Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

New York Times

03-03-2025

IT'S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of 'political' to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That's all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.
The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it's good, it's like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you're in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here's where it easily can turn into a parlor game. 'Hamilton'? Yes, obviously 'Hamilton' is political. OK, what about 'Death Becomes Her'? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. 'The Outsiders'? Class war with songs. The 'Great Gatsby' musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.
Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It's no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy 'Eureka Day,' in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector's play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner 'English,' a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump's first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.
What's jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we've had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog's reconception of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 'An Enemy of the People' as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction 'Show/Boat: A River,' which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We've had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in 'Gypsy,' originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we've had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in 'Oh, Mary!'? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical 'Cabaret' (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall's immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even 'Wicked,' 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.
The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that's your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical 'Sunset Boulevard' — no, wait, damn it, there's that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical 'Real Women Have Curves,' which … nope, that won't work either. It's hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we've all become hammers.
CONSIDER SOME OF the offerings in the week after the vote that returned Trump to power. In Midtown Manhattan, City Center was presenting a concert revival of the 1998 musical 'Ragtime,' an adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's kaleidoscopic 1975 novel about a family of well-to-do suburban WASPs; a Jewish immigrant and his daughter; and a Black musician radicalized by racism, cruelty and murderous assault. The show, set in the New York of more than a century ago, suddenly seemed impossible to watch from a safe distance — and it no longer played as 'How far we've come,' as it may have in the Clinton years, but as 'Maybe we should have seen this coming.' The election-straddling timing of its two-week run was intentional, but 'Ragtime' was scheduled well before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, and no one involved could then have anticipated the real-world reverberation in a climactic second-act song, the female lead's anthemic solo about moving ahead into a new world. Rejecting 'the days when I let you make all my choices,' she soars to the fierce refrain, 'We can never go back to before.' If it wasn't precisely the Harris campaign's chant 'We're not going back,' it was close enough.
The audience, composed largely of women and gay men — the kind of Broadway stalwarts who buy tickets to short runs of semi-staged revivals of musicals — knew it was coming. When the actress Caissie Levy started to sing, they leaned forward in palpable tension: They were bracing for a moment the song delivered. When she finished, some people stood and cheered; others remained seated, in tears. It was a reaction that didn't fit any easy definition of political theater. The show was giving the people what they wanted, but what they wanted varied from seat to seat; some took the lyrics as a promise to believe in, others as an occasion for frustration and grief.
A few blocks south, at the Music Box Theatre, a different kind of transaction between audience and performers was unfolding. Several months earlier, 'Suffs,' a new musical about the suffragist movement, had transferred to Broadway after a run at the Public Theater. Last June, its creator, Shaina Taub, won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score, but that wasn't enough to keep the show afloat and, in the fall, the producers announced it would close in January. But immediately after the election, attendance surged. Cynics might suspect that buying a ticket to a musical that numbered Hillary Clinton among its producers had become a gestural statement (virtue signaling, as conservatives would have it), the late 2024 equivalent of donning a pink pussy hat. Yet the emotional interplay between theatergoers and a show that consistently warns them away from both complacency and self-regard proved to be more complex than 'Resist!' That week, 'Suffs' played not as a rally or, God knows, a victory lap but as a surprisingly sober assessment of how wins are achieved and of what they cost.
The mood shift wasn't confined to mainstream work. A week later, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a five-night run of a 2020 play by the Portuguese writer-actor Tiago Rodrigues; it was, pointedly, called 'Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists' and concerned the impending ritual execution of a right-wing demagogue. Toward the end, the politician, who had so far been silent, unleashed a torrent of ugly invective that continued even as members of the audience (possibly plants, possibly actual ticket holders, possibly plants who then inspired actual ticket holders) started shouting back, cursing at the stage and walking out. It was what political theater is often accused of being — blatantly manipulative — but in a way that forced attendees to confront the idea that knowing how and when to strong-arm an audience is intrinsic to both theater and fascism.
The reactions in those three audiences weren't identical, but what the experiences shared was a quality that people who go to the theater prize dearly — a sense that they are somehow in dialogue with what's happening onstage. That kind of communality can feel like the forging of a bond, a sense that one's view of the world is being affirmed. And in all three cases, it seemed that at least some members of the audience were left interrogating not just what they had seen but their own reactions to it, which is as good an indication as any that the shows worked.
IF THERE'S ONE thing that has remained consistent about American political theater in the 21st century, it's the suspicion with which the term itself is greeted by a large segment of its presumed target audience. It doesn't help that today the two words, when applied to actual politics, have become a shorthand intended to connote performative nonsense, a showy but empty gesture aimed at the easily manipulated. Wikipedia's 'disambiguation' page, somewhat brutally, asks those who search the phrase whether they're interested in 'a theatrical genre' or 'political acts made only for the sake of appearance'; too many theatergoers might answer, 'Is there a difference?' Some people have an almost atavistic mistrust of anything that they think they've caught trying to convince them of something — it tends to get tarred as hectoring or didactic, or just as a slog. Conversely, critics have long nurtured deep contempt for any piece of theater they can dismiss as preaching to the choir and thus write off as smug or self-congratulatory. The overall aversion is understandable: The worst of political theater, blunt-instrument stage work that is only scolding or only flattering, tends not to be very interesting either as politics or as theater. But the genre isn't defined by its dullest examples. There's nothing inherently vulgar or anti-theatrical about a desire to bring people around to your way of thinking and, as for the choir, it needs nourishment and encouragement as much as anyone in the pews. Impassioning the faithful has been a valued function of theater since the Greeks.
