In 2019, American Theatre published a special issue on the state of Black theatre artistry in the U.S., for which I wrote an article titled “Black Theatres: Building, Surviving, Thriving.” At the time, I interviewed the leaders of Black theatres in different regions of the country to ask them about some of the most pressing issues for their organizations, as well as what they saw as the future of the art form. We discussed everything from inequities in public and private funding to the expansion of the theatrical aesthetic, as well as their biggest hopes and dreams for community engagement.

Much has changed, and yet too much has remained the same, in the seven years since that article was published. No one could have predicted that a year after our special issue, there would be a devastating pandemic that disproportionately impacted African Americans, and a simultaneous year of Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks by police. These protests led to what some called a racial reckoning, which in the theatre field yielded the We See You White American Theater (WSYWAT) manifesto. That document sent some predominantly white theatres scrambling to avoid cancellation by publishing diversity statements. There was also a renewed commitment by some private and public funders to level the playing field for Black theatres, and in some cases to give African American theatres that had been operating for several decades their first six- and seven-figure gifts.

In addition, there was a shift in the theatrical leadership landscape, as many Black arts administrators who may have been potential successors at long-standing African American theatres instead found themselves in final candidacy rounds and even at the helm of some of the nation’s most well-funded institutions. Legislation such as the CROWN Act, prohibiting hair discrimination in the workplace, has been ratified in 30 states. And, in what has unfortunately been common practice, some predominantly white institutions pulled down major dollars from donors to expand their diverse offerings—money that Black theatres had been applying for and denied for years.

Then came the backlash, which most Black people knew was coming. Fueled by resentment, the diversity, equity, and inclusion bogeyman was erected by reactionaries with the same swiftness that Confederate mythologists invented the trope of the Black brute after the Civil War. The onslaught of Project 2025, the government overhaul enabled by the reelection of President Donald Trump, and the chilling effect of anti-DEI executive orders and attitudes, have helped us reach a reality where more than 600,000 Black women have been laid off in the past few years, and Black unemployment overall is at one of its highest levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. This has had a disproportionate impact on Black theatres, eroding subscribers’ and donors’ disposable income, all while propagating the idea that supporting Black culture is a threat to democracy.

Yet Black theatre still stands, as it did through the Civil Rights Movement, the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, L.A. in 1992, and Ferguson in 2014. What’s more, Black playwriting is as rich as ever: Just look at Mfoniso Udofia’s nine-play Ufot Family Cycle, wrapping up a two-year run in Boston this fall, or the recent recipient of the Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin Rolling World Premiere Award, Eljon Wardally’s Blooming in Dry Season, which received productions at North Carolina Black Rep and New Federal Theatre. The Hansberry Project and True Colors Theatre’s Drinking Gourd will present the world premiere of the new family drama Tank Stranger by James Ijames, Sept. 15-Oct. 4, in Atlanta.

Meanwhile the WE WILL DREAM: New Works Festival, produced by No Dream Deferred in New Orleans; the BIPOC New Play Festival at Perceptions Theatre in Chicago; and the Obsidian New Play Festival in Detroit are all providing launchpads for new work by Black playwrights. (Full disclosure: My own plays have also found loving homes at Black theatres.)

So what exactly is the state of Black theatre? I returned to conversations with theatre leaders I interviewed in 2019, and started new ones with the founders of some new Black theatres, to find answers to this question and to figure out how we can thrive forward.

Authors and Signatories 

Pandemic-era contraction led to an expanded business model for National Black Theatre. In recent years, the Harlem-based company has elevated its brand recognition and attracted funds for its administrative infrastructure and artist development by signing on as a producer to such commercial efforts as James Ijames’s Pulitzer-winning Hamlet riff Fat Ham, which moved from the Public Theater in 2022 to Broadway in 2023, as well as a 2023 Main Stem revival of Purlie Victorious that catapulted Kara Young’s career (including garnering her a Tony), and the stage adaptation of Imitation of Life by Lynn Nottage, with music by John Legend, that will premiere at the Shed in New York City, Nov. 21-Jan. 3. These high-profile efforts have kept the theatre’s name in people’s mouths as it continues to construct its new building in Harlem.

According to executive artistic director Jonathan McCrory, the Broadway shows NBT has signed on to co-produce are in alignment with the founding vision of the company to maintain and develop African American cultural traditions.

“There is a lot of potential benefit, and a lot of distraction, that can come from doing a Broadway show,” McCrory said, who hastened to add that in the seasons the company helped shows to Broadway, they were also producing new work in Off-Broadway spaces, including (pray) by nicHi douglas with Ars Nova, and “investing the same amount of time, capital, and resources” in those efforts.

These commercial and new-work ventures aren’t just about encouraging Black artists, McCrory said, but also about opening the door for a new generation of arts administrators—in part, he said, so he is able to hire more staff. His goal: nothing less than making NBT the Alvin Ailey of Black theatre, a North Star that Black artists can see as a place of arrival.

