Michael Countryman, Raffi Barsoumian, Daniel Radcliffe and Reg Rogers in Privacy (photo by Joan Marcus)

Last week, The New York Times reported on a dispute between Theatre for a New Audience, one of the city’s major producers of classical theatre, and the acclaimed director Sam Gold. Gold had withdrawn from directing the company’s planned production of Hamlet, which was to star Oscar Isaac, the stage veteran and rising movie star. Gold cited artistic differences with TFANA’s leadership as the cause for the break, and the company’s artistic director was uncharacteristically public with his dismay. According to the article, Gold was shopping the production to other theatres, notably the Public Theater, and it appeared that he would be taking Isaac with him.

With only one side giving their account of the conflict, it’s impossible to parse what happened when, and who said what to whom. My attention, instead, drifted to the last paragraph of the article, which read: “Theatre for a New Audience ended up quickly making arrangements for a Measure for Measure production, directed by Simon Godwin, for next June. Without a star like Isaac, the theatre projected, Measure would make half the money that Hamlet would have.”

While Hamlet tends to be more popular than Measure in general, the implication of the article’s closing sentence, reflecting the sentiments of TFANA, is that the real loss is that of the ‘name’ performer, which will have an impact on the bottom line. That may well be true, though if it’s important to their planning, certainly the company has choice roles in Measure to offer up to other capable stars. I think Jessica Chastain would be a terrific Isabella, for example.

But should Off-Broadway companies be predicating their health on their ability to attract stars? Aren’t stars the essential ingredient of Broadway, with vastly more seats to fill and at a higher price?

That’s not to say that the idea of stars Off-Broadway is a new concept. I think back to the late Jessica Tandy at the Public in the early 1980s in Louise Page’s Salonika as an example of a legendary actor taking a role in a venue much smaller than the Broadway houses to which she was accustomed. But have we reached a point where the major Off-Broadway companies, subsidised theatres all, need names who have established themselves not just in the theatre, but in television or film as well?

Earlier this year at the Public, we saw Claire Danes, John Krasinski and Hank Azaria in Sarah Burgess’ Dry Powder, and right now Daniel Radcliffe is there in James Graham’s Privacy. This fall will see Rachel Weisz in David Hare’s Plenty. New York Theatre Workshop will have Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo in Othello (also directed by Sam Gold). George Takei will be at Classic Stage in John Doyle’s revival of Pacific Overtures. Matthew Broderick was at the Irish Repertory Theatre in Conor McPherson’s Shining City until just a couple of weeks ago. And so on.

None of this is invoked to question the talents of the actors involved, who absolutely should have the opportunity to do work on stages other than Broadway, even after they’ve achieved a level of fame that might well sustain a commercial run on the Great White Way. It’s also a credit to these companies that stars will forego the income and amenities of film, TV and Broadway to consider working there. The phenomenon is not new, though anecdotally it seems more prevalent than ever before.

But with more TV and film stars seemingly taking leading roles Off-Broadway as well as on, especially when it comes to plays, is the opportunity for solid working actors to be discovered in smaller houses being incrementally lost? After all, this year’s Tony winner for best featured actor in a play, Reed Birney, has only been in Broadway shows four times in his career, and there was a gap of more than 30 years between his first and second opportunity. It was Off-Broadway (and Off-Off-Broadway) that sustained him, but if more stars take leading roles, how will fine actors such as Birney manage to maintain their careers?

There’s no question that it is a special thrill to see a star who is also a superb actor in a small venue. But it is also a thrill to see great actors who may not yet have been ‘discovered’ and to watch younger actors hone their craft in major roles, as was the case with Nina Arianda in Venus in Fur. If the need for stars, that some bemoan is now a driving, even essential, force on Broadway, has trickled down to Off-Broadway as well, theatre may be denying itself the opportunity to create its own stars and falling prey to the drive toward ‘celebrity first’ that has permeated our culture. Indeed, this is reinforced by media outlets that only give coverage to theatre when there are big names on the stage; good work is no longer enough to merit mainstream media attention in many cases.

