Category: Theater

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic,” said Oscar Wilde.

For the better part of the last decade, I was a freelance theatre critic in Atlanta. I spent many nights and weekends in the aisle seat watching stories unfold onstage and then participating in musings about what I’d seen with strangers.

That decade also highlighted for me the stories I wasn’t seeing: about poor people, people of color, people living with disabilities, or transgender or nonbinary folks.

That is part of what motivated me to write The Wash, about the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881. During this important but often overlooked event in American history, Black laundresses in Atlanta refused to wash clothes until they were granted the power to set their own rates and control their wages. They faced resistance from their customers, the government, and within their own ranks. But they ultimately prevailed, growing from a few dozen women on strike to more than 3,000 in less than three weeks.

My other motivation to write The Wash, which took me six years on and off (with a lot of time off) to finish, is that I have often rolled my eyes at the tendency of theatres to depict Black life as past life. But for me this story resonates so much with the present, speaking to the labor movements currently gathering strength in the auto, service, and theatre industries. (The Wash is currently in the midst of an eight-week run in Atlanta, co-produced by Synchronicity Theatre and Impact Theatre. In 2025, the play will be at the Black Rep in St. Louis, March 12-30, 2025, and co-produced by Perceptions Theatre and Prop Thtr, October 2025.)

Stepping from critic to playwright has been an exhilarating and terrifying experience. I was only half-joking with a mentor when I said that if the play was bad I’d have to move to a different state and live in anonymity. In all seriousness, the process of developing this world premiere play has shown me that playwrights and critics have more in common than they think. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about playwriting from theatre criticism (and vice versa):

1. You have to have a strong pitch. In journalism, whenever a writer pitches an editor, the editor usually asks, what’s the angle—what’s the hook? Why this story now? I’ve heard that Tarell Alvin McCraney often asked students at Yale Drama School, why is this a play? When it came to The Wash, I knew that I could never get an assignment from a daily paper to write an article connecting a largely forgotten labor strike to labor movements of today while also putting the world of 1881 in its proper context. The story needed more space; it needed the intimacy and immediacy of theatre. I can summarize the play in an elevator, but I’m hoping the experience of the play stays with people far longer. 

2. People have to care about who the characters are before they care about what they do. As someone whose journalism education was primarily in magazines, I developed the habit of writing longform pieces early. But as the speed of information has increased rapidly in the last decade, many news outlets have stopped publishing long pieces. These days, reviews are 400-600 words if you’re lucky. Still, I’ve learned that people will read long if the characters are compelling. The same is true for theatre and other media. TV creator Shonda Rhimes often talks about starting with characters who make strong choices. If you can make people fall in love with a person, they’ll read (or watch) till the end.

3. The story you start out telling and the one you end up telling may not be the same. The best storytellers are the curious ones. I can’t tell you how many times I went into an interview or a review expecting one thing and leaving with something altogether different. New discoveries are a part of the joy of connecting through stories. When I started writing The Wash, I resisted it being an ensemble piece, but it is one. I think playwrights especially are best served when they focus on the writing and let the story be what it’s going to be.

4. Everything is better with editors. Dramaturgs never get the credit they deserve, so let me shout out the teams at Essential Theatre and Hush Harbor Lab as well as my dramaturg for The Wash, Antonia McCain, for helping me make the 110-page article I started out with into 94-page script. The director Brenda Porter and producers at Synchronicity Theatre challenged me repeatedly to answer the question, what are you trying to convey here? I’ve noticed that playwrights like Lucas Hnath give you all the mitigating circumstances in the first 10 pages, then we spend the remaining time untangling them. The same is true for journalists: Your first two paragraphs have to tell people the whole point. You can’t meander or be too precious about the words. Editors (and dramaturgs) are there to help you see that.

5. The community you build will be the audience you have. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve heard theatre leaders make is to think they’re competing with Netflix. In my opinion, the real competition for live theatre audiences is third places: coffee shops, bars, local hangs, parks, houses of worship, and other spaces where people feel a sense of home and community. Earlier in my career, I did marketing and community engagement for nonprofit theatres, and I figured out quickly that the show has to be more than a show to really engage a community, and that engagement has to be constant. I carried that knowledge into my journalism career, where I didn’t just go see shows I was reviewing; I saw as much as I could.

