Arts

As the midterm elections approach, Tim Teeman talks to Lynn Nottage, Heidi Schreck, Oskar Eustis and more about democracy, authoritarianism, resistance—and what a play can actually accomplish.

At a recent performance of Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, the audience at 59E59 Theaters sat quietly rapt while watching Jenny Lyn Bader’s 90-minute play re-creating a real-life moment in history that unfolded in Berlin in 1933. In a spartan detention cell, the historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt is questioned by a Gestapo officer about her suspicion-raising activities at the Prussian State Library.

Bader’s predominantly two-person play—first performed in 2024 and directed by Ari Laura Keith—explores the pair’s predictable points of difference, but also a nervy, nuanced connection that builds between Arendt (Ella Kaille) and the officer (Brett Temple); it’s dramatic and tense, but also drily witty. Despite his determination to interrogate her, the young officer seems to want to help Arendt (the “Mrs. Stern” of the title refers to the surname Arendt took during her first marriage), knowing the peril that awaits her should she stay in Germany, as Hitler’s ascendancy continued.

Bader thinks there is a hunger among both artistic directors and audiences “for plays that make sense of the world. People are looking for meaning in a time when democracy is under attack, when guns are being brought to school, when certain ethnic groups and refugees are under attack, when people are being pushed out of our country in such a violent way.”

Mrs. Stern’s examination of fascism, autocracy, and resistance carries pulsating meanings and echoes for the present day—and is one of a number of Off-Broadway offerings this season confronting political and hot-button cultural issues.

As the November 3 midterm elections emerge into sharpened view, Off-Broadway theater appears determined to meet the moment, with a panoply of topical plays and musicals rooted in past and present, with themes including (deep breath) American identity, racism, misogyny, Trump, LGBTQ+ rights, fascism, gentrification, Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford’s high-profile encounters with Washington, DC’s political patriarchy, the ownership of women’s bodies, domestic violence, the Catholic Church, QAnon, male incels, resistance, and online toxicity.

The ever-vexing questions of what makes a play “political”—explicit or non-explicit in its themes; symbolic, mythic, or raw and very real in its focus and conception, all of course subject to individual interpretations—will inevitably emerge from each.

The opening salvo of this autumn’s Off-Broadway surge was sounded by the Public Theater’s Public Works late summer production, Public Record, in which a hundred New Yorkers told their own culturally diverse, moving experiences of living in the city. In early October, the Public will premiere Triumph, a new 20-minute Caryl Churchill play, “a smart, sly, indirect look at the imperial pretensions of our president,” Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public, tells The Hat, noting the word you’re left with if you remove the i, u, and h from the title.

Also this fall, in no particular order (and this is not a complete or exhaustive list), there has been, is, or soon will be: the return of Elizabeth Marvel and Lee Sunday Evans’s The Ford/Hill Project, Sarah Jones’s America, Who Hurt You?, Marin Ireland’s Pre-Existing Condition, Max Wolf Friedlich’s The Holes, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Ms. Blakk for President, a revival of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (with a revival of Odets’s Awake and Sing! scheduled to land on Broadway in mid-December), a musical adaptation of the race-themed Imitation of Life (written by Lynn Nottage, with music by John Legend, and previously best-known in its 1959 Lana Turner–starring movie incarnation), Katie Cappiello’s The Body of Mary: A Play in Three Acts (of God), the return of Andrew Fox and Joel Sinensky’s Slam Frank, Anne Washburn’s ANON, Richard Nelson’s We’ll See (his next Rhinebeck Panorama play set on the night of the midterm election), an Irish Repertory Theatre revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape, GUAC (written and performed by Manuel Oliver, the father of a Parkland shooting victim), Laura Zlatos’s Show Trial, Susan Glaspell’s The Verge, Dan Giles’s The Charioteer, Else Went’s Degenerates directed by Emma Rosa Went, Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home, and Matthew Freeman’s The Ask (about ACLU fundraising, written by Freeman, a current ACLU staffer).