Off-Broadway seemed a place where theatre was holding out against this, but perhaps it has already lost its standing as a place where talent alone rules, with economic pressures increasingly underlying some creative choices. The question is whether it’s too late to do anything about it, or whether anyone actually wants to.

Tommy Bazarian in “Still Life.” (Photo courtesy Yuvika Tolani).

Someone bathing on stage? Commonplace. Two people bathing together on stage? Seen it. Male and female conjoined twins spending almost the complete duration of an hour-long Bulgarian play in bathtub? For that, I needed to go to the Fringe.

Inanimate objects coming to life and talking? Oh, that’s so Toy Story. Two grapes discussing life for 80 minutes? Yup, that’s the Fringe.

I didn’t choose to see these plays. As a Connecticut native, raised on a diet of regional theatre, Broadway and the major Off-Broadway companies, I don’t usually spend a whole lot of time below Union Square. Coming out of college, my drama club friends became doctors and lawyers, so I was never compelled to see productions in fifth-floor downtown Manhattan lofts. Having only moved here a decade ago at age 40 to run the American Theatre Wing, which required me to see every show that opened on Broadway, I’m pretty mainstream by default. But for three days in August, I dove into the New York International Fringe Festival, letting an unknown person fill my days with the kind of theater I would never have selected for myself. What manner of lunatic am I? Let me explain.

As diverse as anyone manages to make their entertainment choices, they are ultimately part of a self-fulfilling plan. Whether it’s a play, a movie, a book or a TV show, our cultural choices are, for the most part, self-curated experiences that align with our existing interests. Only the truly adventurous will opt for an experience about which they know nothing or, even worse, strikes them as unappealing, especially if they have to pay for it. We don’t accidentally find ourselves at Mamma Mia! if we hate musicals, or a football game if we loathe sports.

Even though I see perhaps 125 theatre productions a year, attend about 50 movies in theaters and watch far too much television, I’m still not as omnivorous as the casual (or non-) theatergoer might perceive me to be. It may be hard to perceive limitations in the guy who enjoyed Fast and Furious 6 and is also the aesthete who reveled in the eight-hour marathon “Great Gatsby” adaptation Gatz, but I know my biases and where I prefer not to go. In the cultural arena, even if one is an avid consumer (since my teens) and a professional (since the age of 21) all at once, it’s easy to block out entire swaths of experience, pop and high culture alike. I wanted to get past that, to see if I could still expand my own repertoire.

Presenting some 185 productions in a span of a little more than two weeks, the New York Fringe, with its youthful irreverence, bare bones and anything-goes ethos, struck me as the perfect petri dish in which to conduct an experiment. Like any mad scientist, I made myself the test subject. What would be the effect of an eclectic, perhaps unpolished, theatrical barrage on the psyche of someone with such an establishment history? What would it be like to be subjected to a highly compressed theatergoing binge without any choice in what I would attend? Other than offering up 72 consecutive hours to Narratively and urging my editor (who I know only by Twitter, e-mail and a single phone conversation) to pack the schedule so long as I got time to eat, I committed to three days at the Fringe, taking in whatever I was directed to see, informed of my schedule each morning with minimal time to form advance notions. I know that my four or five shows a day for three days pales compared to die-hards who spend a week in Edinburgh taking in six or seven shows daily, but even this more measured pace struck my friends and my wife as going off the deep end. I had no idea what I’d think when I came out the other side.

And I’m off!

Day 1

My assigned agenda was waiting in my e-mail inbox when I awoke the first morning. It felt a bit like I was Jim Phelps (or Ethan Hunt, for the youngsters) on Mission: Impossible, getting my brief to topple a fictional Latin American dictatorship. Having paid no attention to literature about the Fringe in order to avoid preconceptions, I was a bit disappointed when all of the shows for the day turned out to be in theatres that I knew (although, in the case of The Players Theatre on MacDougal Street, I’d never been inside). Mild adventure at best.

