Institutional Repair: The Long Path Ahead

Devastating political news came as we finished this issue on institutional values, as the us election in November 2024 brought sweeping, unchecked powers to a right wing inflected by xenophobic extremism.Among the promises made by the campaigns' victors: prosecution of political enemies; use of military force against protesters; deportation of vulnerable immigrants; and politicization, hobbling, and outright elimination of federal agencies.The unambiguous election outcome is bad news for artistic organizations as well as gut-wrenching to all who abhor this vision and wonder how a voting majority could ever have come to embrace it.One explanation might lie in the profound distrust that most Americans -like voters all over the world since the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic -now have for institutions and the elites who run them.In an era of economic inequality, sharp rises in the cost of living, and seemingly endless wars for distant causes, the lack of confidence comes from more than one ideology.The left contests legacies of colonialism and points to institutions as instruments of inequality and oppression.On the right, a different form of frustration with the status quo has given rise to fervent antisystem populism, marked by contempt for the political and cultural establishment.In the cultural sphere, theaters now sit uncomfortably between these campsthey are semipublic nonprofits in the United States and often subsidized entities abroad.To move forward, us institutions, like their global counterparts, will need to defend their missions and accomplishments while also reinventing themselves as accountable to their publics and essential for their communities.While the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion has altered the American theater in recent years, circumstances and strategies of theaters outside the United States are rarely considered.North Americans might start by looking at those theaters.