There is also a season of 10-minute plays, conceived by Vermont’s performing arts center, the Flynn, titled Women+ On the Edge of Democracy, that are intended to be performed before the midterms across the nation by community groups. The playlets, which will also be performed in one day at the Flynn itself, are written by 36 leading female playwrights including Nottage (Ruined and Sweat; both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in 2009 and 2017, respectively) and Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me).

Coming later this winter at the Public, co-commissioned by Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, The Surge by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, a docudrama that dramatizes what Eustis calls ICE’s “murderous invasion” of Minnesota under the banner name of Operation Metro Surge, which resulted in the headline-making killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Eustis says that Blank and Jensen embedded themselves in local communities to write the play, which is “damning but also incredibly upbeat,” as it shows how Minneapolis communities resisted ICE. In spring 2028, Eustis reveals, the Public is also planning a festival of Ukrainian performance in celebration of that country’s “inspiring” stand against the aggression of Russia’s President Putin.

The question of what the purpose of political theater is, Lynn Nottage tells The Hat, is really to ask, “What is the power of art and what is power of storytelling? Number one: to interrogate our own mythology. Also, to put certain ideas into the universe that may have often been unspoken, but sometimes necessary for us to hear. Another reason is to provoke us into action. It’s really easy, particularly now, for us to be complacent and wait for others to do something. So often we find we are doing nothing because we find we’ve become too comfortable doomscrolling.”

The roster of productions this fall provides a perspective on the current state of political theater, and where its future may lie: thriving on smaller stages, while a more-timid climate pervades larger venues. Eustis is most struck that while Off-Broadway and smaller theaters are packed with politically themed content, larger theaters and institutions are steering noticeably clear.

“We’re at a tricky moment for political theater because we’re at a tricky moment for theater as a whole,” Eustis says. “The cracks in the system have grown into actual canyons, crevices and gorges. Most of the nonprofit institutions and commercial theaters feel themselves deeply in danger. What has happened at the Kennedy Center”—currently under threat of demolition by the Trump administration—“is a nightmare model for the rest of us. As a result, the big institutions have been infected by a wave of timidity that is regrettable but completely understandable. People are scared to death. Theaters are not speaking up, being controversial, or taking deep risks.

“Theaters are afraid that, because of the actions of the Trump administration, other sectors of society have been given permission to not support progressive, left, or inclusive causes,” continues Eustis. “The loss of federal money is not the biggest fear, but the war on DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]—which has given permission to withdraw support from theaters that do too much Black work. That kind of withholding of resources would have been unthinkable a decade ago. It wouldn’t have been said out loud. Now the president campaigns on it, and it trickles down to theater’s funders.”

Are larger theaters running scared of the Trump administration when it comes to programming political work?

“Absolutely,” says Eustis, revealing he could only garner the support of three theaters—“and I’ve been doing this a long time, I know everyone”—when searching for signatories for a protest letter he had composed following news last year of Trump’s intention to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Everybody is scared,” says Eustis, accepting that he and the Public exist “in the bluest of bubbles” in New York City. “I’m safe, I’m not claiming any moral high ground. Yes, there’s a lot of political theater by young people in smaller theaters, but they’re not reaching big audiences that larger theaters can attract. And the tension—between the smaller spaces programming political work and the larger spaces not programming it—is palpable. Artists are making amazing and meaningful political pieces. We as theaters have to give them the platforms to perform them.”

Theater was invented to talk about the most urgent issues of our time, Eustis says. “The earliest dramatists were not talking about marital problems. The Oresteia [written by Aeschylus in 458 BCE] was about the invention of the justice system and how to break the cycle of killing and revenge. The Greeks thought it important every citizen go to the theater, and today’s theater should be performing a similar function. If we’re trying not to offend people and just be good entertainment, we’re going to wither—not just artistically, but audiences won’t need us. They can get the same on their iPhones.”

