Perhaps you’ve already read the headlines about how members of the cast of Les Misérables, slated to play at the Kennedy Center next month, are opting out of the performance that President Trump plans to attend, which is tied to a fundraising event for the Center, where he has declared himself chairman. The stories thus far suggest that performers have been given the option to take the night off if they wish, while a CNN headline blares that they are boycotting the performance, which would suggest less accommodation and more precipitous action.

Whatever the precise circumstances, this reflects the politicization of art by outside forces – in this case the federal government – since the new administration came in, in line with the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humanities Endowment and public broadcasting now underway. Even where the administration’s wrecking ball has been stayed by judges, such as with the reinstatement of reporters at Voice of America, we learn that the famously non-partisan VOA will now start carrying news reports from the specious OANN. That Les Misérables, a story about fights for justice large and small, is one of Trump’s favorite musicals suggests that he is drawn to the scale and grandeur but completely incapable of appreciating the politics buried within the show itself. The central story is about a good man forced to petty crime to feed his child and an implacable foe whose campaign to punish the man is wholly out of proportion with the infraction.

Buried within the news reports of the latest Kennedy Center contretemps comes the intemperate reaction of Richard Grennell, installed by Trump seemingly as the Vichy leader of the Center. Informed of cast members choosing to absent themselves from the performance when the president attends, Grennell made a statement about wanting to “out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire.” This is, without question, a new blacklist – names that the government doesn’t want hired if they won’t perform for the king, exposed in such a way as to make future employers think twice about engaging them and exposing them for a rabid subset of MAGA supporters to harass and intimidate.

In the current Broadway show Good Night and Good Luck, and in the movie upon which it is closely based, audiences see the story of Edward R. Murrow’s efforts to expose the perfidy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunt against supposed communists in the 1950s. What the film and play don’t really show is the impact of those witch-hunts on the creative community – screenwriters forced to work under assumed names if they could work at all, actors who couldn’t be cast in films, artists turning against one another and outing their friends and colleagues to McCarthy’s minions, led by the rapacious Roy Cohn, later a Trump mentor.

Yet that is what Grennell believes is the proper treatment of actors who won’t assent to amuse the monarch, and he doesn’t even need a Senate hearing room to do it. Today, thanks to social media, all he needs to do is activate the center’s social media, or take to Truth Social, to make life hell for these conscientious objectors. In doing so, he will heighten the tension within the Les Misérables troupe, possibly provoking even more performers to opt out, in an “I am Spartacus” moment of solidarity.

When arms of the government publicly threaten people with exposure – and Trump’s bloodless coup at the Kennedy Center makes all official actions there part of the government – the witch-hunts have begun. From some actors choosing to sit out, we need more people to stand up, because we no longer have a Joseph Welch with the humanity, the dignity and the sanity to say “Have you no sense of decency” or even a government or a country that might be sufficiently chagrined to step back and come to its senses.

There are those who wield the term “theatre kid” as a pejorative. It bespeaks a certain teenaged volume of expression, a distinctive depth of passion shared perhaps a bit too wantonly, a tendency to hug and cry at random moments of joy, a habit of breaking into song or monologue at restaurants after rehearsals, a predilection for listening to the showtune de jour on endless repeat, bookshelves filled not with YA novels but scripts of plays as yet unseen to be read aloud without provocation. And so on.

To this I say, decades past my high school years: ich bin ein theatre kid.

I’m not sure the term was in vogue back in my day, or if it was, it was apparently spoken behind my back. I was certainly aware of being part of the drama club-chorus/choir axis, which also included the high school band/orchestra. We knew we weren’t the jocks and did not wish to be. My high school was large enough that we existed within our own not-small niche, and if some of us were bullied or ridiculed, it tended to have more to do with simply being nerds or geeks than any specific disdain for our theatrical pursuits.

The theatre kid term is on my mind these days for various reasons, in part because instead of being problematic, two authors have recently taken it as their own as book titles, for two very different adventures in theatre. John DeVore’s 2024 book Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off-Broadway is his account of a young man’s adventures in the downtown scene. Jeffrey Seller’s just published Theatre Kid: A Broadway Memoir, is obviously more uptown, coming from the producer of “Rent,” “Avenue Q,” and “Hamilton.” Clearly should I ever write a memoir (unlikely), the most obvious title has been taken, singularly and plurally.

