American Theatre: Dead. By a Long Series of Self-Inflicted Gun Shot Wounds

Steppenwolf Theatre’s Decision to Eliminate the Steppenwolf for Young Adults Program is Emblematic of the Short-Sighted Doom Spiral American Theatre Keeps Doubling Down On

While obviously the first two words of this title till ensure that you will never, ever read this essay, for the bizarre outlier handful that remain, I’d like to make note — and hope you’ll keep sight of — a couple of things in a spirit of transparency:

1. I used to be in theatre. I was an actor for a long time (never an especially good or committed one, I don’t think, but one of those misguided and self-seeking ones who coasted on whatever vestigial charisma I could then muster;) and I was a fundraiser for a number of organizations (I’m an exceptionally good grant writer,) both as a staff member and freelancer; I worked for a long time as a consultant for a small foundation that provided funding to small performing arts organizations (the way I got fired from that place is a fun story I’ll save for another time) where I reviewed shows and assessed the organizational well-being of many small theatre companies. So: the fact that I have soured entirely on the practice of theatre as a field in this country should be understood to be the hard-won position of someone who’s had his inborn fondness methodically beaten out of him over the course of many decades’ exposure.
2. The Hallie Gordon of whom I’ll make repeated mention below is my long-suffering wife. As such, I must acknowledge that this essay risks seeming like a longwinded complaint about (what I regard as) Hallie’s mistreatment by the company to which she devoted much of her career. I concede there’s a ribbon of this running through here, BUT — and I regard this as more important/germane to the points I’m trying to make, and hope you’ll agree — rather than this being simply a screed about the betrayal and abuse suffered by the person I love most, it is precisely my vantage of a close observer to the struggles she’s faced in [HYPERBOLE ALERT] attempting in vain to save American theatre from itself that informs the conclusions I’ve reached.
3. Hallie has no idea I’m writing this. I have not consulted her or discussed it with her AT ALL. Hallie is a FAR more goodhearted person than I’ll ever be, has not ONE vengeful bone in her body, and would probably discourage me from writing this at all. ALL the observations, assertions, and conclusions are mine and mine alone.
4. This essay is a post mortem. A comeuppance for the so-called villains here is no longer possible. Because the villains of American theatre, just like its heroes, are soot-covered and staggering out of a blast crater, sifting through rubble.
5. I HATE the “R-E” spelling of the word “theatre” — it evinces so much of the “pretend we’re British” pretension that’s contributed to the downfall of the field, but use it here because it’s commonly accepted. Just know that it’s under protest.

Seventy Years of Hand-Wringing

For as long as anyone can recall, the American theatre has wondered aloud — in the program notes people skim before the house lights go down, across tables in staff meetings, into microphones at post-show discussions and in conference keynotes: “How can we attract younger audiences?” And then brainstorming about it — often at great time-intensive expense with earnest-seeming consultants intoning at white boards — for literal decades. Without doing a goddamn thing. All the Recommendations, all the Action Plans — written in ash. While the floodwaters kept rising.

Theatre organizations of every size in every city watched — stricken, aghast — as their audiences grayed and died off. The movie of a theatre crowd is like a sped-up time-lapse of a carved apple face shriveling into a creased, sunken geriatric hag, then decaying into dust that gets carried away by a stiff wind. And through it all, the field kept right on brainstorming.

I’ve come to compare the plight of American theatre with that of American education — we keep identifying the problem and the steps required to fix it, and doing exactly nothing. Except setting aside a little money to continue studying the problem. We send think tank eggheads to observe schools in Finland, where they dutifully scribble notes about later start times, and not getting homework till like fifth grade, and the inclusion of art and physical activity in every school day, and the absence of standardized tests, and teaching approaches that accommodate different learning styles — on and on. And these findings get typed up in white papers that land on the desks of policymakers and summarized on the teleprompters of newscasters.

And in response, we do NONE of the things that have been DEMONSTRATED to work. Instead, we make a thousand tweaks to the edges of a quilt, the center of which we know to be on fire. And consign generation upon generation to mandatory attendance at joyless, feet-flat-eyes-front gulags where curiosity goes to die, or, more precisely, to have the life squeezed out of it.