Eustis has blunt advice for larger theaters running scared of Trump. “Do not underestimate the desire among your audience for boldness. People are desperate for theaters to channel their voices and not be afraid. Courage is infectious. People are drawn to it. Theaters should be the joyous resistance. We’re the Knicks in 5.”

–

“For as long as we have been attacked, we have learned to hone our voices”

The political plays Off-Broadway this fall feature worlds and messages both big and small, emphatic and subtle.

Nottage’s Women+ play was inspired by how the Trump administration has “attacked powerful women of color in positions of authority,” including New York Attorney General Letitia James; Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett; Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University; and, from the 19th century, the poet Phillis Wheatley, whose history-making authorship was questioned because of her race and sex.

Nottage hopes the play “shows the ways in which our voices have been continually challenged, and why Black women are often the most outspoken speakers of the truth in this country. Misogynoir is a particularly insidious form of bigotry. Black women are often the first and easiest targets. For as long as we have been attacked, we have learned to hone our voices, and those voices have become quite dangerous adversaries for the people trying to stop free speech.”

Alongside playwright Dominique Morisseau, Nottage is also working on another project, Under Siege, the basis of which ponders why so many powerful Black women have been forced out of their jobs in recent years. Nottage and Morisseau have reached out to over 35 leading Black female playwrights, including Katori Hall, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Jones, and Danai Gurira, who each write a page of script, then pose a question at the end of that page for the next playwright to address. The piece, produced by the National Black Theatre, is a dialogue chain, inspired, Nottage says, by Hank Willis Thomas and Chris Johnson’s Question Bridge: Black Males project (which they conceived in collaboration with Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair). Nottage is also one of the artists taking part in Fall of Freedom, “a nationwide wave of creative resistance” centered around “an urgent call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian forces sweeping our nation.”

Dan Giles, playwright of The Charioteer, says his play, about an older brother and younger sister who become estranged as he becomes more involved in environmental activism, is about how each sibling “impacts” the other’s life over a decade. “They grew up in a pretty suburban world disengaged from politics,” Giles says. “The play is about her learning right from wrong from him, and how the way she encounters his politics—and he is someone who doesn’t always do right by her as a sibling—transforms her life for better and worse.”

The intellectual and emotional heart of the play comes from Giles’s own feelings of “hopelessness” around climate change, how it should be addressed, “and how do you cultivate hope or act purposefully or lead a meaningful life under circumstances that seem hopeless.”

The personal and political are “definitely intertwined” in his play, says Giles, whose own favorite politically hued plays—Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—feature canvases of colorfully clashing reality and fantasy.

ANON “is both very political and not political at the same time,” says Washburn of her latest play, at MCC. “What it’s looking at is the intensely online culture—more QAnon than MAGA, though the two are deeply related—that has been the driver of the last 10 years and our current political moment.” The conflict between lead character Jeannie (Crystal Finn) and her gay neighbors is a clash of “symbolic thinking.”

Just as Shakespeare in his plays questioned how we dramatize ourselves, so ANON, Washburn hopes, analyzes “the power we take from retelling our own personal stories, and how we situate ourselves in larger stories and movements.”

Finn says her character disappears down online QAnon rabbit holes and high-pitched chatrooms, as she becomes more infuriated by her neighbors’ rainbow Pride flag. For Finn, Washburn’s play is an exploration of two different households and “a kind of psychological portrait of the algorithmic media environment we’re in. We watch Jeannie become radicalized on the internet and painfully lost to her own family. But the play isn’t moralistic in a simple way. It contains the recognizable and the mundane, but also people facing a real reckoning—something they and we cannot turn away from.”

Max Wolf Friedlich, playwright of the critically acclaimed The Holes, notes the slipperiness of the term “political theater.” It can refer to overtly political works, like Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project, which was a notable and influential work for Friedlich when he was young, or be implicit in the structure and characters of a play like The Holes.