My first show, about a would-be celebrity chef whose absurd concoctions had failed to catch the palate of television executives, began at two p.m. On a Wednesday. Oh, dear god: I’m a matinee lady. Here I thought I was breaking new ground and I start by making myself a cliché. But once I got over my panic, I noticed that the audience was in fact mostly younger than me – this held true at all but two shows. So even though I was a relatively senior patron, I was, comfortingly, at an experience sought out by those ostensibly hipper than myself, albeit theatre geeks like me. I kept waiting for food be thrown into the audience by the increasingly manic chef, wondering whether the front rows might at any moment be showered with diced vegetables, as if at a Gallagher gig. Alas, the premise stayed with self-flagellation for the solo show rather than audience assault.

An hour later, I’m back out into the sunshine. With more than 90 minutes to go until my next show, I check e-mails, tweet, return a couple of calls. But trying to avoid snacking and not being a coffee drinker, I simply have time to kill. My greatest concern in this first break, which is already longer than my time in the theatre so far? Would my phone battery hold out until I get home at midnight. Not unlike the experience of a long wait at an airport, I learn that finding an open power outlet at the Fringe is a beautiful thing.

Next show: a “version” of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints In Three Acts. I’m pretty sure I saw Four Saints once. I lived in Hartford, Connecticut for a decade, where the 1934 premiere of Stein’s piece took place, and is still referenced as a cultural touchstone when the city is accused of being straight-laced. That I can’t clearly remember the production I saw in Hartford suggests this is going to be a slog.

Daniel Bellomy, Jacob Vine, Jordan Phillips, Mitch Marois,Jimmy Nicholas, Joe Ventricelli and Carter Redwood in “Gertrude Stein SAINTS!” (Photo courtesy Jordan Harrison).

Within 15 minutes of lights up, I’m grabbing for my program, because this sure isn’t anything I remember. This cast looks so young. Who on earth are they? Who put this together? After about four bios I discover a common thread: I’m watching a show featuring undergraduates from Carnegie Mellon University. And while the word’s are Gertrude’s, these kids developed the almost completely a capella score themselves, under the direction of a CMU grad student. Loath as I am to play critic (and it’s not the purpose of my Fringe binge), before it’s half over I’m ready to buy the CD (yes, yes, I know—or download it from iTunes).

Dinner. I wolf down a piece of lasagna across the street, then back into the same theatre (La Mama) for the next show, then a quick sprint across the Village for the final show of the evening. Of these, one is amateurish but well-meaning, the other cynical and tasteless. The only noteworthy moment? During one of these shows, I see the first instance (of what would eventually become four) of simulated or mimed masturbation. Yes, it will become a mini-motif over three days. I don’t realize it right away, but collectively, they add up. Does this say something about the state of our culture? Is the motif a metaphor? Is this being taught in drama schools? I shudder at the possibilities. And I won’t even go into the implications of the show in which a character rhetorically asks to be rectally assaulted with an array of increasingly uncomfortable objects.

When I get home I give my wife the briefest of recaps, as she’s already in bed and halfway to sleep. I’m feeling a bit down, wondering whether I was taking the work on its own terms, something I always advocate, or holding it to the standard of my more conventional theatergoing fare. Have my perception and taste calcified with age and experience, or did I just see a few misfires? I haven’t spent much time in 99-seat, 60-seat, 30-seat theatres. I have to make significant perceptual adjustments for the Fringe, not because I had to make allowances for their constraints, but because I haven’t fully learned to appreciate work that may be truly new, extremely youthful, and made with the barest bones.

