On its face, to those who believe in authentic representation of race and ethnicity on stage, a white woman playing Harriet Tubman is absurd if not grotesque. It would follow then that the same woman suing a library for reneging on her contract to do just that is nothing short of outrageous.

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical construct. Writer and actor Annette Hubbell was engaged by the Rancho Santa Fe Library in San Diego County, California to perform vignettes from her “Women Warriors” program in 2024. A contract was issued for Hubbell to portray Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe, two Black woman and one white woman. Then, according to Hubbell, shortly before the performance was to be given, the library asked Hubbell to swap out Bethune and Tubman for other famous women, white women, in her repertoire, reportedly because it would not be appropriate for her to portray the Black historical figures.

Hubbell, on record to KPBS ingenuously claiming, “It never occurred to me that that might even be an issue,” refused to make the switch to other characters in her portfolio, which include Elizabeth Fry, Corrie Ten Boom and Gladys Aylward, and the performance was canceled by the library. It is unclear whether Hubbell was paid her fee regardless.

In December 2024, former San Diego city attorney Jan Goldsmith published an op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune recounting the incident and declaring support for Hubbell. He wrote, “It is hardly equitable, respectful or inclusive to ban an actress from honoring in a performance an historical character because they are of different races. The apparent assumption is only an actress of the character’s race can understand and convey that character’s feelings. That is simply untrue.” Goldsmith noted that this was not blackface portrayal and therefore not offensive. He’s also a bit of personal publicist for Hubbell, having previously profiled her for the paper.

Following this, the conservative leaning Pacific Legal Foundation took up Hubbell’s cause, leading to a lawsuit claiming that Hubbell is a victim of racial discrimination. Filed at the beginning of May in the US District Court Southern District of California, the suit seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and “an award of nominal damages in the amount of $1.00.”

Awareness of the case is only going to escalate, with Hubbell and one of her attorneys appearing live this morning on CNN to reiterate their claims. It will throw the topic of authentic representation and reverse discrimination back into headlines, and it is unlikely that the ensuing dialogue will be terribly constructive in terms of understanding the issues at hand.

Hubbell has now spoken out trying to make parallels with other works where artists of certain races play characters of another.

Writing in her own Union Tribune op-ed, days after filing her lawsuit, in which she described herself as not by nature being adversarial, she wrote, “There’s nothing unusual about actors portraying historical figures of differing races. The most prominent example from recent years is the hit Broadway musical ‘Hamilton,’ in which a cast of primarily non-White actors portrays the revolutionary era with energy and warmth. I raised that point with library officials, who dismissed the issue by saying, “That’s historically different.” They couldn’t explain how it was different. Would they cancel a ‘Hamilton’ show for using actors of the ‘wrong’ race? Of course not.”

Boiled down to basics, the same laws that prevent discrimination against people of color can and have been used to claim reverse discrimination in various arenas, leading to such results as the striking down of affirmative action efforts at universities. It has proven difficult to make allowances for circumstances, intentions and nuance, which is what Hubbell and her attorneys will now seek to capitalize upon. Even Hamilton, early on, ran into trouble over casting notices which sought “non-white” actors and they have had to alter their language and efforts accordingly in order to comply with the letter of the law.

What’s likely to get lost here is that, in Hubbell’s own telling, she offers a menu of vignettes from which presenters can choose and the library allegedly requested Bethune and Tubman, only to change their mind as awareness sank in and the performance approached. If the library had done its due diligence, if the various departments that weighed in closer to the performance had been involved at the start, Hubbell might have been asked to do different characters from the beginning and what now is being decried as censorship would never have arisen. Someone, somewhere along the way at the library really dropped the ball with that initial selection – were they paying attention? – and now the library, and champions of authentic representation, will likely pay the price. This case too easily fits into the narrative advanced by four months of vigorous attacks on anything that conservative firebrands can claim to be a result of legitimate and necessary equity, diversity and inclusion efforts, which they seek to vilify and eradicate.