Friedlich also wrote the Off-Broadway to Broadway transfer Job, about a young tech employee effectively taking her therapist hostage. The Holes, which is centered on a bar in an Upstate New York town where a mysterious, unseen man supplies unknown pleasures only to male customers in a backroom, plays on tensions between urban and rural, the moneyed and poor, and the relentless forces of gentrification.

As Freidlich notes, The Holes, featuring impressive performances by Bubba Weiler, Grantham Coleman, Tina Benko, and Jack Mulhern, is a play “about men, male loneliness, needs, and repression, which are often huge drivers of violence and policymaking in this country.”

The current crop of politically themed plays is exciting, Friedlich says, and part of an “incredibly transformative time and place in theater.”

–

“It’s messy and a lot, and that’s democracy”

Connections across time and among communities are the theoretical underpinnings for much of the current political work on stage.

Laura Zlatos, playwright of Show Trial at the Tank, explains that the play was drawn from the real-life transcripts of the 1950 show trial of Czechoslovakian democracy and women’s rights activist Milada Horáková, which was used as propaganda by the then-Stalinist regime. Executed shortly after the trial, her remains were never found. Recordings of her trial, used by Zlatos in her writing of the play, reveal how courageous Horáková was in forcefully defending her beliefs. She has long been rehabilitated as a national hero in the modern Czech and Slovak Republics.

Theaters that are programming political work are responding to what audiences want in this current political moment, says Zlatos. “They understand they have a responsibility as agencies with voices and power to show work that is challenging and which maybe will make some people feel uncomfortable.”

Show Trial satirizes the sham trial Horáková was subjected to as dark comedy, looking “at the absurdity of authoritarian justice and how it was used then and how it is used today in the USA and around the world,” says Zlatos, as well as “how propaganda functions, the compromises we make to make a better world and the sacrifices activists make.” Zlatos’s relatives are from Slovakia, and she has long been interested in Czechoslovakian history. While researching the life and work of dissident-turned-Czechoslovakia’s last president Vaclav Havel, she came across Horáková’s story.

Katie Cappiello, playwright and director of The Body of Mary, says her play—actually a trio of short plays spanning many thousands of years, humorously interrogating the Church, faith, women’s bodies, misogyny, pregnancy, and brute patriarchy—is rooted in her own experiences of growing up Catholic and “being a woman, mom, and pregnant person in this country. I didn’t intend to write something political. I intended to write something interesting, in relation to my experiences. The play has political themes because unfortunately the female body in today’s world is political.”

Cappiello relishes the gasps, the laughter, and the shocked silences of the audiences who have come to see the play. Her inspiration for writing it was Colm Tóibin’s 2012 novella, and later stage play, The Testament of Mary, which told biblical events from what the novelist imagines as a much more clear-eyed and raw voice of Jesus’s mother. Cappiello was also “deeply inspired” by   , which she first saw as a student at New York University, “and I forever love and am inspired by anything and everything by Anna Deavere Smith and Caryl Churchill.”

Humor is the central ingredient in Cappiello’s plays “because there is a sense of catharsis and relief in being able to laugh at the completely absurd stories I grew up hearing,” says the playwright. For example, the first vignette deconstructs how Mary’s supposedly virgin birth of Jesus came to be via a visit from the Angel Gabriel. “I tell the story of the Annunciation as a story of assault. There are some parts of Catholicism I still love, but as a woman I don’t love the institution. It’s really hard to love a religion that doesn’t love you.”

Women’s experiences are also central to the nationwide Women+ On the Edge of Democracy project, overseen by Jay Wahl, executive director of the Flynn in Vermont, who conceived the idea of the 36 female playwrights creating 10-minute plays with Leslie Swackhamer, executive director of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the oldest and largest international prize specifically recognizing women+ playwrights.

