When I started to write about the future of theatre, here’s how I began:
We’re in trouble.
We’re in trouble because we are disconnected from larger shifts across other sectors and fields. We’re in trouble because we work to tell new stories of diverse experiences and bold ideas, but largely build relationships and networks in the same way we have for decades. We’re in trouble because our imaginations may come up with grand visions, but our vision of our own role in the community lacks imagination.
Then I realized: I was trying to talk to a “field.” A field which, in my mind, is made up of institutions. I was talking to this constellation of entities by which plays are most frequently produced in the American nonprofit theatre industry. I’ve been on the inside and outside of this constellation—as an artist, a sometimes leader, an opinionated voice from the margins—for over 30 years.
But that field is just one system in which theatre occurs. The American theatre isn’t just institutions: It is also individual artists and small collectives, experimental ensembles, high school theatre programs, training programs, community theatres, and really anyone who cares about being imaginatively, collaboratively live in space with others.
Theatre artist and community organizer Annalisa Dias has taught me that endings are beginnings, and trouble is opportunity. Which means that opportunities abound.
We’re in trouble because our imaginations may come up with grand visions, but our vision of our own role in the community lacks imagination.
So, what if we pay closer attention? What if we find new collaborators who don’t know what we have to offer but are willing to be curious together? What if we stage our role in civic life with the audacity and aspiration we bring to our most excellent art?
The opportunities of this moment compel us as artists and organizations to translate what we know about the power of art into a clear story of community benefit. Whose lives, what values, and what commitments do we center in the choices we make budgetarily, programmatically, creatively? What benefit do we bring to our community? Who and what do we serve?
Our futures as theatres and theatre artists depend on how we wrestle with these questions. There is a growing national conversation about health, at the individual and community level, that offers us a powerful and timely opportunity to explore them.
Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, the current chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), is spearheading, per President Biden’s executive order, an unprecedented movement across the federal government to integrate the arts across all federal agencies and to support allowable expenditures for arts-based strategies in all infrastructure and other funding priorities at the federal, state, and local levels. This means cross-sector collaboration is being incentivized and community organizations, like theatres, can partner with local and state government agencies to tackle community needs in areas such as public engagement, housing, and health equity at a scale and frequency not seen since the Great Depression.
In late January in Washington, D.C., at a national summit on arts and health hosted by the White House and the NEA, leaders from across those fields listened as Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told Jackson that a loneliness epidemic is at the core of our nation’s mental health crisis, and that he saw the arts as an urgently needed remedy, a path to individual healing and social cohesion. Examples were shared; testimony was given.
In fact, there is a global movement called social prescribing taking root across the U.S., thanks to the work of researchers like Dr. Jill Sonke, community health leaders like Paloma Hernandez, arts practitioners like Anne Basting, PhD, university leaders like Deb Cullinan, and government agency leaders like Michael Bobbitt. This movement is likely to alter how the arts are funded in significant ways. Social prescribing, a system whereby patients are referred to local social, food, housing, nature and recreation, and arts and culture resources, means that care providers can broaden what they prescribe to include arts and cultural resources. Pilot programs in the U.S. are demonstrating that healthcare and insurance dollars can be used to pay for these services.
In other words, arts and cultural providers are paid, like health service providers, for filling those prescriptions. This can include classes, workshops, event attendance, co-creation, and/or participation. The goals of this movement are arts access and equitable health outcomes for all. In service of these goals, advocates are working for these prescriptions to be reimbursable by Medicaid and by private insurance companies. If this happens—if Medicaid rules shift and enough evidence persuades insurance companies that it’s in their financial interest to provide these benefits for their customers—the resources that would become available for arts experiences in the U.S., and for the artists and institutions that provide them, would be transformative.
Maybe your theatre’s engagement or connectivity area (which perhaps used to be your education area) will transition into a department of community well-being.
This is just one source of inspiration I see. The Arts for Everybody campaign from One Nation One Project, which will demonstrate arts and health collaborations at 18 sites across the U.S. this summer. Others include Enough: Plays to End Gun Violence, and Sean Daniels’s work with the Recovery Project, both of them tackling public health crises. I also look at the University of Florida Center for Arts and Medicine’s research and advocacy work. I look to funding for new arts and culture cross-sector partnerships between the NEA and the Environmental Protection Agency, and new tools from the National League of Cities to help municipalities access unlikely funding sources.
How will this play out? If you work at a theatre, in the near future that theatre might have a department of arts and health, funded to place theatre artists inside health spaces across your community—some in clearly health-related contexts (hospitals, medical clinics, rehab centers), some in spaces that feel community health-adjacent (senior centers, shelters for the unhoused, veteran’s services). Maybe your theatre’s engagement or connectivity area (which perhaps used to be your education area) will transition into a department of community well-being.
If you’re an individual artist, this might become part of your work. If you train theatre artists, you might start preparing your students for this work. If you love theatre, you could advocate in your community for this work.
In addition to what happens on our stages, this is an opportunity that reaches beyond our stages, beyond our buildings and our seasons, beyond our school tours and classroom residencies—indeed, beyond the “field.” If we join this arts and health conversation, if we engage with this cross-sector movement, if we work to build and share narratives of local collaboration, of innovation and impact, we can surprise ourselves. Isn’t that when we make our best work: when we get in rooms with new colleagues and allow for discovery?
That’s a prescription for a future I’d like to see.
Michael Rohd is a theatremaker, process designer, and facilitator who collaborates around the U.S., leads Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana, and is civic collaborations director for One Nation One Project. www.michaelrohd.com.