For The Wash, it was important for me to collaborate with theatres that understand the importance of community engagement. Synchronicity Theatre does pay-what-you-can performances every Wednesday. Impact Theatre offers a senior matinee as well as a free event in their neighborhood that people can attend whether they’re seeing the show or not. In addition, for The Wash, our sound designer Kacie Willis Lauders tapped into her network to host entrepreneur nights for folks to meetup before the show.

During one pay-what-you-can performance, we donated a portion of ticket sales to the Tiny Blessings Foundation, a local nonprofit that provides care packages to new mothers who are unhoused. We also hosted an event called Indigo Night, where we invited local, up-and-coming chefs to sell food in the lobby an hour before the show. They didn’t have to pay a tabling fee or share profit with the theatre, and audience members didn’t have to think about dinner.

All of these events were successful because we had already built the relationships to make them so. When you show people that you’re invested in their thriving, they’ll reciprocate and become invested in yours. That’s a lesson I take with me into all my work, on the page or the stage.

Kelundra Smith (she/her) is the managing editor of American Theatre.

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If you have never heard of the phenomenon that is tabletop role-playing games (or TTRPG to insiders), it may come as a shock that this low-fi, fantasy-based leisure activity is not the niche pastime you may imagine it to be.

While there are certainly elements of nerdy appeal to TTRPG (as depicted in sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory, for example), its global following has legions of mainstream fans who gather, usually in-person, for regular gaming sessions where, with the help of a few simple prompts, their imaginations alone lead them to create stories and adventures that could be carried on for weeks, months or even years at a time.

For Perth/Boorloo-based playwright Scott McArdle the allure of TTRPG first caught his attention at the tender age of 14, and he has hardly missed a session of the popular TTRPG game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) since then… and that was 17 years ago.

But aside from the game having a strong presence in McArdle’s personal life for almost two decades, the artist has also found ways to bring some of the magic he feels while gaming to his work as a playwright, performer and theatre-maker.

And, somewhat surprisingly, this melding of TTRPG and contemporary theatre has been a masterstroke that’s allowed McArdle and his creative collaborators to grow a sizeable fan base and help dispel the idea that the mainstay audience of independent theatre is art world insiders and/or fellow theatre artists.

Instead, McArdle and his artistic collaborators – namely theatre-makers and puppeteers Amberly Cull and Nick Pages-Oliver – are proving that in harnessing the magic of gameplay to tell their stories, they can attract non-traditional theatre crowds to their work and break down longstanding barriers to arts access along their way.

So, how exactly are they doing this? As the artists explain, there are a number of factors behind their unique formula that is expanding their audience base at a time when the sector is in great need of audience growth.

Dungeons and Dragons improv a gateway for new audiences

For McArdle, perhaps the strongest quality of TTRPG is in their endless potential for collaborative storytelling.

From a quick look at McArdle’s career to date, it’s clear the artist didn’t waste time in applying this distinctive form of storytelling to his stage work to great effect.

He explains, ‘For the past nine years, I’ve been doing an improv comedy show in Perth/Boorloo called Improv RPG, which adapts games like D&D to the stage, and it has been a massive hit.

‘We’ve performed it at Fringe World for years, where we won the Fringe World Comedy Award, and we still routinely sell out shows,’ he says, adding that he suspects the show’s long-running success centres on one simple truth.

‘In bringing D&D to the stage in this way, I think we have created a community with our audience who see that we’re not making highbrow art, but something accessible to them and their passions,’ McArdle says.

Read: The performing arts company breaking every convention in the book … and winning

‘It’s basically the opposite of everything I was taught at drama school,’ he continues. ‘So it attracts people who feel like theatre is something that is not for them.

‘But I strongly believe we should be making theatre for exactly these audiences – and by that I mean the people who will be amazed and entertained by it,’ he says.