Even more important to my ruminations on the term is the presence of theatre characters on stage in New York right now who are either theatre kids or theatre-kid adjacent. One might assume that this is because the playwrights are themselves theatre kids, but I think there’s something a bit deeper, namely the place that theatre kids occupy both in life and in the imagination, a singular archetype that is representative of many kids who find an affinity for an art, and for others who share their affinity, banding together under the guidance of Thespis and whichever ancient god cared for the stage crew as well.

Hawkins, Indiana, noted for its supernatural ruptures thanks to Stranger Things, finds its resident theatre kid via the character of Joyce Maldonado, embodied on TV screens as an adult in Netflix’s TV series by Winona Ryder. But on Broadway in the show’s stage prequel Stranger Things: The First Shadow, by Kate Trefry, a teenaged Joyce is the manic, shouty director of the Hawkins High drama group. She is no egocentric Rachel Berry clone, since her focus is on producing and directing, not starring; she’s closer to Max Fischer, the ambitious auteur of Rushmore, though even he starred in his copyright-flaunting mini-epics. But one does get the sense that Joyce could grow up – demons and demogorgons notwithstanding – to join New York’s experimental scene, because she eschews Oklahoma! in favor of a surreptitiously staged production of Dark of the Moon, designed to shock the Hawkinsians expecting a bright golden haze on the meadow.

A more complex theatre kid portrayal appears in Adam Gwon’s new musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company. At the center of the show stands Ricky Alleman, a new teacher in a semi-rural Pennsylvania town, closeted when it comes to his workplace in the play’s mid-90s chronology. While we quickly learn that he frequents local theatres and is an acolyte of the ascendant Tony Kushner, Ricky is a once and always theatre kid, but the archetype of the show is Sam Buckman, described in the cast of characters as a “tomboy with theater kid energy. Wry, impulsive, figuring herself out.”

Sam is determined to get out of her small town by winning a college scholarship at the regional Thespian Society monologue competition and, upon discovering Ricky’s affinity for the stage, she dragoons him into being her coach, all the while scheming – like Joyce – to pull a bait and switch. She won’t perform the anticipated Shakespeare, but rather a selection from Kushner’s then still-new, still-startling Angels in America. It seems that among their other traits, theatre kids, at least when dramatically portrayed, are sneaky little devils, challenging authority in pursuit of artistic dreams.

The third character in the current triumvirate is only studying a work of theatre, not preparing to perform in it, though, like a pro she nails a cold read of scenes from The Crucible. Shelby Holcomb is, ultimately, the central character upon whom the plot turns in Kimberly Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, the whiz at textual analysis, the dramaturg-in-the-making who upends classroom discussion of Arthur Miller’s work by looking at it from the perspective of a modern woman, not a 1960s pedagogue or drama critic, informed by her personal experience. Make no mistake: Shelby has drama kid energy, causing one of her contemporaries, after Shelby’s bombshell return to classes after a mysterious “sabbatical” out of town, to exclaim, “She’s a lot,” eliciting the reply, “She kind of always has been.” One senses that if Shelby has it in her power to substitute another text into the curriculum, she would be astute enough to realize that her English class, as constituted on Broadway, might be better served by studying Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or, if things were to get truly metatheatrical, Kimberley Bellflower’s John Proctor is the Villain.

If Joyce takes a backseat to the supernatural shenanigans of Henry Creel and the Upside Down, if Sam’s story is still perhaps secondary to that of Ricky, if Shelby’s audience is limited to that of her classmates and not an audience of parents and students in the auditorium, there is no doubting that theatre kid energy is a driving force within these shows. That these three instances are all female characters should not be construed to suggest that only young women are theatre kids; the same energy can be found in young men of the same age (or in my case, any age), because theatre kids can come in any gender, any setting, any sexuality, any physicality, or any era.