Nor is there anything wrong with attempting to speak truth to power — or, if power doesn't show up to listen, to at least speak truth about power; that has always been a central goal of theater, the talkiest of all art forms. We saw it literalized a decade ago, when 'Hamilton,' the final stage blockbuster of the Obama years, provided the occasion for the opening culture war salvo of the first Trump presidency. A week and a half after the 2016 election, then-Vice President-elect Mike Pence attended a Broadway performance of the show that ended with a curtain speech prepared by the creative team in which the actor Brandon Victor Dixon (who played Aaron Burr) spoke on behalf of 'the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us' and expressed hope that he would feel inspired to 'work on behalf of all of us.' (Eight years later, the content, timing and tone were matched almost note for note by the very first of this year's post-inaugural Trump controversies, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde's call for mercy and compassion during a prayer service. Forced to sit and listen in silence, Trump couldn't have looked unhappier if he'd been stuck at a Broadway musical other than 'Cats.') Much about the 'Hamilton' moment has now been forgotten — including the fact that Pence was already in the lobby when the speech was made and was basically fine with it; it was, of course, Trump who had a meltdown and demanded an apology. Days later, 'Saturday Night Live,' playing to an even more privileged live audience, derided the curtain speech as a sop to bubble-dwelling liberals; there's never been a shortage of people on the left, or elsewhere in the arts, who will sneer at theater the minute they sniff self-importance, although, in retrospect, that speech seems both appropriate and generous to a fault.
In the years that followed, political theater largely gave up on challenging the views of conservatives (to the extent that it ever tried to; it's hard to pick a fight with people who, by and large, don't show up to take the bait). It became, instead, an arena in which playwrights found fresh and energizing ways to involve and sometimes even indict their audiences. Jackie Sibblies Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, 'Fairview,' produced in New York in 2018 and brought back in 2019, was a meta-theatrical event in which a birthday party in the home of a Black family becomes an occasion for white characters to comment on the action and to play Black roles themselves; it ends with a Black character directly telling the audience that white people need to step aside and learn to listen to Black stories — and to underscore the point, white audience members are called up onstage as a way of denying them the safety of believing that they themselves aren't a culpable element of the dynamic they've just witnessed. Some white people who saw 'Fairview' felt pushed around; others experienced the intended discomfort but relished the theatricality of the gesture even if it came at their — our — expense.
In ways its author may not have anticipated, 'Fairview' turned out to be the shape of things to come, heralding the arrival of a stage subgenre in which theater itself — our relationship to it, our complacency about it, the wealth that allows only some of us to regularly buy tickets to it — became a central subject of what we were seeing. Heidi Schreck's 'What the Constitution Means to Me' explicitly presented a debate on Broadway in 2019 about who is left out of a text intended to enshrine American values and ended each performance by putting the fate of the Constitution to an audience referendum. Those in attendance voted not to discard it at most performances, but you couldn't fail to consider the combination of money, access, geography and cultural predilection that limited who 'we the people' were each night. (That self-awareness didn't make much difference to the conservative publication National Review, whose critic harrumphed about well-heeled elite-lefty audiences and 'their imaginary Constitution.')
Then came Covid-19 and, when live New York performances resumed after 18 months of dark theaters, the landscape had altered. During that hiatus, the protests over the murder of George Floyd breached whatever walls theater had managed to erect around itself and sparked a series of manifestoes, arguments and reckonings with the institutional whiteness and structural racism of much of American theater, both in New York and across the country. If there was one thing political theater could now speak about with authority, it was the democratic failures of theater itself.
The most provocative work of that time added up to a searing demand that audiences consider not only what they were watching but their own role in the troubled history of an art form more defined by gatekeeping than its leaders had ever admitted. The young Black playwright-actor Jordan E. Cooper's 'Ain't No Mo',' which played Off Broadway before the pandemic and on Broadway in 2022, is a scabrous revue-style comedy about a plan to repatriate all Black Americans to Africa that explicitly acknowledges its audience several times, notably in a profane call-and-response segment about Barack Obama that hilariously reminded white theatergoers that they were in a house that didn't, for that night, belong to them. And Suzan-Lori Parks's biting 'Sally & Tom,' staged at the Public last year, reimagines the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in the context of creative and cultural clashes between the director of a play about the couple (he's also playing Tom) and his romantic partner, the author (she's also playing Sally). One of the shows their fictional company produces, 'Listen Up, Whitey, Cause It's All Your Fault,' felt like a wink at any one of a half-dozen recent plays on New York stages. Shows like these, and pointed revivals of Alice Childress's 'Trouble in Mind' (a 1955 play about the hypocrisies of then-progressive antiracist theater) and David Henry Hwang's 2007 'Yellow Face' (which sprang out of a real-life white-person-playing-Asian casting controversy) all but demanded a surrender of neutrality from any theatergoer attempting to hold on to it: In different ways, the plays told their audiences, 'Like it or not, you're in this too.'