Untapped wellsprings of audiences in societal subcultures?

As well as impressing Fringe audiences and live comedy fans, not surprisingly, McArdle’s improv show has attracted droves of Perth’s local TTRPG community, who routinely turn up to join the fun.

However, it’s one thing to bring new audiences to your improv comedy show during a Fringe festival, but quite another to see these audiences return to watch your full-length contemporary theatre work in an independently produced season outside of the festival calendar.

But that’s exactly what McArdle and his creative team are achieving with their latest show, which is once again drawing Perth’s TTRPG gaming community into the theatre.

This new work is a puppet-musical titled Same Time Next Week, and it tells the story of a group of role-play gamers whose weekly ritual of Dungeons and Dragons is a strong bond that holds them together as one of them faces serious illness.

As co-creator Nick Pages-Oliver explains, the team’s melding of puppetry, music theatre and TTRPG themes in their new work may appear a risky choice on the surface, but in fact it’s a deliberate move to ensure the theatre doors stay wide open for their existing gaming audiences, who they are sure will once again turn out in force to see the show.

‘The audience for this work are people that Scott has already tapped into with his show Improv RPG,’ Pages-Oliver says. ‘Because we know these are people who are not afraid to take a risk on watching new theatre. So, I think this is a great audience to tap into in the first instance.’

But looking beyond the local gaming community, Pages-Oliver, Cull and McArdle see the work as having wide appeal to other mainstream audiences who are currently seeking uplifting experiences against a backdrop of rising life pressures and disastrous world events.

‘We actually think now is the perfect time in the cultural landscape to develop a work like this that sparks joy, and inspires hope and wonder in people,’ Pages-Oliver says.

‘But this is also a story that doesn’t shy away from challenging issues and real subjects that affect us,’ he continues. ‘It’s more that we want to use the sense of play and wonder of music theatre and puppetry to tell these stories on serious subjects.’

Read: How collaboration bolsters creativity

The artist adds that as a young freelance theatre-maker and performer he sees great potential in broadening theatre’s reach through the exciting cross-genre style of work that he and his collaborators are currently exploring.

‘I feel somewhat disheartened by the current situation where major theatre companies feel they can’t take big risks, and where their audiences are generally subscribers who have been going to their shows for decades or they are young people trying to get into the industry,’ he says.

‘But we are really passionate about growing new audiences for theatre, and so I think we should absolutely continue to tap into these different subcultures to broaden our reach.’

Same Time Next Week at The Blue Room Theatre runs from 13 to 31 August.

In 1968, the regional theatre movement was finding its legs just as the Civil Rights Movement reached a major inflection point. About a month before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Zelda Fichandler, founding artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., sent a memo titled “Confidential Plan” to the board about her intentions to integrate the theatre’s acting company and audience. The memo is included in The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater, a new book edited by Todd London, out now from TCG Books. London, a longtime arts leader, educator, and chronicler of the nonprofit theatre, spent a decade compiling this collection of essays and speeches, a project Fichandler herself began nearly 20 years ago, and was still at work on with him when she died in 2016.

Reflecting on the complementary roles of the actor and the audience, Fichandler, in a chapter titled “Beyond Black and White,” still has much to teach us about engaging and empowering diverse communities through theatre. As London summarizes in the book’s introduction, in Fichandler’s own words: “Is [theatre] doing human work? Is it bettering our society? Is it truly representative? Is it excellent?” Fichandler writes not only about integrated programming, but about the necessity of changing the way white people see, think about, and speak about Black people in society, and vice versa. She emphasizes that the artist, the text, and the audience must arrive at an equitable exchange in order for theatre to happen.

The version of her “Confidential Plan” excerpted below includes parts of the March 1968 memo, as well as a revised version published in the Sunday Star on June 30, 1968. It’s important to note that Fichandler’s initial efforts were unsuccessful from her perspective and that she reworked this plan throughout her tenure at Arena Stage. In the book’s footnotes, London writes that he decided to keep Fichandler’s usage of “Negro” and he/him as presumptive gender-neutral pronouns, both for historical accuracy and “as an unvarnished guide” to the evolution of Zelda’s thinking. 