It’s the same in American theatre — even IF (and at this stage it is a big goddamn “if”) the Artistic Directors and foundation funders and consultants and Boards of Directors were to concede the (undeniable, self-evident) truth, namely that the project of attracting young audiences to this art form is one demanding RADICAL reinventions of longstanding and poorly conceived precedent, reinventions that cannot be measured in increments of a single production, or season, or tepid outreach initiative, but that necessarily last MULTIPLE GENERATIONS. Just like with our schools — if we wish to enact the changes we claim we want to see, we would need as a society to direct substantial, sustained resources of money and political will toward some shared vision of changing the direction of a sprawling, complex public institution. But we don’t. We cluck our tongues and spin our wheels; install metal detectors and hold lockdown drills and measure all the wrong things.

Like with education, folks in American theatre have known what to do for a long time. They’ve just failed to do it because it’s hard and will take a long time — it demands the planting of an orchard the fruit of which will likely not be ready for harvest till well after the tenure of any one Artistic Director or Board of Directors. In other words, it is a project demanding great vision and a measure of selflessness, making it, in American parlance, a doomed proposition.

Hop in, Loser, we’re building a future! Photo by panyawat auitpol on Unsplash

The Abattoir of Joy

From a business standpoint, theatre could not be more disastrous: site-specific, labor-intensive, expensive to produce, non-scalable, nested inside concentric rings of Barriers to Entry — privilege, expense, snobbery, etc. — all in a climate of savage competition for the finite time, attention, and money of a nation now accustomed to instantaneous delivery of infinitely variable entertainments to wherever it happens to be sitting.

In the public mind, the pitch for attending theatre sounds something like: “Great news — what say if, instead of deepening the ass cove in your recliner where whatever preference-calibrated entertainment diet of Real Housewife Slap Fight or House Hunters Subterranean or whatever, is a click away at any time of your choosing, you get all dressed up — spats, lambskin gloves, monocle, the whole shot — climb into a rickety hansom cab for a bone-rattling trip to The Thee-AY-ter, where we’ll spoon-feed you material of our choosing, on a date and time we determine, where we also decide when you can get up to pee. Oh, and that’ll be a hundred and forty bucks.” And, where institution-level theatre is concerned, they’re not far off.

Which brings up a crucial distinction: when I’m shitting on theatre, here, it’s on theatre organizations at that institution level. Live performance can be electrifying; theatre as a form of expression can be singular and arresting, a source of delight, even wonder. I’ve gotten to watch stuff that’s provided the best, highest form of ass-kickery, that humanizes everyone present and reaffirms a sense that our capacity for invention is without limit, our compassion is depthless, our courage cannot be dissolved. But almost all of this is work I’ve encountered outside of institution-level settings — in little storefront theaters, in repurposed or temporary spaces, in the back rooms of taverns. Thee-AY-ter, too frequently, is a place for enshrining boredom, a marble tub for thrusting Surprise under tepid water and holding there to drown.

I worked for a few years for a theatre company in Chicago called The Neo-Futurists. For something like 40 years, now, they’ve been creating and presenting original work that attracts young audiences — and I’m not talking about thee-AY-ter-young, which is like “under 50,” I mean YOUNG-young, like couldn’t get into a bar without a fake ID. Part of this success has to do with tone and velocity and lack of artifice, for sure. There’s a kind of anarchic spirit there, a nervy, dead-sprint ethos that is youthful-feeling, but it’s not dumbed-down. They make smart, substantive work. They just do it in a way that does not much resemble the ponderous encased-in-glass mastodon dust-fart stuff you’ll mostly see in a thee-AY-ter.

So it is possible, obviously, to reach and retain young audiences. You just have to pursue that goal with seriousness and commitment.

Which is exactly what most institution-level theatre organizations fail to do. What a big theatre company typically does is student matinees — either of whichever play they have currently running, or some truncated tastes-like-medicine classic. Now, as a strategy for instilling enthusiasm for an art form, busing in a few hundred horned-up teens, and depositing them in an unfamiliar darkened room that carries a largely implied-but-nonetheless-rigid code of conduct is probably not optimal.

Cracking the Code

Instead of simply plopping high schoolers into seats for the unconvincing performance of an antiquated play, which is what most companies have done historically and continue to do today, Hallie Gordon — as leader of Steppenwolf for Young Adults (SYA) — took a radical approach. Hallie built a program FOR teens, not some afterthought half-assery pointed vaguely in their vicinity. The program produced original shows for teen audiences.

