What Is to Be Done?

This essay offers a view of the American theater, especially the American nonprofit theater, in historical perspective, real and imagined. The essay understands the current state of the American theater as a phase in a 2,500-year history of the Western theater, and sees its present form as a high-priced commodity to be anomalous and contradictory to the goals inherent within the art form. The essay imagines afuture world where the current organization of our theater seems strange and inexplicable, and tries to elucidate, for the sake of that imagined audience, how we’ve ended up here.