Even if the suit is successful, it’s unlikely to open the doors to a wave of white actors playing BIPOC characters in major arenas. That said, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the furor here could yield a Kennedy Center booking for Hubbell so that Richard Grennell and his cohort can stick another thumb in the eye of those who decry his partisan reframing of that institution. For those, like me, who believe that DEI initiatives remain essential, this is a reminder that the work must not be a hurdle to be cleared later in the programming or producing process, but something inextricable from the start, to avoid gaffes that may create or reinforce unfortunate precedent when it comes after the fact.

The National Endowment for the Arts does not deserve a premature burial, but it’s fair to say things aren’t looking good for it, at least in its current form. While the NEA as it has existed for the past 60 years is being hollowed out by design, it’s entirely possible that not unlike the people inhabited by a collective of alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the building and the name may live. But in doing so, it will be a shell taken over by something entirely different.

Having watched the NEA survive some four decades of attacks on its existence, surviving thanks to support from both sides of the aisle, it is startling to think that this could be the true turning point, and that Donald Trump will do what Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich and their ilk could not. If it remains at all, it will be as a sham vehicle through which the administration will fund its favored projects, such as non-Equity shows at the Kennedy Center and Trump’s sculpture garden of who he deems to be heroes.

Around the country, not-for-profits proudly and rightly declare that they will not kowtow to the draconian regulations that still might afford them access to federal funds. They post their stands as white on black texts on social media coupled with calls for the public to make up the difference in money lost. No doubt anyone who has supported arts or humanities programs have seen these stances and requests in recent week. Long-serving, dedicated staffers depart the NEA this week in response to the gutting of the agency.

That makes this a moment when it’s worth examining why the Endowment has proven, at long last, so easily and quickly compromised. For that, we turn to the term “endowment” or more specifically the root of it, “endow.” Dictionary.com defines “endow” as “to provide with a permanent fund or source of income,” and an “endowment” as “the property, funds, etc., with which an institution or person is endowed.” As an example, as Harvard has come under a barrage of attacks on its policies and independence, we have heard so much about their financial underpinning: their $53 billion endowment, which spins off income through investments that supports the work of the college, allowing such programs as financial aid for those in need.

Unfortunately, in the common use of the word, the National Endowment for the Arts is a misnomer. It is not a fund drawn upon each year to support arts programs and institutions. Rather, it is a federal agency, funded through the federal budget each year for its operations and grantmaking. It is that annual appropriation which has made the agency so vulnerable, since each year a budget must be passed in Washington. For many years the NEA has been a favored target for performative ideological cost-cutters looking for supposed waste. The most progressive, even outré, projects funded by the NEA have long made it a locus for the censorious, railing against works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, important art but not really representative of the majority of what receives NEA funding, which covers a wide range of organizations in cities and towns, from adventurous to the most family friendly. Over its lifetime, the NEA is estimated to have distributed $5.5 billion in grants.

At the same time Trump, Musk and their wrecking-ball crew were undermining the NEA, NEH and CPB, major philanthropies were steering funding away from the arts as well. As Helen Shaw wrote in her galvanizing article for The New Yorker in April, “When the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small.”

With the NEA hobbled and the foundations looking to direct their funds elsewhere, this begs the inevitable question: now what? Yes, every arts not-for-profit can redouble their fundraising efforts, and perhaps in this first fiscal year without NEA funding people will step up – screenwriter John Logan gave $40,000 to Berkeley Rep’s new works center to make up for lost NEA funding – but will the increased giving of recent months be a solution that can be relied upon year after year, or one-time thing?

While federal funding will always be a goal, and perhaps in four or eight years we might see the government funding agencies revitalized, since they are but a rounding error in the federal budget, maybe it’s time for the establishment of a true arts endowment – a foundation dedicated solely to the support of US arts and culture, independent of the government and established in such a fashion that future generations could not turn its attention to other needs. It would, inevitably, grow slowly, but as generational wealth passes into new hands, perhaps some of that largesse could be deposited into an entity with a culture-based mandate and articles of incorporation which prohibit a change – save for the inclusion in the future of new forms of arts expression – to other uses.

