Why I’m Optimistic About the Future of American Theater

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the future of American theater, an industry that by many measures is struggling. Financial pressures, shifting audience habits, and an increasingly fragmented cultural landscape all pose real challenges. And yet, I find myself not discouraged, but deeply optimistic.

On a recent trip to New York with a group of donors, we had the chance to hear from Lincoln Center’s Bart Sherr. He closed his remarks with a simple but resonant idea: theater has never been more important than it is today. That sentiment has stayed with me, not as a platitude, but as a truth that feels increasingly urgent the more I sit with it.

We are moving rapidly into an era defined by automation, artificial intelligence, and digital mediation. As these forces expand, so too does something quieter but no less powerful: a growing hunger for genuine human connection. Theater offers something no algorithm can replicate, the unfiltered presence of human beings sharing space, time, and emotion. It is not just entertainment. It is a lived, communal experience. In a world where so much is simulated or optimized, the raw immediacy of live performance will only become more rare and more essential.

The live human experience will increasingly become a competitive advantage.

At the same time, we are living through an age of hyper-personalized media. We curate our feeds, our news, our perspectives, often unconsciously constructing echo chambers that reinforce what we already believe. Theater resists that isolation. It gathers people from across political, cultural, and ideological divides into a single room and asks them to experience something together. Not separately, not asynchronously, but collectively. In doing so, it creates one of the last remaining spaces where empathy can be built across difference through shared emotional experience. As cultural leaders, we must actively encourage audiences from all backgrounds and ideologies to unite under our roofs to build shared community, vocabulary and storytelling. As the rest of the country, and much of the world, separates into tribes, we have a unique ability to build bridges.

And perhaps most critically, theater asks something of us that many other mediums no longer do. It demands that we think and feel at the same time. In an era increasingly dominated by 15 second TikToks and reductive narratives, our capacity for critical thinking and emotional nuance is under strain. Great theater pushes back against that. It invites us to sit with complexity, to hold multiple truths simultaneously, and to wrestle with questions that do not have easy answers.

I was reminded of this power watching Mexodus and Ragtime in New York, works that confront the contradictions of our national identity with both honesty and hope. They do not simplify. They do not resolve neatly. Instead, they illuminate the tension between who we are and who we aspire to be. That tension, uncomfortable, imperfect, and deeply human, is where growth happens.

Recently, Nadia Fall, the new Artistic Director of the Young Vic, argued that theaters must program their way out of our challenges by creating truly unmissable work. In an intriguing post by writer Sara Farrington for her Substack Theater is Hard, she offers a critique of modern theater in a fictionalized conversation with playwright Edward Albee: many plays have shifted from character-driven storytelling to issue-driven lectures, where “characters” exist mainly to express certainty rather than experience conflict or change. This creates a temporary feeling of clarity or moral sureness for audiences, but it is fleeting and ultimately disconnected from the messy, unresolved reality outside the theater.

Which brings me to something I believe strongly. We need to trust our audiences more.

Theater does not need to shout to be heard. It does not need to reduce itself to a single message or spend two hours reinforcing a predetermined conclusion. In fact, its greatest strength lies in its ambiguity, in its willingness to leave space for interpretation, reflection, and even disagreement. Audiences are not passive recipients. They are active participants in meaning-making. When we resist the urge to spoon-feed, we invite deeper engagement.

This, to me, is the opportunity in front of American theater.

We can be the place where disparate communities gather, not because they agree, but because they are willing to sit together. We can offer experiences that deepen critical thinking rather than bypass it. We can create spaces where people reconnect with one another on a fundamentally human level, in contrast to an increasingly automated world.

The challenges we face are real. But so is the need for what we do. If anything, this moment is not a signal of decline. It is a call to purpose.