STRIKE THE GHOST LIGHT
Or, How American Theater Goes Dark.
Dear American Theater,
My prediction: any theater with a woke board, woke artistic staff and woke season planning will shutter in fewer than 5 years. Go woke: go broke.
This will be primarily because the companies will fail to tell stories audiences want to see. Secondarily it will be because they will have become political entities of a Marxist nature, not theater companies, and both liberals and conservatives will find themselves both reviled and condescended to while their pockets are being picked. Thirdly the organizations will be social justice orgs, focused solely on Critical Theory and its subsets (with Critical Race Theory as the star of the show) which encompasses both points one and two: run by a politboro, it will stage agitprop of the sort originally mounted to spread Marxism, which will be stupid storytelling; and which will repulse thinking Americans who cherish what theater is meant to give us and meant to do, and who value the principles of Classic Liberalism.
While corporate sponsors will initially support these companies for cynical reasons — first as a means to "woke-offset" that which they think consumers find offensive (imagined racism and so on) and then for “good guy” profit — eventually the money pit will be too big to fill; the houses too empty to justify; and the theaters' future collapse too predictable to keep them on the company dole.
This is to say nothing of the fact that if Classical Liberal American democracy returns to center stage, it will no longer be fashionable or profitable for corporate America to support Marxists (who loathe capitalists and capitalism, but who happily take the money like the spotty, sullen teenager who grabs his allowance and screams "I hate everything you stand for!!!,” sounding just like Portland's bougie AntiFa mob).
Individual sponsors will fade away as little by little, theatre-goers will become less afraid of being called racist or transphobic or any one of the other bleak monikers used to terrorize and threaten people into silence for saying out loud, "This theater's Critical Theory tactics are racist, exclusionary and intolerant. Also, the seasons have been offensive and dumb." Just like hundreds of subscribers and individual ticket-holders across the US have already done, they will tell their friends as they gather at more fulfilling events, finally confessing their frustration while listening to great live music or watching miraculous dance or attending fabulous film fests. This trend will continue and grow.
Future audience members will fail to appear for all of these reasons, and because wolk volx have neither any interest in theater, nor any money. Aye, there’s a rub: ticket prices will never be low enough to both allow for unemployed rioters to attend, and keep the lights on.
Finally, let's not forget the inner workings of these companies. Critical Theory and its whinging subsets carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. It was ever thus, and ever shall it be with Marxism. The center cannot hold.
So what will happen is in furious board meetings and day-to-day operations the intersectional slices will get thinner and thinner: fairly soon white gay men will be forced to de-center themselves (and that's gonna really piss 'em off); certainly white women (theater’s primary ambassadors, friend- and fundraisers); then able-bodied anybody, along with height-weight proportionate people, melanin-measured hierarchies and so on.
Initially, the few foggy-headed, goodhearted, well-meaning dangly-earringed liberals left on theater boards will nod sympathetically and go along (to get along) while expressing some doubt in their late-night pillow talk with their good wife or husband.
Eventually they will be driven off the board, or quit.
Soon -- within 5 years for each of these theaters -- there will be no money in the till, and none coming in. Houses will be half-full at most, and the companies will try to rely on school performances and summer camps, which eventually parents will reject as bald propaganda and indoctrination.
Ultimately everyone on the artistic and admin staff will hate and fear each other, “incident reporting” on each other, just like they did in Mao's China, in Pol Pot's Cambodia, in Fidel's Cuba. And in Ted Wheeler's Portland.
Public and internal denunciations will occur for sport and status, with concomitant loss of staff, volunteers, and audience members. Fear of being called one thing or another on that day’s verboten list will lead to constant low-lying oppression, the strangulation of imagination, the suffocation of creativity, and the potential for very real exploitation.
In Portland, Portland Center Stage is signaling its woke status with an online denunciation form, in high-tech vintage Communist China-style.
As a consequence of all this, many employees will leave theater permanently, as hundreds nationwide already have.
The companies will teeter very, very close to closing. The various cities, on the hook for their loans to them, will do everything they can to bail out the organizations. Artistic directors and their cronies will be fired or quit, much of the staff and board will follow. There may or may not be a hostile takeover or two along the way as better and better "two legs better" mobs fight for control over the rags and bones.
The center cannot, will not, hold. Never has. Never will.
The history of the Campoamor theater in Havana, Cuba should serve as a dress rehearsal for the future of US theater, as just one example of a formerly great company now fallen to dust under the sledgehammer and pickaxe of Marxism.
https://www.lensculture.com/articles/eduardo-garcia-home-marginal-living-in-the-heart-of-havana
If democracy has fallen, these will become rumbling, crumbling, largely empty buildings used for indoctrination, mothers and children housing sites, and so on. If it hasn't, the theater will rise again, as theater always has; will return to its core values of meaningful storytelling, and little by little we will return to our Regularly Scheduled Programming.
Come see me in 2026. Let's see if I'm right, and if I am, let's rebuild together.
From a prescient article on the fall of Julliard to Critical Race Theory, and thus Marxism:
"(A) theater veteran knows 40 to 50 theater professionals who have left the profession or are about to do so, 'so toxic' has the environment become. Any alternative perspective or criticism becomes: 'You do not respect us.' If a voice coach observes that a student’s voice is not coming from his core, the student will respond: 'That is because I don’t feel comfortable in class with you.'
An arts consultant reports the 'unspoken fear' of theater leaders: they will put on quota-filling plays, and no one will come. 'I have talked to long time audience members who have no interest in seeing much of this new work,' whose main purpose is to indict white America, the consultant says.
The Black Lives Matter movement in the arts is only nominally about 'inclusion.' In fact, it is about exclusion and the power that has motivated every revolutionary mob: the power of negation, the power to tear things down. This purportedly 'inclusive' movement will result in a world of constricted imaginative possibility and stunted human growth.
A leader in the arts world, told of Juilliard’s travails, observes: 'This is a crucial time to stand up and call out what is an overly emotional and irrational attack on the best of what humanity has to offer.'
He would not allow me to reveal his name or affiliation."
It only took 2 years for OSF. Have you got a crystal ball?
I remember going to a play in 2019 at the theater company in the old armory building. An embarrassing overly long "land acknowledgement". I knew then we were in the hands of a cult. I also remember how not one theater company would touch "My name is Rachael Corie" About the Palestinian Solidarity activist murdered in cold blood by an Israeli assassin. Bottom line the theater scene has been in the control of the wrong people for a long time.