What binds them is their too muchness to some, their boundless enthusiasm for drama and the dramatic that some of us recognize like a secret handshake when we spy it on stage or in a classroom or making too much noise at the next table in a restaurant. At this season of theatrical awards-giving, we may be focused on the theatre kids who professionalized their affinity, but what we should always celebrate are the countless theatre kids who make theatre as well as those who attend it, because without them, there would be no theatre.

[Photos, from left to right: Eliza Pagelle as Sam in “All The World’s a Stage” at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine; Sadie Sink as Shelby in “John Proctor is the Villain” on Broadway, photo by Julieta Cervantes; and Alison Jaye as Joyce in “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Broadway, photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.]

Show of hands – who out there has read about the new play Irishtown at Irish Rep? How about the musical All The World’s a Stage at Keen Company? I ask because I saw both of these shows a couple of weeks ago and having seen little in the way of features or reviews – at the latter, I asked Keen’s artistic director when the show would open only to be told it had, three days earlier – I wondered what was at play.

Playbill and Broadway World’s review round-ups show only three or four reviews for each show, even though they say they are updated as reviews come in. Review aggregator “Did They Like It?” shows nothing on either, though they still feature Off-Broadway reviews for Blue Man Group, which has closed, as well as summaries of English and Prayer for the French Republic in their Off-Broadway runs, even though both later reached Broadway. Show Score, an audience-based aggregator does acknowledge these shows, but with just over 50 opinions formed for All The World and only six for Irishtown.

I raise this because it’s representative of what’s happened to attention for some Off-Broadway shows, those that are neither produced by large organizations like The Public, MTC or Atlantic, or newer trend-setting companies like Bushwick Star or Ars Nova. There’s no meaningful Off-Broadway coverage in the Daily News or the Post unless there’s a big name attached, and the Times’s attention is clearly variable beyond Broadway.

Having long ago decided to forego the critical route, I mention these shows simply because I saw them and I’m glad to have done so. In each case, I was motivated to attend for different reasons: with Irishtown, because it features a friend of four decades in its cast of five and because a comedy seemed like a good idea these days; with All The World, I’d read that it involved a high school drama competition, and school theatre is a particular interest of mine.

It concerns me that these shows are so unremarked upon, because it suggests that there’s less interest by the larger media in drawing a spotlight to work on smaller stages, that what was once a lively feature and critical array of thought and opinion has stratified and left a gaping hole. Admittedly all media (including independent media) struggles with budgets and can only allocate so many resources, but where does that leave new work that not only needs support while on New York stages, but also needs to recognition that may allow it to land on stages around the company. With casts of five for Irishtown and four (plus four musicians) for All The World, these are the types of works that might find favor on regional stages, or at colleges, if only people manage to read about them.

I don’t single out these two works in some stealth way of circumventing my own critical silence, but merely as exemplars, because I managed to see them at a time when so much attention is being directed to the welter of Broadway openings that characterize every April. I am entirely aware that there’s works I’ve missed and perhaps not even heard of, because I have limits on both time and stamina, and because I must make choices about what might land in my own paid writing. With no particular outlet to discuss this topic, I turn to this long Facebook post, even as I think about whether starting to blog again more regularly might be useful in supporting the theatrical ecosystem.

I have no bold conclusion nor specific exhortation, except to say that I’m concerned for the health of the Off-Broadway sector (and some will point out that Keen Company, in a 99-seat house technically adheres to the perhaps outdated definition of Off-Off-Broadway) if no one knows the work is out there – and when produced by fully professional companies, equally deserving of attention and assessment, to take its place in the theatrical conversation. And this post itself is meant as a conversation starter.

UPDATES: Five days after I posted this to Facebook, the NY Times posted a review of All The World’s a Stage, in its penultimate week. The critic described it as “an unassuming, 100-minute marvel.” 16 days after this was posted to Facebook, the NY Times posted a Critic’s Notebook that included Irishtown.

[Left: Elizabeth Stanley, Eliza Pagelle, Matt Rodin and Jon-Michael Reese in “All The World’s a Stage” by Adam Gwon at Keen Company, photo by Richard Termine. Right: Kevin Oliver Lynch, Saiorse Monica Jackson and Kate Burton in “Irishtown” by Nicola Murphy Dubey at Irish Repertory Theatre, photo by Carol Rosegg]