Aesthetic Power and the Moment

Where are we at Arena Stage? When we look around, inside and out, what do we see?

Arena’s record has been, all in all, a good one. A way of work has evolved over the years that, without being rigid or over-codified, seems to release the life locked behind the words of the script. A theatre structure of architectural distinction, designed to meet the needs of an existing company and make a strong statement about the collective nature of theatre, has been put up and paid for. We have, little by little, gathered around us an audience with a real, rather than opportunistic, relationship to the theatre. Our personnel tend to want to stay, because they tend to expand rather than shrivel in this environment. A company and “company style” have emerged. “Artistic standards,” sometimes excellent, never fall below a certain level and, considering the lack of subsidy, are phenomenal. Our repertory is satisfactory-to-challenging—a constant, often significant examination of the human condition via plays that speak to our own age and audience. After 18 years, three homes, and 150 productions, Arena looks and feels young. And healthy, with houses over 90 percent filled and a deficit no bigger than it should be.

When I look around, however, beyond our too-perfected technique and what [art critic] Harold Rosenberg calls the “canons of our craft,” a deep, visceral intuition tells me that the power of our art is being blunted, deadened, and caged. 

Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital city, is the first city in the country to become predominantly (63 percent) Negro. Its school system is over 90 percent Negro. Yet we have no Negro actors in our permanent company, and attendance by Negro members of the community—except for plays like The Great White Hope, Blood Knot and Othello, which have Negro actors onstage—is practically nil. The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders’ recent report concluded that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.” It warned against the development, in our major cities, of an urban “apartheid.” This is the single most pressing social phenomenon of our day and, with isolated exceptions, absent from our stage. One would think it did not exist.

The Negro’s struggle for power—economic power, business power, political, intellectual, psychological, human power—foundationally affects his relationships with other Negroes, with whites, and with himself. This struggle reverberates through contemporary American life. Each of us feels its vibrations every day. And yet we come into our theatre at night as if into an unreal world: A white audience sits around a stage upon which a white company tells “sad tales of the death of kings.” Surely we are in the wrong place! And it is not a geographical dislocation; it is a profound aesthetic dislocation. The style of our art is cut off from its source.

In Tell It Like It Is, provocative Negro columnist Chuck Stone remembers:

My minister in Hartford always told the story of a little boy who used to race the old trolley cars pulled by horses. The boy would run along for a while with the trolley car, sprint ahead, and then drop back to taunt the motorman. “What say, Mr. Motorman, can’t you go any faster?” “Yes, son, I can,” replied the motorman, “but I’ve got to stay with the car.”

We are all—all the theatres—simply staying with the car. By doing so, we deny to our work a dimension of tension, abrasion, contemporaneity, connection, immediacy, aliveness—a dimension of power.

Arena Stage proposes to leave the car and try running it alone. It proposes to enlarge its present company to include a substantial number of Negro actors. And it proposes, for a minimum of three years—or as long as the self-definition and self-determination of Black people and the relationship between Black and white people is the most pervasive circumstance of our lives—to select a repertory that makes organic—aesthetic—sense for an interracial company. In this way we can best discover and release the power within our art. 

The Actor

We approached the plan by exclusion and negation—what it is not. Now we should examine it from the opposite angle and see how it adds to, deepens, and enriches the art of the theatre by means of the artist, the audience, the stage event.

The art of the theatre concerns us first. Any single Negro actor is an individual and, therefore, not like anyone else, a state he has in common with any white actor. He is also an artist with the desire to use his talent in the appropriate way: to share his human insights by demonstrating human actions on the stage. This, too, he has in common with any white actor.

But every human being is what he has been born and what he has experienced. We are each a constellation of traits of personality, mind, body, and behavior, some there in the cradle, some picked up along the way, and we are what happens to us. When two people meet, two pasts meet; we encounter one another encumbered. Surely the Negro actor, coming into power at this moment of history, knowing exclusion from the dominant white culture and therefore having a special view of it, has the capacity for a unique and particular expressiveness on the stage.