Often the plays were world premiere adaptations of books in high school curriculums (or, given the shit show education’s devolved into in recent years, books that have been banned from reading lists) — Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Zusak’s The Book Thief, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Farhenheit 451, and others. The program also commissioned world premiere original plays of many styles on many subjects — the dawn of the atomic age, modern gun violence, gamer culture, the clash between street artists and the gatekeepers of the fine art world, among others.

The program Hallie built didn’t merely embody and enliven books these kids had to read in school — though it did that without question — it devised and presented stories created expressly for them, stories that reflected events taking place around them, thoughts that occupied their minds. Broadly speaking, this was work as smart, heartfelt, and beautifully crafted as anything taking place on the Steppenwolf mainstage or anywhere else. In many cases — a shockingly high number of cases, actually, given the many constraints of budget, time, and logistics in creating such work within an institution for which it was a secondary priority — the artistry, resonance, and impact of this work was superior to the so-called adult work the company was producing.

But plays — even extraordinarily well executed ones — are inherently fleeting. The transformative power of any play is limited to how long it remains in the minds and hearts of its viewers — a power that dissipates as those viewers disperse — a deeply moving play can transform the individuals who’ve seen it, but in itself, it will not transform an institution or culture.

But what Hallie Gordon built extended well beyond the making of plays.

Steppenwolf for Young Adults (SYA) ALSO did the following — a PARTIAL list, off the top of my head:

• Forged partnerships with schools, libraries, universities, museums, and other civic institutions that more than anything else taking place at Steppenwolf fulfilled the promise of becoming and remaining a good neighbor and citizen, an engaged and fully present partner in municipal life, not simply a cultural outpost.
• Provided dozens of playwrights with what in many cases was their first “big” opportunity — SYA commissioned original work from playwrights, work that went on to be PRODUCED (vs. the “Workshop Hell” phenomenon too common in the field — where theatre companies may claim that they are “developing new work” while relieved of the risk and expense of actually presenting original work.) Several playwrights who got an early break at SYA have gone on to write for TV — you’ve seen their stuff even if you’ve never set foot in a theater.
• Provided scores of designers of every sort with precisely the break required to get to the “next level” in their careers — having been “vetted” by SYA, lighting and sound and costume and set designers got a shot to work on “real” Steppenwolf shows, and at other large, comparatively well-paying theatre organizations all over the country.
• Provided hundreds of actors with what in many cases was not only their first paying gig, but with a résumé item that carried some cache in the field, opening doors to bigger opportunity in Chicago and elsewhere.
• Afforded many scores of young artists and designers the chance to join their respective unions (Actors’ Equity, etc.,) gaining access and enjoying the benefits of better pay and working conditions, the prospect of health coverage, etc.
• Through a program called the Young Adult Council, and managing Steppenwolf’s intern program, granted young people — many of whom might never have otherwise have had the chance — to learn as close observers and co-workers the administrative and operational realities of a major nonprofit theater.
• Provided many scores of classroom teachers with training to incorporate the performing and literary arts into their instruction, expanding their toolkits for reaching every kind of student.
• Provided public performances of its shows at the most affordable ticket prices of any Steppenwolf shows.
• Brought professional-grade arts instruction into many scores of Chicago area classrooms — providing students with a deeper level of engagement with the arts, and teaching artists with decent-paying work.
• Awakened in thousands of school-aged kids an appreciation for the expressive and artistic potential of theatre. Yes, thousands.
• Through training and mentorship, helped create the next two generations of theatre artists and arts administrators.

In short, every dimension of what an organization claims it seeks to do with its arts outreach and educational programming, SYA ACTUALLY provided. Like I said above, I was a grant writer for a long time, so am well-versed in the rhetoric of this stuff, and as somebody who also evaluated lots of grant proposals, I can spot the sometimes vast chasm separating the rhetoric from the reality of what an organization actually does. The work of SYA elevated the company, not vice versa — Steppenwolf was made better and more compelling by its (begrudging, I know for a fact) inclusion of SYA in its programming. The City of Chicago overall was made incrementally better due to the work of SYA. Theatre as a field was rendered more relevant and lively due to the work of SYA.

