It wasn’t until now, with the industry in a tizzy about how audiences aren’t coming back and artists constantly voicing their apprehensions about critics, that I began to wonder the validity to all these complaints. Is our frustration directed accurately at the problem? If so, how does it reflect in the numbers? Can these things be quantified? Well, I am uniquely positioned to actually investigate, so I did. I created a data set of 31 shows (by 5 different companies—the most I had access to) from as far back as 2014 to now and compared the numbers against each other using multiple variables.

A few months ago, I applied to a playwright’s residency that asked me this question: “Why do you write plays?” In the past, I would likely have responded with some boilerplate statement about theatre’s immediacy. I may have added something about its ability to respond to changing social/political dynamics. Maybe thrown in a sprinkle of faux-profundity about audience self-reflection. I believed what I said.

As the pandemic continues to mount an ever increasing death toll and ground life around the world to a screeching halt, it is not hyperbolic to say that society has shifted. Many Americans have begun to truly understand (a little too late) the importance of universal healthcare, a strong social safety net, and a living wage. It has reinforced the idea that an economy is not run by CEOs, but by workers. It has brought together scientists from all over the globe, exchanging research and information, to create a vaccine not for personal gain, but solely for the benefit of humankind. If the coronavirus has taught us any lesson, it is that we must act with the collective interest over the individual interest.

A few exciting things!

To ask audiences to “sit with characters whose beliefs they don’t share”—specifically conservative beliefs—is, quite frankly, aggressively conformist and is in lock step with how conservative politics operates nationally. Arbery has stated to the NY Times that he does not want his play “to breed complacency,” that his play was “meant to trouble.” It is in this spirit that I respond to Heroes in relation to our larger political landscape.

I just returned from Bucknell University where I was invited to talk on a panel regarding Theatre Nohgaku’s production of Gettysburg. The company, being a majority white ensemble, doing Japanese Noh theatre in America, prompted the department to have a discussion on appropriation vs. appreciation.