There’s no question that if successful, especially in the initial years, funds would be given to this foundation, this endowment, that would not be immediately available for arts organizations. But in this moment of contraction, perhaps that’s the best time to weather a change for the long-term goal of a sustaining arts endowment distinct from political pressures and the vagaries of who is in office. If we continue to simply hold out hope for a revitalization of the NEA, we will miss this moment to recalibrate the means of funding the arts, if we don’t take matters into our own hands when the federal government remains to easily manipulated when it comes to our fate, we may be consigned evermore to a constant and likely Darwinian contest for funds, donor by donor, organization by organization, as the vehicles to which we have been accustomed by support are destroyed in the name of partisan ideology and simply left to fend for themselves by the very organizations which helped so much of the current arts landscape come into being.

Maybe this idea is a stretch, but we’d better start coming up with options while waiting for what now seems inevitable.

When the seniors graduate tomorrow at Fannin County High School in Blue Ridge GA, approximately 90 miles north of Atlanta, the sporting events will all be over and the yearbook published. But for the drama students at Fannin, there will be words left unspoken, because last weekend, following the first of two planned performances of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the show was shut down, with students and parents being informed that the second performance would not be permitted. Over the course of the next 48 hours, the reasons given for the cancelation would change, but the show remained shuttered and, with the school year over, there’s no possibility of the second performance taking place.

In accounts from multiple students and parents, the Friday evening performance went off without incident. But on Saturday morning, word of the cancelation began filtering out. Angela Grist, a parent with two students in the play, described the Saturday morning in her house as, “The kids all got messages stating that, what the kids were told initially, was that somebody in the audience didn’t like the context of the play and said that it was demonic and disgusting and that it was immediately shut down. I got up and the kids were just so upset. I mean my daughter’s crying, my adopted son is close to tears telling me what happened. I reached out to the school and got no reply at all.”

Abigail Ridings, the senior who is president of the drama club and was directing the production, told a similar story. “I walked into my mom’s bedroom Saturday morning, the night after our first show, and she told me that the show had been canceled, that she just got off the phone with my principal. He said that certain people had to ‘repent after watching the show,’ as a joke, and that it was canceled due to parent complaints.” Asked about the specific nature of the complaints as explained to her mother, Ridings elaborated saying that the play was “too evil and disgusting and things like that.”

And so it seems that the play about witch hunts, about the persecution of people out of hysteria, despite being an acknowledge American classic widely taught in high school classrooms and performed frequently on high school stages, had provoked the same moral persecution it portrayed as unjust.

The students and parents rapidly tried to see about offering the second performance at another local venue, but while there were offers on the table, concerns grew that it wasn’t permissible, because the license for the show was specific to the high school and that moving the performance might violate the contract. Instead, the students ended up pulling together a showcase of their talents using other material, which was performed that weekend for those who didn’t get to see The Crucible, as well as for those who did.

But that was not the end of the incident, because come Monday, the school issued a statement about the cancelation that was wholly different than what students and parents were initially told. In an unsigned statement on school letterhead, with five staffers including Dr. Scott Ramsay and athletic director Jeremy King listed among the leadership, the statement began:

“After Friday night’s performance of The Crucible, we received several complaints as to an unauthorized change in the script of the play. Upon investigation, we learned that the performance did not reflect the original script. These alterations were not approved by the licensing company or administration. The performance contract for The Crucible does not allow modifications without prior written approval. Failing to follow the proper licensing approval process for additions led to a breach in our contract with the play’s publisher. The infraction resulted in an automatic termination of the licensing agreement. The second performance of The Crucible could not occur because we were no longer covered by a copyright agreement.”

Suddenly, the demonic and disgusting content had been magically transformed into a copyright violation. Three students stated that no words of the text had been changed in any way. The only possible material in the production that might have given the licensor pause was that the production began with a wordless scene of the young women of Salem dancing in the woods at night, enacting what is described by dialogue in the text, an interpretive choice that was unlikely to have been in violation of the license since it altered not the text, the spirit nor the intention of the show. Would it have been advisable to have checked with the licensor? Yes. Was it flagrantly out of bounds? I think not.