Organizations in 26 states had, at the time of my interviewing Wahl, confirmed they would be performing one or more of the Women+ pieces—from theater groups to scout troops, knitting groups, rugby clubs, even a pastor who will be reciting one from a pulpit. All the playwrights are offering their plays to be performed with no royalty costs incurred; the only condition is that audiences must not be charged to attend.

“Democracy is measured in how well we listen to the most unheard voices, particularly in the current political climate—and women’s voices are among the most unheard or silenced,” Wahl said. The 36 plays feature politics, personal stories, “a lot of humor, hope, talking animals, hens, ostriches, Betsy Ross in the underworld, and a range of different places, ages, and time periods.”

“The idea came to me because in the arts we’re supposed to be holding up a mirror to what is happening in the world,” Wahl says. “This project is a way of being honest about what women are seeing, dreaming, and hoping for. There is optimism and also despair, not bitterness but anger, a sense of calling things out. There is humor and humanity. It’s messy and a lot, and that’s democracy. The plays build a complicated portrait of America.”

Heidi Schreck’s Women+ monologue links history to the present day, in the story of Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid during the Great Depression from Schreck’s hometown of Wenatchee, Washington, who took her fight over unpaid wages and the minimum wage—ultimately successfully—to the Supreme Court in 1937. Within a year, there was a federal minimum wage in the United States, signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

On the worst days, when all else feels hopeless, Schreck writes in the play, people should be inspired by Parrish. Or, in the words of writer Rebecca Solnit, Schreck says, if the word “hope” feels too sappy, go with “never fucking surrender.”

“I know there are lots of people fighting for change, the better angels of this country,” Schreck tells The Hat. “Just having the story of an ordinary person who affected tremendous change I found really hopeful. You might think all decisions are taken above our heads. Elsie Parrish is a reminder we do have power. She refused to accept the injustice being perpetrated against her.”

–

“We are in the fight of our lives”

Alongside new pieces with a historical focus, some political plays this autumn are classics being inventively revived. Steven Pasquale, who is directing Waiting for Lefty at Classic Stage Company—with original music and arrangements by Cameron Scoggins and Sahar Milani (the folk music duo Yeller Tooth)—says Clifford Odets’s famed 1935 play about a group of cab drivers planning to strike will feel “100 million percent relevant today and that’s the reason we’re doing it. We’re at an inflection point in this country where we have clear and observable corruption at the top in front of our very eyes.”

“Every day, bad behavior and lawlessness are excused,” Pasquale says. “It seems like we’re living in a society where 10 guys take it all, and everyone else gets screwed, which are the same questions Odets and [Elia] Kazan and members of the Group Theatre were asking in the 1930s: Is there a better way than this winner-takes-all, completely corrupt oligarchy, autocracy, lawless-filth from the top down? There must be. We don’t know if this idiot [Trump] will launch a nuclear winter in the coming days. We are in the fight of our lives, and storytellers have a duty—when our rulers are corrupt—to hold a mirror up to where we are.”

Odets wrote Waiting for Lefty 91 years ago, notes Milani, “and it’s devastatingly portable to our time now.” She and Scoggins have used mostly historical folk protest songs for the piece, with some original music too. “Folk music and union protests have always been hand-in hand,” she adds. “Those musical forms have always lent themselves to protest. I hope their use in the show helps people realize how connected we are across time.”

For Jon Beavers, who plays coal stoker Yank in the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at the Irish Rep, O’Neill’s protagonist—a man who proudly defines himself by what he does and then loses all sense of himself and his worth—feels all too relevant today.

“The dream back then, just as it is now, was meritocracy, but a billionaire class, then emerging and now very present, crushed the poor in so many ways,” says Beavers. “At first a worker might cling to the bootstrap mentality for identity, but today no one says ‘thank you for your service’ after 30 years when AI replaces you. No one at the top knows who you are.” Yank’s growing misogyny and rage mirrors today’s toxically online incels, says Beavers.

