something else to begin.

Most people accept the world as it is. Theatre people do not. They question it, rearrange it, and occasionally set it on fire, which is not always appreciated but is often necessary. If sanity means quietly accepting things as they are, then a small, productive madness may be the healthier condition. Theatre, after all, has always depended on the kindness of strangers unreasonable enough to believe that a well-told story in a dark room might still change something—or at the very least, make it harder to pretend nothing needs changing at all.

So let’s take a clear look at our art—and consider a few practical, and occasionally impractical, ways of thinking about theatre and the art of living.

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