It’s important to note that the production was proceeding without the supervision of the drama teacher at the high school, who had departed two weeks earlier – some said he was forced to resign, others said fired – leaving the students to complete work on the show themselves. It left them without the natural advocate for the show and conduit of information with the administration. However, the remaining rehearsals, with the purportedly offending staging, had been repeatedly performed with administrative personnel present in a supervisory role.

It’s rare, barring something egregious, that a school would take it upon itself to shut a show down over their own perceived violation of copyright without consultation with the licensing entity, in this case Broadway Licensing/Dramatists Play Service. It’s highly unlikely that after a single performance on a Friday night, someone had made a complaint to Broadway Licensing and the company itself had contacted the school so quickly to lodge an objection, so that the school would make a decision within ours to cancel to avoid any further ostensible violation. And if indeed the reason for the cancelation was the wordless opening, the school failed to offer the students the opportunity to proceed without the supposedly scofflaw scene in place. So the timing is questionable and the solution draconian. 

Parent Angela Grist said that she reached out to Broadway Licensing herself and, in communication with a staffer she identified as “Stephanie C.” Grist said, “She told me that everything that I told her did not sound like copyright infringement.”

Separately, another parent, Amber Cather Herendon, in a phone call commemorated by a video she posted online, spoke with a person she identified as another customer service rep at Broadway Licensing. That unnamed person, while careful to note that the Miller estate is very careful about permitting alterations to the text, said that their company’s director was aware of and exploring the incident further, but that, “We are not traditionally one to shut productions down, even if we are under the impression that copyright is being infringed on. At the very least we will reach out and say ‘hey, we understand that X is happening or Y is happening. We may have to shut productions down, but it would not be as abrupt as this production seems to be.” They went on to say, “Again, we’re not sure who provided the authorization to shut the production down. We certainly wouldn’t have done that completely. At the very least we would have just requested that the [unintelligible] be formally submitted so that we could determine if that is something we could alter.”

I have reached out to both the principal at Fannin County High as well as representatives from Broadway Licensing for comment and clarification and this post will be updated should they respond. But with two separate parental accounts, one recorded, it seems that the school’s administration decided, after content complaints, to use the wordless opening scene, an interpretive choice, as a pretext for shutting the show down, after bowing to complaints about the show’s actual content, namely the words of Arthur Miller and his characters.

Cast member Aiden McBee said of the copyright claim, “The timeline doesn’t make sense, if they learned it was copyright after the fact.” McBee went on to say, “They say they understand and appreciate the arts, but I just don’t believe it, because to appreciate the arts you have to understand. The Crucible is a message of authority and of distrust, which is quite ironic. I just want clear communication.”

Student Caden Gerald, who played John Proctor in the show and who said he was one of eight graduation seniors in the production, posted a five minute video recounting the incident and his feelings. He said, Some people noted, on Blue Ridge Facebook groups and on Instagram, that the show was demonic and disgusting – a show that called out a real issue of McCarthyism, a show that does not ridicule anything religious.” He continued, “I personally believe that this is a disgusting example of excellent PR training, an example of deflecting accountability and blame.”

Channeling the oratory of his character, Gerald said, “John Proctor is being forced to sign away his friends because of one cry against them. To draw parallel to real life, I ask you to ask yourselves, how may you teach us students to walk like men and women in this world when you sell us to lies and opinion, deflecting blame to our good names that we have made. Us students have not lived long enough to make great names of ourselves before you have started to tarnish them – names of us, children and young adults. How may we walk in this world when you have forced us to be sat?”

All three students quoted here, and parent Angela Grist, believe that the school owes the students an explanation and several demanded an apology for the events that shuttered the show. The silence from the school may be designed to run out the clock, with school over and graduation complete in less than two days. The community of Blue Ridge, and the cast and families of The Crucible, deserve more.

P.S. In Miller’s All My Sons, during the opening scene, characters discuss a fierce storm the night before that felled a nearby tree. In Simon McBurney’s 2008 Broadway production, the play began with a wordless scene in which a storm was depicted onstage and audiences saw the tree felled by wind and lighting. The scene is only described in dialogue, it is not part of the text.

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]