Ciarán O’Reilly, the production’s director (and co-founder and producing artistic director of Irish Rep), says that when the rich socialite Mildred calls Yank a “filthy beast,” it triggers his existential crisis and descent into madness, and “a search for revenge and to try to get back what he feels was taken from him. That leads him to the union, church, prison, and then finally the ape in the zoo.”

“Belong” is the key, and one of the most used, words in the play, says Beavers. “Yank loses his sense of belonging, and today we are also losing that sense of community and belonging to one another. For audiences today, when everyone is staring at their phones all the time, I hope coming to see a play like this offers an opportunity to experience a shared story and provides some catharsis. Sitting in a theater is a collective experience, and I hope the play—beyond its political significance—sparks conversations about what it means to belong to one another.”

Those in-real-time audience connections mirror the thematic resonances that strike chords across eras, notes Ari Laura Keith, director of Mrs. Stern.

“People on the left have embraced our play as a warning about right-wing totalitarianism, and those on the right say the same thing about a warning of left-wing totalitarianism,” Keith says. “We’re at a loss for common ground in today’s world, so it’s been exciting to accidentally find a story that seems to provide that. Theater is a laboratory for understanding lived experience, and a space to explore how we create a world we feel we can all live in.”

Playwright Jenny Lyn Bader didn’t want to simply craft a history play, but—“as someone who loves crossing all kinds of genres”—a thriller and a dark comedy.

“At a time when a lot of art is apocalyptic and there is a lot of cultural pessimism, we wanted the play to not feel bleak,” says Keith. “Our responsibility as artists feels to wrestle in a bleak moment towards charting a path forward—how can we authentically offer some kind of promise, potential, or guide.”

How overtly political should plays be to hit home? “History and time give a new perspective, and what happened in my play also happened in another country—that adds another layer of distance which allows people to look at the story a little differently,” says Laura Zlatos of writing Show Trial. “It’s easy for people to say that they would never fall for propaganda, but so many people did. Obviously, propaganda functions differently now, because of technology and more information being available, but even today people do not take threats to democracy seriously. They’re not paying attention to everything he [Trump] is doing.”

“I don’t feel any sense of obligation to write about politics, but I do find politics really interesting,” says Dan Giles. “It is something that shapes me and shapes how I move through the world. One bit of early feedback in the play [The Charioteer] was that the male character was a bit ranty. I didn’t feel that, but you do have to ask yourself: Would such a thing stop people listening to the play? I hope that even if you don’t care about any of the political stuff, you will care about how his relationship with his sister turns out.”

Hope is the main ingredient of a political play, says Giles. “The play is dead in the water if there’s no hope.”

Schreck echoes this, recalling the power of audience responses to her performing the Tony-nominated and Pulitzer-finalist What the Constitution Means to Me on and off Broadway and around the country—such as in September 2018, just hours after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford delivered her testimony during a Senate hearing around Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

“I couldn’t pretend to be another person in another country in another time,” recalls Schreck. “I performed the play many times when something major had happened politically that day, but that was one of the most intense. I could hear people crying. I remember thinking, ‘How do I do this tonight?,’ and feeling ultimately relieved not to be alone and being part of a group of people trying to process it in real time. I hope the Flynn project does the same as something for people to gather around. It feels crucial and hopeful.”

Schreck recalls the “profound” effect of seeing Angels in America when she was 20, “and how it changed my thinking about the history of this country.” She has heard from people in smaller towns and red states “happy to engage and find community” when they saw Constitution.

“I didn’t think my play would change anyone’s mind,” says Schreck. “I just wanted to write about the debate competitions I did as a kid and being a girl in this country and culture and my changing view of what the Constitution was. I hoped the play could provide strength, energy, and hope for those that felt the way I did.”

Schreck’s work combining the personal and political continues today. She is working on a book about both the history of women’s health in America and her own experience of postpartum depression following the birth of her twin daughters during the pandemic.