Steppenwolf, therefore, has cheapened itself by the elimination of SYA. Steppenwolf has diminished itself to yet one more place that puts on plays. A place, in other words, about which there is no reason to care.

This Epilogue Started Some Time Ago

In addition to her strengths as an adminstrator and leader, Hallie is a tremendously gifted director. And while she did direct certain among the SYA productions presented during her near-two-decade tenure, her personal artistic and professional ambitions were always subordinate to (corny as it may sound) serving the greater good. As noted above, SYA, under Hallie’s leadership, was as generous as possible with professional and artistic opportunity. Where many arts institutions and programs pay lip service to valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion (Steppenwolf itself being one such offender,) SYA enacted these principles faithfully. Hallie built a culture that demonstrated the role of the arts in civic and educational life, and that celebrated every damn one of us.

When the pandemic hit, and the lockdowns followed, American theatre was revealed to be a deeply extraneous thing, where survival and wellbeing were concerned. In all the talk of “essential workers” at the time, there was never any mention of, like, Prop Designer, or Dialect Coach. So like every theatre, Steppenwolf faced a reckoning. And, in the decisions it made then, and those they continue to make today, they reveal their institutional priorities. During lockdown, after a steep pay cut, Steppenwolf laid Hallie off — one of only a couple people they let go.

The I-shit-you-not same day they informed her of this decision, I was treated to the bitter irony of Steppenwolf’s then-Artistic Director of the company being interviewed on the local NPR affiliate purring in honeyed, concerned-sounding tones about how resolved the company was to “take care of its people” during that fraught time. The so-called rationale for laying her off was that Hallie, with near two decades of seniority, was a high-salaried employee they couldn’t justify continuing to pay, even at her already slashed salary. Expel from your mind, please, that the Artistic Director in question, exerting herself to approximate human-sounding concern on my radio, could have volunteered to take a fractional pay cut herself that could have covered Hallie’s salary in full. And that after such a pay cut, the A.D.’s salary would have remained ample by any measure.

In addition to the badly needed income, our family lost its health coverage. At, you know, the dawn of a global pandemic. We’ve had to move out of Chicago. The city we called home for almost thirty years. Still, though, I’d wager that former Artistic Director sleeps like a baby. Since taking care of your people can really take it out of you.

Oh. Also. Fun note: throughout the pandemic, Steppenwolf continued construction of a brand new building, adding many hundreds of seats and several performance venues for which there was no demonstrable need. Like, literally. The company was not filling its existing venues. Its subscriber base, now almost entirely suburban — all ear hair and hard candy and embrittled bones — pretty much hates anything that carries a whiff of the novel or unfamiliar, and is content to Karen-squawk at the volunteer ushers, lobby bartenders, and box office staff about the many sources of their unfounded displeasure. And now the company has given itself more seats to fill. While the available supply of crones and widowers continues to keel over and die off in droves.

But an unneeded new building? Sure. Because deep-pocketed pre-corpses like to put their name on things, lending a thin patina of generosity to the lives they’ve misspent on plunder; and philanthropic foundations, which ought to fucking know better, continue to find capital campaigns sexier than providing the operating funds that are actually useful and much-needed.

And, to borrow from Vonnegut, so it goes.

One of the first things Hallie said to me the day they let her go was: “They’re gonna kill off SYA.” I agreed. The only surprising aspect of this decision is that it took them a couple years to get to it.

In the movies, when the guy’s gotta dig his own grave before they put a bullet in him, he’s blubbering and begging, face streaked with snot and tears. In the world of nonprofit theatre, though, in response to its own 70 years of hand wringing, the guy types up a press release announcing his own bold, prescient decision to dig his own grave. The guy himself will be strengthened, he feels, his prospects brightened, by the addition of this grave at his feet. “This is auspicious,” he tells us. “Our longevity and prosperity can only be assured when we stand on the lip of this pit.” And the guy spears his shovel into the pile of dirt he has dug and dusts his palms. “Today,” he bellows — from the diaphragm, for he has technique. “Today is a new dawn.” And he draws a pistol, holds it aloft. “This is what leadership looks like.” He points it at his own head and fires. He pitches over, landing in his fresh-dug grave, just so. His last thought, as the thirsty earth drinks the blood surging out of him, is “I’ve made a success of things.”

Ian Belknap is a Chicago writer presently living in Baltimore.