Day 2

Time looms before me. Despite one good experience, I do not relish two more days if the ratio of “wins” to “losses” holds at the same rate. Just to add to the fun, a small medical procedure I need to have done is unexpectedly moved up from the following week to this morning. And the day’s roster requires me to consult both subway and street maps.

Confession: I’ve never been on the Lower East Side. I’ve made occasional excursions to East 4th Street (for New York Theatre Workshop and La Mama, where I’d been yesterday), to Lafayette Street (The Public) and to The Flea Theatre in TriBeCa. But in each case, I’ve taken the subway, popping up out of the ground like some cultured gopher, harvesting my treats and jumping back into the hole.

So when I emerge on Delancey Street, I am disoriented. I have to use both the map in the subway station and Google maps to determine where I am and where I’m going. I feel like a tourist. Ten years in New York, but this is terra incognita. At one point, on East Houston Street, I happen to look to my right. Huh, there’s one of those bridges to Brooklyn. I don’t even know which one. Idiot.

I’m early, of course, a congenital habit. I have close to two hours before my first show. Then inspiration hits: I’m now near all of those restaurants I read about in New York magazine (to which I’ve subscribed for decades) but never eat at. Bigger inspiration: isn’t the fabled Shopsins around here somewhere? Carefully and repeatedly consulting Yelp and Google, I find it’s inside the very building I’m in front of. After almost being thrown out by the legendary Kenny S. for having the temerity to ask if I can plug in my phone anywhere, I eat, my choice somewhat limited by my commitment to not give in to mac and cheese pancakes, which seem to be part of every third item.

I have time after lunch, so I wander the streets a bit. Here’s chi-chi WD-40, here’s Katz’s Deli, here’s Russ & Daughters. The Zagat Guide sprung to life. I briefly indulge in a fantasy of my grandparents as immigrants to the U.S., living in these tenement buildings almost a century ago, like characters in a Delmore Schwartz novel. Though I have to admit to myself that I know little of their early lives, or when they’d moved up to Connecticut. With my parents gone, I never will know. If I have heritage here, it’s lost to me.

The first show is at a basement theatre called The Celebration of Whimsy. Reinforcing the tenet embodied in the space’s name, it is also known as the C.O.W. I see a show in which two clowns, squatting in an abandoned home, are confronted by weapons-wielding home invader clowns, in a place called The Cow. This hits a particular chord of mirth for me. Is this what it was like to go to Off-Off-Broadway 50 years ago? Was it this wacky?

Another break. I quickly learn that there aren’t spots to just hang around on the Lower East Side during the day, or at least I can’t find any (I would later discover copious places in the evening, but they’re bars and I don’t drink, plus they’re exceptionally loud). Fortunately, as I trek back to East 4th Street, I pass Fringe Central. Power outlets! I tweet my delight, which results in Elena Holy, who runs the Fringe, emerging out of seeming nowhere to greet me with a hug (we first met when I interviewed her for a podcast back in 2004). Recharged electrically and emotionally, I’m off again.

The next play, about a group of aimless teens (one of whom just happens to be a Satanist) has a really terrific first act (I’m reminded of Eric Bogosian’s Suburbia), and it’s a fully shaped play, not an hour-long sketch. Unfortunately it is let down by its perfunctory second act. I recognize the playwright from her Twitter feed and her acting roles sitting in the row behind me; I have this desperate urge to chat with her about her play. But that’s presumptuous. I don’t know her, I’ve never held an artistic position in the theatre, I’m not a critic. So I remain anonymous, but make a note to see her work in the future. Boy, I wish I could talk with someone about the promise and the problems of this show. Frustrating.

The evening takes me to a venue called Teatro LATEA, housed in an enormous former public school building. I would ultimately see three out of my 13 shows here, and I’m surprised that a building with multiple theatre spaces has completely escaped my notice until now. I see a play about corporate/industrial inhumanity, followed – in the same space, an hour later –by a two-person series of blackout sketches on the theme of romance. The latter is charming, and with some polish could make for a popular entertainment with little of the bohemian aura of the Fringe about it; the former left me somewhat mystified. So day two yielded three qualified wins and only one (not such a terrible) loss. Things are looking up.