Schreck is also about to begin workshops for her first full-length play since Constitution (starring Tony Award–winning actor Deirdre O’Connell), writing a screenplay with the filmmaker Sarah Polley, writing the screenplay adaptation of Belle Burden’s bestselling memoir Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, and collaborating on another unnamed screen project with America Ferrera.

–

“We’re not allowed to be anything but hopeful”

What power does political theater hold today? Anne Washburn’s inspirations include Lisa Kron’s In the Wake, “which talked about us as political creatures”; Tony Kushner’s 1985 play A Bright Room Called Day, exploring the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany; Caryl Churchill’s work; and Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon (also 1985), which showed Washburn “you could have volatile and charismatic personalities on stage existing without direct authorial rebuttal of their words.”

“There’s always a temptation with political theater,” Washburn says, “to make sure that different, opposing energies are contained, rebutted, and answered, but the point of political theater is questions, and provoking conversations, whereas the point of actual politics is answers. Political theater is always rubbing up against itself in interesting ways.”

Aunt Dan, says Washburn, “is a great example of allowing a play to be a problem that the community has to solve rather than a description of a solved problem.”

For Nottage, political playwriting can be “very intentional, with things being said and designed to be disruptive, asking particular questions in dialogue with what is happening in the country,” while “the politics of other pieces rise up from certain conversations, or the placement of characters on stage.”

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was particularly influential for Nottage. “It’s a great play, and at the intersection of so many conversations about racism, housing discrimination, classism, misogyny—and, for me, it’s a masterclass in how subtly you can tell a story that has an incredible impact and resonance and can in some ways transcend the moment.”

Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage is another touchstone for Nottage, “a play he wrote during the rise of fascism in Germany and incredibly relevant in this moment—a warning of what happens to us when we lean into capitalist and transactional impulses.”

Attending theater around others is itself important, says Nottage: “Just to be able to vibe with each other can lead to action, particularly now when so many people are so disconnected.” She recalls one moment at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when, during a performance of her play Ruined, a female audience member leapt from her seat to attack a male actor, incensed at his character’s behavior. “He had to shake her off and was naturally very disturbed by it. But there is the power of the word—or the power of emotion conjured by the word.”

“Theater is a cure for what ails us,” says Eustis. “Gathering people in one space and going through experiences watching plays where nobody has the right answer means truth emerges from conflict and different stories and points of views—all what we need as a society, rather than the insanity of the tribalism of the internet and politics and mass media that deny us those things.”

For Pasquale, theater is “a vital place for audiences to connect,” as one of the few spaces without the temptation of a phone screen (even though audience members often flout the rule). Collaborating with Milani and Scoggins and others to make Waiting for Lefty has been a “balm” for the rage Pasquale feels, offering the chance to “sit in solidarity with those feeling the same thing,” and a productive, galvanizing route out of the current daily “mess.” “I view the world through an empathetic lens. Let’s make some art that is entertaining.”

Like Nottage, Brecht is Eustis’s biggest influence—“he constantly wrestled throughout his life with how to do politically effective art in times that were not dissimilar to my own”—alongside the work and example of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (their tagline is “Never Silent. Always Revolutionary”), which deploys “art as an organizing tool.”

Eustis is encouraged by “the growing resistance to this authoritarian nightmare that has been gaining strength over the last ten to fifteen years. Who would have thought Viktor Orbán (the former authoritarian prime minister of Hungary) would have been voted out of office? That was unthinkable a couple of years ago. Look at the Ukrainians. They have fought Putin to a standstill. There are signs everywhere of how much people are willing to fight for democracy. It’s really a time question. It took 12 years to get rid of Hitler, but it was an awfully bloody 12 years.”

Is Eustis optimistic or pessimistic when it comes to the future of political theater? “We’re not allowed to be anything but hopeful. Our job is to strive for a better future. We’re going to lose a lot of fights and win others, but nothing gives us the right to stop fighting.”