In Continued Defense of Theater

“The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”

― John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War

As a person who creates and produces theater I exist within a statistical anomaly. Even living in the USA, the wealthiest nation in the world, the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported around only 100,000–150,000 people are employed directly in theater occupations (actors, directors, producers, stage technicians) in 2023 — less than 0.05% of the population. That’s half of a hundredth of a percent. Even if we include those who participate in amateur theater, over the course of their entire lives, UNESCO cultural participation studies suggest only 5–10% of adults worldwide have participated in theater or live performance. Over the course of their entire lives. Globally the participation is closer to 1-2% annually.

Theater has never belonged to the majority. It is a calling answered by the few, a vocation chosen by less than one percent of humanity. Against the tide of billions farming, manufacturing, policing, doctoring, selling, and building, only a small fraction gather in the dark to weave the living stories that bind us together. Yet, though our numbers are small, our impact is immeasurable. A single performance can ignite an entire community, echoing across generations in ways no factory line or balance sheet can measure. Art can save lives. I know because it saved mine. It found me when I was without hope and took me in.

But today, the theater is gasping for air. We are asked to create with dwindling resources, to build cathedrals of imagination on crumbling budgets, to reach higher while the ground beneath us falls away. Every theater that goes bankrupt is more than an isolated collapse; it is contagion. The loss of one organization eats away at its neighbors, at schools, at festivals, at the fragile networks of volunteers and audiences who depend on its light. Dead spaces breed despair and despair is contagious.

Yet from this decay, something ferocious has emerged. Artistic Darwinism has forged survivors who will not bend. They are the ones who scavenge wood from demolition sites to build sets, who sew costumes from thrift-store scraps, who beg and barter and persist because the alternative—silence—is worse than hunger. They are fanatics of the beautiful, zealots of joy, militants of hope. They are the hardened core who refuse to surrender the stage to darkness. If civilization collapses tomorrow, it will be these people who light the first fire, gather the tribe, and tell the first story.

It is not the artists who have failed. It is society that has failed the artists. We have allowed market logic and austerity politics to dictate which stories deserve to be told. We have treated theater as a luxury, trimming it from schools, defunding it in communities, dismissing it as an indulgence. In doing so we have failed our children. For every shuttered arts program, another child loses the chance to discover their voice. For every canceled theater season, another generation is denied the tools of empathy, imagination, and courage. We are raising children with fewer opportunities for joy, fewer chances for connection, and fewer doors to walk through into creative careers.

This failure is not only cultural, it is economic malpractice. For art is the one human endeavor that generates income from creativity itself. A spark becomes a story, a story becomes a performance, and the performance becomes an engine that fills restaurants, sells tickets, books hotels, creates jobs, and revitalizes neighborhoods. The arts do not siphon resources—they multiply them. The data is irrefutable: regions that invest in theater see economic growth, not decline. A single stage can power a city block; a vibrant arts district can resurrect a dying town. To abandon theater is not fiscal prudence, it is civic suicide.

If we do not give our children the skills to create, then we condemn them to a slow erosion of spirit. The decline will not announce itself with a sudden crash. It will be systemic, chronic, and terminal. A creeping impoverishment of imagination, a thinning of empathy, a corrosion of joy. Without creation, there is only consumption. Without imagination, there is only obedience. Without art, there is only silence.

There is another choice. We can refuse to decline. We can choose expansion. We can recognize that the survival of theater depends on more than applause; it depends on deliberate, radical investment in its future. Communities can organize not just to save theaters, but to make them hubs of life; places where neighbors gather, children learn, and voices long silenced are heard. Schools can restore the arts to their rightful place at the heart of education, ensuring that every child has the chance to act, to sing, to move, to imagine. Governments and foundations can move beyond token grants and build reliable pathways to funding that sustain artists with dignity instead of starving them with scraps.

Theater is not a charity case. It is not ornamental. It is infrastructure. It builds communities as surely as roads and hospitals. It fosters unity, collaboration, and resilience. To attend a play is to feel the pulse of empathy; to make a play is to flex the muscle of hope. Theater is the rehearsal for democracy itself, the place where we learn to see through another’s eyes, to question authority, to lift the voices of the oppressed, to wrestle with power, to laugh at folly, and to dream of something better.

This is our challenge: to fight not only for the preservation of theater, but for its expansion, for its rebirth, for its ascension as a vital force in the life of every community. To do anything less is to abandon our children to a narrower, darker future. To rise to it is to give them joy, resilience, courage, and love.

The choice is here. Decline or rebirth. Silence or song. Despair or creation. The stage is waiting. The story is ours to tell.