Day 3

My god, it’s beautiful out again. When I committed to this experiment, I didn’t stop for a second to think about the distances between venues, or that it might a) rain b) be above 90 degrees c) be stiflingly humid or d) all of the above. But I couldn’t ask for nicer August days in the city. I have no doubt that my attitude towards the whole experience would have been vastly different had I been sweaty or soggy or both. Maybe there is a Thespis after all.

Penko Gospodinov and Anastassia Liutova in “The Spider.” (Photo courtesy Miroslav Veselinov).

The day offers a schedule closer to what I’d originally imagined: five shows between lights up at two p.m. and the final blackout at 10:20 p.m. Today is the day I see the bathtub play and the talking grapes. It is also the day I see solo shows so dire that I am embarrassed for both the performers and the audience. One is a stand-up act that seems to have been cobbled together from a marathon of Comedy Central stand-up material, and yields almost no laughter from anyone, least of all me. Maybe I’m being punked, and this is the next Andy Kaufman? Is this a meta-commentary on stand-up comedy? I think not. The other solo pieces, not comedic, resemble nothing so much as spoofs of exercises in a consciousness-raising group from the 1970s, with a great deal of careful miming to accompany not just actions, but words and thoughts. Isn’t it enough to be told that the sun came up without having it demonstrated? If you say you’re reading, must we watch you flip pages? How much must we learn about that clichéd first trip to buy feminine hygiene products? Oy.

Together, these shows prompt me to wonder that if these made it into the Fringe, which was curated, what on earth were the rejected shows like? Am I being cruel? Perhaps, but that’s part of why I avoid being a critic. I hold very strong opinions about what I see and at this stage of my life, I probably dislike more than I like. It’s not an admirable trait. To be fair, many years ago, Ian McKellen told me that you learn more from watching bad theatre than from good theatre. I should have invited him.

Beyond the tub, the grapes and the shows I will not speak of again, the fifth piece is another promising work with a talented, if not completely in-sync cast, that starts as workplace comedy and ends as a dystopian vision from The Twilight Zone. Again, people to watch for all around in the future, especially as I’ve adjusted my internal critic to consider promising as success.

It’s a shame that I finished with one of the downer shows, as my final day doesn’t exactly send me out on a high. That said, I complete my final day with a reasonable amount of energy. I’m sufficiently stimulated by the past three days that I sleep very little that night, and awaken the next morning as if preparing to head out for day four. But in point of fact, come two p.m., when I might have been back in the theatre, I commence a multi-hour nap, and my Saturday is lost in lethargy and recuperation.

Epiphany

Did I think I would learn something new about theatre when I concocted this scheme? Perhaps. Or maybe I just wanted to set some mini-endurance goal for myself, something that would be a good story to tell friends. “Hey, remember that time I saw 13 shows in three days?” But truth be told, just as I went in blind about what I’d see, my thoughts were comparably inchoate about what I’d discover. These three days of solo theatergoing pointed out several things about myself, and about my relationship to theatre.

I had to grapple with the fact that, as the product of elite theatre, I have been molded into an elitist. In addition to the Wing, I’ve worked at, among others, Goodspeed Musicals, Manhattan Theatre Club and The O’Neill Theatre Center, all well established before I ever set foot near them. That, plus growing up in such proximity to New York, and so very close to the Yale Rep and Long Wharf Theatres, meant I was seeing very highly developed work from the start.

The construct of my Fringe experience also brought home an aspect I’ve not previously contemplated about theatergoing, namely that it is a social experience. I’ve certainly spent plenty of time in theatres (legit and movie) by myself, but it’s not my preference. However, having committed to 13 unknown shows, I couldn’t very well find one person who would want to join me, and the lack of advance schedule meant I couldn’t invite different people to different shows.