Still, his vision goes beyond his own company. “If we had a national beacon in every region, it wouldn’t be enough,” McCrory said. “We need to create national and iconic beacons within our communities that help to show the spiritual soul force of what it means to work within a Western context with an Indigenous pathology.”

In Cleveland, Tony F. Sias and the team at Karamu House are growing through change, which includes theatre renovations, reinvigorating their business model with more space rentals, engaging younger audiences through new work, and searching for a new artistic director. Sias, who’d been at the post since 2015, resigned last year and has been on contract since, working alongside interim president and CEO Aseelah Shareef until the board finds a successor. He said that time has allowed him to experiment with the theatre season: Last year they staged Nate Jacobs’s A Motown Christmas to sold-out houses, and they will revive it this winter. For the 2026-27 season, they’ve got Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting, about the integration of baseball, and the biographical drama Paul Robeson.

“The climate of our country right now has heightened the desire to talk about the Black experience and Black history,” Sias said. “We want to continue to be griots for the larger community and have programming and stories that fill the gaps of public education.”

Like Karamu House, the 32-year-old African-American Shakespeare Company (AASC) is in a season of new growth and change. In the years following the pandemic, San Francisco’s ex-mayor London Breed had allocated $120 million to BIPOC nonprofits through the Dream Keeper Initiative, but that funding was rescinded from all grantees in 2025 amid accusations of misappropriation. AASC executive director Sherri Young said this took half a million dollars out of the company’s budget, both from pre-existing city funding and enhanced funds from Dream Keeper, which led to staff layoffs, scrambling for spaces to rent, and depleted reserves. The aftershock also helped her unlock new strategies. 

“We weren’t doing a great job at soliciting individual donors during the pandemic and after, so we’re going back to that,” Young said. “I had a phone conversation with a woman who said to me, ‘I’ve been with you all for a while, but I haven’t been with you since the pandemic. How can I get back in touch with you?’ It’s about human connection, people seeing you and supporting you.”

As the company rebuilds, Nataki Garrett, former producing artistic director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has come aboard as interim artistic director and as an executive coach for Young. And the setbacks certainly haven’t dimmed Young’s ambitions. The company is licensing its popular Cinderella adaptation, reworking Tom Stoppard’s The 15-Minute Hamlet, and creating a spinoff from Oliver Twist featuring a Black Oliver living in a post-apocalyptic environment where kids are required to work. Young says that in the next decade, her goals include purchasing a building, taking the theatre’s shows on tour through the U.S. and internationally, and employing a resident company.

The refusal to take no for an answer has driven Nate Jacobs since he founded Sarasota, Florida’s Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe after he grew tired of being cast as a butler onstage. WCBTT is one of the few Black theatres that owns their building—and in fact just purchased an additional space—which, Jacobs said, has been the key to the company’s growth and stabilization. That, plus a loyal patron base, allowed them to make up a six-figure loss in state and federal funds over the past year.

“If we don’t save our stories, nobody else will, and we can’t do that if we ain’t talking,” Jacobs said. “Our contribution to the arts is strong enough that you walk into the arts council and city council offices and hold them accountable.”

Speaking of saving the stories: Jacobs said the company is now part of the Sylvia Sprinkle Hamlin Rolling World Premiere program, and in 2024 they co-produced Coconut Cake by Melda Beaty. For the 2026-27 season, they’re serving up such crowd pleasers as Sophisticated Ladies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Stevie: A Stevie Wonder Revue.

New Acts 

A spirit of determination and tenacity is also fueling the next generation of Black theatremakers who have started companies in the last decade. Lauren Turner Hines, the founding producing artistic director of No Dream Deferred and founder and executive leader at the Andre Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Social Justice in New Orleans, said she was inspired to start a company to revive the love she felt in Black theatre spaces when she was growing up in North Carolina. No Dream Deferred had an early success when a Mellon Grant funded their month-long WE WILL DREAM Festival in 2023.

What’s most important to her, Hines said, is that the company’s values are reflected in its budget, which includes paying Black artists professional wages, collaborating with the surrounding community, and earmarking funds for the LGBT-focused LOUD: Queer Youth Theatre.

In August, Hines and her co-leaders at the ACAC closed on the 12,357-square-foot building that once housed Southern Rep. The journey to get there was filled with setbacks, including a monthly lease that jumped from $6,000 to $13,500 and the developer’s reluctance to honor the clause in the lease that gave the ACAC a purchase option. Undeterred, Hines and her team got to work raising the $1.9 million required to purchase the building. This is a point of celebration and relief for the company, but Hines also recognizes the loneliness she has felt throughout the process.

