Theatre and Democracy: Pt 2
Last week, I wrote about theatre and democracy, and the way the decline of one reflected the decline of the other. Today, I'm going to continue on that subject. In particular, I want to drill down on some of the economic struggles that theaters face, the overproduction of theatrical elites, and the decline of theatre as a symptom of declining social capital.
Act III: Trouble Brewing
The field of theatre and its symbiotic educational establishment are both in trouble. Despite the extensive training, vanishingly few MFA graduates are able to make a living working in their chosen field full time. The largest theatres (such as Arena Stage) pay their unionized actors between $800 and $2000 per week, with housing provided for out-of-town actors. That may seem like a good deal, but your contract only runs until the final performance. If your show has a 3-week rehearsal period and a 5-week run, you need to find a new job after it closes. These union jobs are also vanishingly rare. Most nonprofit theatres pay artists a flat fee of just a few hundred dollars, and even then, you’re often still competing with hundreds of others for the role. This intense competition isn’t just true for actors. Directors, lighting designers, stage managers, writers–everybody is chasing a limited number of opportunities, with MFA programs churning out more graduates every year.
If theatre were a growth industry, this would not be an issue. Unfortunately the overproduction of “theatrical elites” has coincided with an audience that has been brutally reduced post-pandemic. The Theatre Communications group is the premier service organization for nonprofit theatres. Every year they publish “Theatre Facts,” a report of the fiscal state of professional nonprofit theatre. When comparing the data from 2023 (the most recent year for which data is available) to 2018, we see more companies performing more productions, but for fewer people. The total estimated number of nonprofit theatre companies rose by over 20%--from 1,855 to 2,258. However, the total number of productions fell, from 21,000 to 15,400. The total estimated attendance plummeted by over 40%, from 39,000,000 to 27,800,000, and subscriber numbers dropped from 1,000,000 to 675,000. Take into account US population growth during the same period, and you have a portrait of a field contracting.
MFA programs are undergoing a similar contraction. In just the last few years, dozens of programs have paused admissions or closed entirely, including the programs at Brown (paused), UCLA (paused), UC Davis (closed), the Ohio State University (closed), Rutgers (closed), Northwestern University (paused), the University of Southern California (closed), and the University of Virginia (closed). Even the program that I graduated from–Ohio University’s MFA in Playwrighting–stopped accepting new students after the pandemic, and graduated its last class in 2023.
MFA programs are intertwined with regional theaters, training apprentices with the promise of becoming future professionals. The closure of these programs diminishes the field’s capacity to reproduce itself, as well as the public’s opportunity to see theatre. And yet, as we have already seen, fewer audience members are coming to the theatre in the first place. One could argue that the retreat of professional theatre education is a clear-eyed response to market choice. A university running a program where graduates matriculate into a field that is poorly-paid and overcompetitive is being irresponsible.
The counterargument is that universities don’t merely prepare candidates for the job market. Universities preserve and transmit knowledge, the fine arts included. Nobody is making anybody go to graduate school, especially for something as famously fickle as stagework, and nobody goes to theatre school to get rich. Theatre MFA programs exist to train artists, and the transmission of an art form shouldn’t hinge on the whims of the market. These programs serve a different purpose.
Furthermore, while MFA programs are ostensibly pre-professional, in reality they act as subsidized professional theatres, coexisting with, competing among, or in some places acting as large regional theatres in broad swathes of the United States. As the name suggests, MFA programs are for people who want to master an art form. Audience members are seeing the work of professionals. In some cities, especially in the midwest and mountain west, university theatre programs put on the most elaborate and well-funded productions in the area.
The loss of these theatre programs represents a decline that isn’t accounted for in the TCG numbers, and yet these de-facto professional theatres are being subsidized by their own students’ sweat equity and, quite often, tuition dollars. MFA programs face the similar pressures as professional theatres but their responses are shaped by both economic and institutional choices. In any case, it’s not just audience members, but institutions–like my own alma mater–that are withdrawing their support from American theatre.
ACT IV: Social Capital
I have mixed feelings about the closure of my own program. The program itself was often quite grueling, though the high standards and demands for continuous output taught me to be a better writer. I was lucky to have a partner that lived in another city, and I spent every break and many weekends with her, away from campus and the burden of my commitments. I was collegial, but not close, with the other MFA students. When the program closed I was not part of any group chat that lit up with fond remembrances and cries of disbelief. Instead, I emailed my favorite professor to commiserate and share my hopes that he would have better teaching assistants now that he no longer had to hire playwrights like me.
As much as I hate to see this erosion, the facts are irrefutable: the market is brutal, and there are fewer butts in seats. But for now, let’s get back to the questions at hand: why is American theatre in trouble? Does this trouble really reflect the weakening of our democracy?
A major reason for the attendance decline is, of course, that there is more competition for our attention today than there was 60, or even 20, years ago. Why would I pay $100 to see a play I’ve never heard of when I can watch Severance from the comfort of my couch, or TikTok from the comfort of my bed? This tracks with Robert Putnam’s thesis of the decline of voluntary associations: technology is disrupting our opportunities to form social capital. Going to the theatre is a chance to voluntarily associate with others, and it’s not just theatre that has been on the decline. Movie theatre attendance has also declined post pandemic, as well as membership in sports leagues, and on and on. Audiences have left the theatron in favor of their devices.
Theatre, however, has a connection to democracy that movie theatres and sports leagues do not, being the civic art form of the ancient world’s most famous democracy. Nonprofit theater in the United States is conceived of as being in the public interest. It provides an infrastructure for our society to engage with the stories that define us, live and in real time. Yet this civic space is being eaten by alienating digital media created for the purpose of private capital accumulation, which is controlled ever more tightly by a band of contemporary robber-barons.
Furthermore, theatre is increasingly distressed by the same economic forces straining (or strangling) American democracy. Nonprofit theatres are scrambling in response to the withdrawal of National Endowment for the Arts funding. A recent overview of Broadway musicals found that, of the 18 that had been brought to the stage last season, none had turned a profit. Both for-profit and nonprofit theatres are suffering from the effects of inflation as labor and materials costs rise. Unfortunately for the performing arts, inflation cuts both ways. As things become more expensive, audience members cut back on entertainment like theatre tickets. Higher costs mean that theatres tend to turn to smaller, less risky works, incurring a so-called “artistic deficit” to make up for their fiscal deficit. Government austerity and a struggling economy leave us poorer both materially and culturally.
So, the American stage, an important site of civic dialogue, is struggling due to digital media, high inflation, and federal austerity. In these ways, the retreat of theatre is emblematic of the breakdown of American democratic society overall, what the V-DEM Institute called “the fastest evolving episode of autocratization the USA has been through in modern history” in their 2025 Democracy report. A thriving cultural sector is a sign of a thriving democracy, and an endangered cultural sector is a sign of an endangered democracy. As the report notes, one favored tactic of autocrats is to attack academic and cultural expression–which, as I’ve pointed out, are weakening in the case of American theatre. While the Trump regime forces comedians off the airwaves and takes over the Kennedy Center, they push against an edifice built on crumbling foundations.