The movement of the Negro adult now taking place within American life is cataclysmic. It offers the artist, who comes to grips with our moment, catalytic opportunities for emotional confrontation and human change. If Negro playwrights can find their audience. If Negro actors have the talent and opportunity for sufficient training and experience. All the stuff of art and life is presently at hand and ready to be shared: loneliness, anger, guilt, love, paranoia, hate, derision, need, role-playing, duplicity, hope, failure, treachery, injustice, randomness, emergence, frustration, despair—the whole kit and caboodle of being alive.

The fact of Blackness is something white people simply cannot feel or know. It is like no other exclusion. “Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro,” says Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, written from his experience as a Negro and psychiatrist in the Antilles. Fanon dissects the psycho-existential created in the Negro by virtue of his Blackness; by analyzing it, he seeks to destroy it. Fanon’s book describes the odyssey of a human soul from the deepest darkness into the light, the widest arc of human experience. It is an Everyman story of neurotic personality recovering into health, a journey most of us have not taken and from which we have everything to learn.

When we exclude the Negro actor from our stages and company, we not only deprive him as an artist of the opportunity to use his talents and to grow, we deprive our work of a mine of human experience that could only enrich it and shake it up. We deprive our work of tonalities and reverberations and attitudes toward white society that may be benevolent or not, that may be abrasive or not, but that are bound to be particular, deeply felt, and urgent. We deprive our work of a degree of motion, confrontation, personal exposure, contact, friction, union—of a continuously alive dialectic of change through experience—that a company of both white and Black actors could achieve, but that one of only white actors is less likely to. We deprive our work of complexity, immediacy, verticality, and learning. We deprive it of power.

The Audience

Without the audience as terminus, the art of the actor—the art of the theatre itself—does not exist. I have my own version of the old scientific riddle about whether, if no one is there to hear it, a tree that falls in the forest produces a sound: That is, when the tree falls, what is the listener (assuming he is there) called upon to do?

When a play happens, the listener, the audience, becomes a primary doer. He has an urgent and inexorable task to perform: He must answer back—not always out loud, but as good as. He has to catch the ball of action and return it to the players in a shape changed by his own reaction. Based on the rules of the game we call theatre, the audience must keep up this play of reciprocal connection for the whole evening. Because change can come about only through direct experience and not through passive watching, it is this very rule that causes change in him.

Audiences don’t just come to see our work, they are a part of it. The nature and composition of the audience has a great deal to do with the “success”—that is, the degree of aliveness, expressiveness, tension, depth, and energy—of a performance. Which is to say, the audience has a great deal to do with whether or not a performance achieves its power as an art. Actors know this by instinct and experience. “What kind of house is it?” they ask. Not the stage event alone nor the audience alone, then, but the two together in the moment-to moment life they invent and share: a spiraling excitement of discovery and gift. 

Homogeneous audiences, who connect with a play in a predictably uniform way, with one pervading attitude, are anathema to the pulse of a living art. It isn’t coincidental that, in all its years of history, Arena seemed most alive while we were playing The Great White Hope and Blood Knot this year, both with interracial casts, both drawing an audience more diverse than usual with regard to race, income level, age, education, occupation, human experience, preoccupations and interests, patterns of entertainment, and expectations about theatre and life in general.

Certainly, the sight of an all-white audience in a theatre that professes engagement with life outside its walls—in an urban city with a majority Negro population—evokes Disneyland. It goes beyond the preposterous to the gut of art itself. Said Henry James: “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” He did not have in mind, of course, the “conversation’’ between audience and performance, but he might have. The human dialogue. It is the silent but essential process for the making of a pulsating theatrical art. One can almost “hear” it going on—not only between play and audience, but also among the audience themselves. It is the real movement taking place—the movement between men’s minds.

Nothing could serve the theatrical art more profoundly than the presence of a heterogeneous, diversified, interracial audience. Our American theatres have already suffered hugely, deep within the core of their work, for the lack of it.

—Zelda Fichandler, March 1968

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