As a result, I was largely speechless for the better part of three days (uncharacteristic of me, to say the least) because I was alone and I’m not prone to striking up conversations with people in adjacent seats, or standing next to me while waiting in line. I was able to use the social media lifeline, but sparingly and only intermittently. To top it off, as someone who often attends shows late in previews or early in their runs uptown, I’m used to constantly running into people I know at the theatre; that happened at only a single show. I was among strangers virtually the whole time. My binge was a lonely adventure. That’s not in the Fringe brochure, but it was a lonely stint of my own making.

Corollary to the loneliness was the dislocation. I was a stranger in a strange land. Save for the occasional chain restaurant (one can find Subway and Baskin Robbins on the LES, though I spotted no Starbucks), every storefront was new to me, and because I hadn’t mapped out my trip, I was often at a loss regarding where to go in my limited free time. That eased by day three, as I learned that the Lower East Side isn’t some far-off kingdom; it’s merely a few blocks beyond territory that I know, a couple of stops on the F train that I’ve never taken. I will go back, on a camera safari, on a dining trip with my wife. My island has gotten a bit bigger. What the hell took me so long?

And as for letting someone else choose theatre for me? Even after seeing them, I doubt I would have made any effort to see even one of the pieces I went to, had they been described to me.

What was the scorecard? I found: one show which was an utter surprise and brought unstinting joy; a play by a very promising writer who I plan to follow; two potentially strong pieces with general appeal, but in need of greater polish; a surprisingly charming and thoughtful work about inanimate objects; a clever sketch that would have benefited from firmer direction; a funny idea that was buried inside too much exposition; a singularly unique idea that nearly wore out its welcome; a play that was well intentioned but unskilled; a puzzlement; two shows that were embarrassing for both audience and performers; and one piece that was loathsome.

But as I think about it, adding the Fringe programs to my random stacks of theatre programs that haven’t yet been sent to storage, here’s the funny thing: I wouldn’t be surprised, were I to line up any of my regular theatre-going in 13 consecutive production chunks, if I had the same range of reaction. Might the more finished work that is my usual fare yield a better ratio of hits to misses? Perhaps. But bigger theatres and bigger budgets are no guarantees of success, and I say that as someone who saw Suzanne Somers’s brief Broadway turn in The Blonde in the Thunderbird, a solo autobiography show of massive self-absorption that remains the hilarious nadir of my theatergoing life. That might have been better at the Fringe, funnily enough, perhaps performed in a bathtub. As I’ve learned, it’s all a matter of perspective.

To read this article in its originally published form, visit Narratively.

Ever so quietly this week, the national arts scene became a bit more fragmented, a bit more stratified and a lot more invisible. The Associated Press has just spiked a chunk of its opera, dance and off-Broadway coverage. And in this case, no news is bad news.

In an email, AP chief theater writer Mark Kennedy described the decision to me:

“We sent out a survey before the Tonys to the members of our cooperative, asking about their use of our reviews,” he wrote. “While music, books, movies and TV came back positive, the results proved what we have long suspected: Members overwhelmingly are not using our opera, dance or off-Broadway reviews.”

“It’s more than that,” Kennedy continued. “In some cases, they actually resent [that coverage], thinking we can use our resources better. So while we of course will dip into the world of off-Broadway, whether for an occasional review or a story, we have to listen to the people who pay our bills.”

This may seem like an inside-baseball story, of interest only to theatrical publicists and producers. But the ramifications are a little greater.

Coverage in The New York Times has prestige and tradition, and speaks to the arts community; The Wall Street Journal reaches art organizations’ board members and corporate sponsors; USA Today has mass appeal. But the AP almost certainly has the widest reach of all: Its copy is available to hundreds of print and online outlets internationally, including the big three above.