“I believe the practices within commercial development are the reason why we are losing access to our cultural sites and the history embedded in them,” Hines said. “It has me thinking about how to avoid this happening again. All of us should start thinking about infrastructure for preservation and infrastructure to fight physical and cultural displacement. How do we, upon acquisition, transfer the building into a fund that has community stakeholders where people in the community get access to shares?”

That big-picture thinking in the midst of isolation carries a different weight for this new crop of theatremakers. Unlike our theatre forebears, the sense that we’re all Black, beautiful, and making art in different parts of the country toward some common overarching goal doesn’t exist in the same way. This chasm is exacerbated by regional differences in audience, aesthetic, and access to resources—and the hamster wheel of trying to preserve all three.

About 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, N. Emil Thomas has been trying to find the secret sauce to keep Marietta’s Theatre in the Square growing since 2016. The DePaul MFA graduate’s company presents Afro-Latino-focused events, as well as theatre classics like Ragtime (onstage Sept. 25-Oct. 11). The building and its presence as a theatre have a rich history in the busy suburb, but the nonprofit model isn’t one Thomas has been able to make work, because “it doesn’t allow the theatre to grow without waiting for the funding to happen,” he said. “I tread the line between being inside of the American theatre institution and being a Black artist and not being fully inside and who that gives you access to. It’s been hard to find a mentor who isn’t trying to change the model into something that doesn’t work.”

For now, the company is mostly able to pay its bills from ticket sales and space rentals, while its education and community engagement programs live under a separate nonprofit umbrella. 

In addition to the inherent challenges of the nonprofit model, the fallout from the loss of funding, both federal and private, cannot be overstated for the theatre industry writ large. But the impact on Black theatre has been especially bleak. Faced with anti-Black-history and anti-DEI policies running rampant, Miami’s M Ensemble ran an emergency fundraising campaign last year to keep its doors open. As African-American Shakespeare’s Young put it, “It’s like the Titanic: You thought hitting the iceberg was the issue, but it’s the survival once you get into the water.”

In Indianapolis, LaKesha Lorene co-founded Naptown African American Theatre Collective as the city’s first Black Equity house in 2022—and announced its dissolution in June of this year. Initially, Lorene simply wanted to create opportunities in her hometown for Black artists to work and be paid on a professional level. With seed money from the Indianapolis Arts Council and a private grant, the company created a series of workshops and classes open to anyone in the community who was interested in working in theatre. The company produced mostly regional premieres, including August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67, and Loy A. Webb’s Judy’s Life’s Work. Lorene said that her goal all along was to purchase a $10 million facility for the organization.

“We weren’t ever going to be the answer, but we wanted to start the movement toward getting Black artists more opportunities in the region,” Lorene said. Then skyrocketing production costs, a skeletal administrative staff, and the loss of foundation support led the board and leadership to wind down the organization. Lorene knows that what she experienced with Naptown is not an isolated experience. She cited the discrepancies in how much money her organization was entrusted to steward compared to its white counterparts, as well as the overall challenge of getting legislators in a conservative state to see arts and culture as a real occupation.

“Good leadership is knowing when to pause and when to stop,” Lorene said. “Michael Jordan should’ve retired a lot earlier; he sullied some of his legacy with the Wizards. That’s what can happen when you try to hold onto something that is dying. I want Naptown to live on as the best version of itself and be an inspiration to others.”

The Amendments

There are lessons from the last decade that can propel Black theatre, and the American theatre more broadly, into the next decade. It turns out that the disruption of commerce, and the accompanying sense of urgency to elevate Black art, was an effective short-term strategy. But it didn’t solve the problem of Black dependency on white generosity. It also didn’t push the Black elite—who were conspicuously not called out in that infamous WSYWAT manifesto—to add Black theatre to their to-give lists and/or to double down on existing commitments. 

A thriving Black theatre requires that culturally specific theatres writ large not be ghettoized for their cultural differences. It also requires that the funding class not engage in theatrical gentrification disguised as integration. When Black theatres whose leaders saw renewed or sudden interest in 2020 can’t even get an email response in 2026, the mark has been missed. African American theatre is its own unique art form to be celebrated, uplifted, and treated with the same seriousness as the founders of the regional theatre movement intended for every part of this art form. In short: Black art has never been more vibrant, aesthetically expansive, or interesting. So whither Black theatre institutions?

“What I hope happens is that a new crop of dynamic visionaries and leaders restore the ecosystem that has been eroded, and that there is a financial investment in that ecosystem,” McCrory said. “I hope it’s not just spoken about in history books.”

Said Jacobs, “I believe Black theatre is definitely predestined to be a valid art form in this world; I see it as having a future.” The “organic history” of theatre, he added, has proven that “people need live performing arts as much as they need food.”

“This isn’t even the worst time in history,” Hines said. “We have everything we need to thrive already. We have nothing else to do but go.”

Kelundra Smith (she/her) is the publisher of this magazine and an award-winning playwright. Kelundra.com