WHAT DO AUDIENCES want from political plays? Lately, the question seems to have been turned around: More often, it's, 'What does political theater want to do to its audience?' Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanize us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us? For the creators of theater, big-picture goals can sometimes come down to decisions as micro as how quickly to cut off a laugh or whether to hold for clapping after a line or steamroll over it. In writing 'Suffs,' 'I tried to avoid lines that ask for politically self-satisfied applause,' says Taub, 36, who also starred in the show as the suffragist Alice Paul. 'I didn't want this to be a show that liberals could sit and watch and then use to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side' … but I also didn't want them to leave [feeling] shamed or indicted.'
In November, Taub took a working vacation from 'Suffs' to play Emma Goldman in 'Ragtime,' the director of which, Lear deBessonet, was frequently in attendance, watching from the back. DeBessonet, 44, had talked with her cast before performances began about steeling themselves for 'whatever happens [in the election], whether people are coming to it in a state of grief or unknowing or elation. We took the stance that deeply committing to the stakes of the story and letting an audience parse it for themselves was the way to go,' she says. 'We didn't need to be trying to add contemporary commentary.' Nevertheless, deBessonet could sense the ground shift in the 2,257-seat City Center when Levy sang 'Back to Before' the night after the election had been called. 'I never saw so many shoulders shaking,' she says. 'To me, this points back to, What is theater as an art form uniquely good at? It's the ability to feel feelings with other people, in real time, as a community. It's a space that contemporary life doesn't offer us that frequently.' In adversarial times, that space inevitably starts to seem more essential.
DeBessonet's production was received so positively that there was instant talk of 'Ragtime' transferring to Broadway; if that happens, as is rumored, during the 2025-26 season, it's a safe bet that the words 'political theater' won't be at the top of the ads. It's not exactly considered a selling point for any show and, even for the people who create such work, the term is fraught. Toossi, who wrote 'English' while in grad school, feels some ambivalence about the label 'political play' — 'it can be easier for audiences to think of Middle Easterners as an issue than as people,' she says, adding that 'for me, what makes a play political is if its agenda is to make a certain group of people's lives better, and I fully cop to that.'
But in previews, Toossi, 33, still found herself negotiating, and sometimes resisting, the reaction of her audience. In one scene, Elham, a young, fiercely intelligent aspiring medical student, struggles with an oral presentation and splutters to her classmates, in halting English, 'I want everyone to know I am not idiot.' The instructor corrects her, and Elham's next line, 'I am not an idiot,' gets a reliably huge laugh. 'Then she starts crying, and everyone's stomach drops,' says Toossi, who began to weep herself when she first heard the Broadway audience roar at the line. 'The intention is to implicate the audience in that laughter because the desire to get an audience to interrogate its privilege sounds to me like what a political play is or can be,' she says. On paper, 'English' can read as a deeply observed group character study. But when it's performed in front of a mostly white, mostly affluent crowd, it becomes something else as well. 'Because of who we're talking to — and that's who I wanted to talk to,' she says, 'yes, I think it's a political play, and I've made my peace with that.'
She's not alone right now. This spring, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, a Tony winner last season for the political-meets-personal Southern drama 'Appropriate,' jumps back into the fray with 'Purpose,' a satire about a Black family dynasty in Chicago that bears some resemblance to Jesse Jackson's. It will be joined on Broadway by at least three plays that, though they weren't planned in anticipation of this political era, may be defined in the public conversation by the degree to which they do or don't feel right for it. Aside from a big-ticket revival of Shakespeare's 'Othello' in which Denzel Washington faces off against Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney will star in a stage adaptation of 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' his 2005 movie about the mainstream media and McCarthyism; and a revival of David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1984) with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk will test New York's appetite for a conservative playwright's signature work about remorseless hustlers. Political shows, whether new work or revivals, always vie for relevance but don't want to be seen as pouncing on a particular issue in a way that could be mocked as too on-the-nose; there's no greater praise for a play than saying it speaks to the moment without straining to do so. It will be a spring of auspicious timing (or not) and unplanned and/or fortuitous resonance, since we're not likely to get our first look at work directly inspired by the 2024 election or what has followed it until the fall of 2026 at the earliest.
That will arrive in a world we can only pretend to be able to predict, and that lag may be the steepest hurdle political theater faces during the second Trump term. Breakneck speed is, in theater, not generally achievable. And at a time when many people feel we tumble over the edge of a new cliff every day, it's almost impossible to imagine what a timely artistic response might look or sound like. Will it offer catharsis, or solidarity, or pushback, or hope or outrage? Or will it just feel like a hand to hold on to while in free fall?