Indeed, as news has increasingly shifted online, AP arts coverage is probably more accessible to more people than it has ever been. It appears directly on countless news websites — including NPR’s — without any human effort, as part of a continuous news feed, where it’s not subject to the day-to-day editorial priorities and space limitations that govern a print paper or radio show. Even when editors “don’t use” this coverage, it appears on their sites; in some cases, an AP item may prompt an outlet to do its own story on the same subject.

In my days as a publicist, pre-Internet, reportage by The Associated Press often resulted in a single story cropping up in the most unexpected places. It would get relayed back to me by other publicists in other cities — or, charmingly, by the parents of co-workers.

Further back, when I was a teen hungry to learn, AP coverage fed my arts interest with news of culture beyond that originated by my local paper.

What’s important to note is that this week’s news is not the callous edict of a commercially driven corporate behemoth, but rather a practical decision by a member-driven service organization that operates as a not-for-profit. Yet it represents how, in an ever more challenging environment for the news industry, the arts are drawing the short stick.

Some might think that coverage of these areas is essentially local news for Manhattanites. But the arts ecology is more complicated than that. Sure, many people may not be able to attend a New York opera in person, but both radio and TV broadcasts bring those performances to audiences across the country — and the AP’s stories may be the most accessible source of advance coverage for fans in a variety of markets.

Dance companies may well tour to those same locations, and since few can sustain themselves playing only in Manhattan, the AP’s coverage has a direct impact on the viability of those bookings as well.

As for off-Broadway? That’s the easiest to argue for. It’s home to a significant number of new works that may never reach Broadway, but which increase the body of theatrical literature — and which often go on to play numerous regional and amateur stages.

This is particularly important when it comes to plays (as opposed to musicals): Of the 45 works recognized by the Pulitzer for drama or the Tony for best play since 1984, only five originated on Broadway. Yet that is the arena on which the AP will now narrow its focus. Coverage of “regional” arts organizations — long hailed as a similarly deep well of creativity — has already been marginalized.

This is just the latest news in a dispiriting trend. Onetime show-business bible Variety has all but eliminated regional theater reviews, along with a significant amount of its off-Broadway coverage; there’s occasional opera coverage in its pages these days, and no dance coverage.

The Village Voice, home to off-Broadway’s Obie Awards, laid off drama critic Michael Feingold just weeks ago, after more than four decades of service, even as it broadened its coverage of food.

There are countless other examples: Arts coverage at outlets large and small has been narrowing in favor of the largest and most popular companies and offerings, just as arts funding sources have been shrinking, and often tilting in favor of the bigger players. That stratification will only be reinforced by the AP’s coverage reductions.

There’s an invisible cost here. When attempts to reduce or eliminate funding to the arts crop up — which they do with a depressing regularity — they gain traction in part because not enough people encounter the arts, or even regular coverage of the arts, on a daily basis. When a resource as mighty as The Associated Press can’t even offer material for consideration because of a professed lack of interest by other media gatekeepers, I worry it’ll only lend support to those who want to delegitimize the arts with a charge of elitism.

Because celebrity holds ever-increasing sway in all entertainment coverage, and because the performing arts are (to too many editors) the poor stepchild of entertainment, I have a sneaking suspicion that if Hugh Jackman ever ventures off-Broadway, when Renee Fleming sings something at the Met, wherever David Hallberg dances, The Associated Press will probably manage to tell us about it.

We’ll also still hear from the AP when an artistic leader is the victim of internecine violence in his own company, or when a tech mishap injures a performer. Bad news always trumps good.

But we will know infinitely less about all the fine work being done by those who aren’t already well known, or at companies where tragedies mercifully don’t happen, or among worthy troupes that could most benefit from national attention not found elsewhere.

And should The Associated Press’s decision prove to be a model for yet more media outlets, then entire swaths of the arts may be, as long feared, on the brink of popular irrelevancy. Because soon no one may know they’re there.

Here’s the post in its original form on NPR.org