A new series of essays captures American theater as it attempts to reject some of its foundational inequities.
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Forty years ago, Jesse Green, then a recent college graduate with a degree in English and theater, was a general assistant at the Williamstown Theater Festival. He made waffles, cleaned toilets and performed other work, all of it unpaid and “some of it unsafe and some of it degrading,” he wrote later.
The festival introduced a young Mr. Green to the excitement of professional theater, but it came with a warning. “In order to be worthy of the great art form, we also had to be subjugated,” he said.
Now the chief theater critic for The New York Times, Mr. Green examines, in a series of essays called “The Reformation,” the long-held notion that actors and others who toil in the theater must suffer for their art. The four essays, all written by Mr. Green, explore the consequences of the American theater industry’s long-overdue admission that bullying, dismal pay, dangerous working conditions and mistreatment and exclusion of artists of color cannot be excused as the purported cost of great art, he said. Blending reporting and criticism, he aims to understand how calls for change in each of these areas will reshape the industry and the work it produces.
Mr. Green began developing the series during the period of darkened marquees and Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. Criticism of the industry had swelled into a 29-page set of demands from the coalition known as We See You, White American Theater, which included suggestions to rename half of all Broadway theaters, impose term limits for industry leaders and require that at least half of those in casts and creative teams be people of color.
“That was sort of a hook: Here is a really well-stated list of complaints and suggestions and demands,” Mr. Green said. “I began to think, so what are the theaters going to do about it? And also, what am I going to do about it?”
He brought the idea to Nicole Herrington, The Times’s theater editor, who agreed that the moment was worth documenting. “Who knows if in 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we might look back and this was a pivotal moment or not?” she said. “But we wanted to take stock of what was happening.”
The essays are being published once a month through the summer, connecting the end of the last theater season to the beginning of the next one.
The series’s inaugural essay, published a few days before the Tony Awards in June, examined the abusive practices of some of American theater’s foundational creators, directors and choreographers. The second considered calls for pay equity in theater, and the third, which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, is about the physical and emotional demands made of theater artists. The fourth installment, to come later this summer, will address diversity and equity in theater.
The assignment is a change of pace for Mr. Green, who often writes reviews of new shows as quickly as overnight. He referred to the interviews, thinking and preparation for “The Reformation” as “the huge part of the iceberg under the water.” Writing the 2,500- to 3,500-word reported essays, the first drafts of which can take a few days or longer, is “the tiny little tip that’s sticking above the water,” he said.
His monthslong research process has included interviews with almost 30 people, most of whom are not celebrated stars.
He spoke to a costume designer in the Midwest who makes less than $20,000 a year, an associate literary director who was laid off in the depths of the pandemic in 2020 and a dramaturg who took on a second job as a communications consultant — all for the series’s second essay, about the harsh financial realities of a life in theater.
Such weighty themes are challenging to reflect in artwork, said Felicia Vasquez, a staff editor for art and print who designed the series. She knew Deena So’Oteh, an illustrator whose Halloween cover for The New York Times Book Review featured five pairs of bloodshot eyes rolling back into the head of a spectral figure, could handle the job.
“My work in general skews a little moody,” admitted Ms. So’Oteh, who sketches out several concepts for each illustration on her iPad. In most of them, large objects loom over smaller ones, casting long shadows across the page: “There is this juxtaposition of one individual versus this giant system,” she said.
Mr. Green believes that system has reached an inflection point and that its art may evolve in ways both exciting and provocative to the old guard.
He welcomes the possibilities. “The theater must change,” he said. “It has to take into account the demands and wishes of people who have pretty bravely come forth in the last few years to say what’s wrong, and allow the form to become what it becomes next.”
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