I can still recall the first few times my kids started to begin sentences with the phrase, “Remember when…?” It began as early as age 5 or 6. It was bittersweet and bracing to realize that these newish creatures had entered the stream of time alongside the rest of us, with much water ahead but also a wake forming behind.
What kind of world are they, and we, heading into? And can past lessons give us tools to face what’s coming for us? As we survey a national landscape riven with the kind of division and fear that opportunistic authoritarians are all too eager to exploit, we might do well to remember that their terrors and tactics are not new. Neither are the strategies that artists and activists have used for generations to repel the forces of darkness and ignorance—indeed, their fearless imaginations have often created the light that leads us out of cocoons of isolation, not to mention prison cells.
This Fall Season Preview issue of American Theatre is focused on what we can take from the struggles of the past to equip us for the struggles of a present which demands our active vigilance and resistance. Dezi Tibbs’s cover story celebrates the intergenerational path of trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming performers through an industry that has only recently begun to acknowledge the full range of their expression and artistry. Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s extraordinary narrative nonfiction piece imagines its way into three historic examples of artists using their craft to resist and transcend oppression. Ashley Lee’s in-depth account of East West Players’ revival of Yankee Dawg You Die at East West Players can’t help but illuminate how far Asian American representation has—and hasn’t—come since Philip Kan Gotanda first wrote it in 1988. And Nathan Pugh’s first-person account of his resignation from the Kennedy Center sounds a timely alarm about the dangers facing legacy arts institutions in the Trump 2.0 era.
This issue’s Top 10 Most Produced Plays and Top 20 Most Produced Playwrights lists are also a mix of past and present, with several vintage bylines (Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson) alongside names so new we only recently published their work in these pages (Eboni Booth, Jonathan Spector). This coming season’s most-produced title, the musical Come From Away, now stands as a sort of memorial piece, telling the story of nearly 7,000 passengers stranded for months in Newfoundland when their planes were diverted on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. This feel-good musical does not reckon with the long-tail geopolitical impact of the attacks. But in portraying the everyday humanity among a wide variety of folks forced by adversity to form a kind of ad hoc community, Come From Away is a testament not only of its time but for ours, if we can heed it.
One last bit of past-vs.-present comparison I want to highlight. Our annual season listings don’t just paint a vibrant, variegated portrait of theatre happening across the country or supply fodder for our most-produced rankings. They are also a rough gauge of how the industry is faring. Last year, things looked grim: The total total number of productions at TCG member theatres was 1,281—a stark measure of the field’s contraction, as our last pre-pandemic tally, for the 2019-20 season, counted 2,229 productions.
Well, we’re not out of the woods yet, but this season, TCG member theatres have programmed 1,446 productions, by our count. If you add in the 156 shows we counted at non-member theatres (which we do to improve the accuracy of our Top 10 and Top 20 lists), that’s 1,602. Hardly a full recovery, but it’s in the right direction.
And that direction points us, to borrow a lyric from Ragtime, toward the future, from the past.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
