What We Talk About When We Talk About Theater in 2025

By now, it’s almost a reflex to describe American theater as “in crisis.” It’s the tic we can’t shake, like an actor who keeps clearing their throat before a line they’ve delivered nightly for a decade. But early 2025 offers something murkier than crisis: not a firestorm or a collapse, not even quite a reckoning, but a stretch of strange weather. We are watching a field attempt to regrow its roots while still pretending the trunk didn’t just crack in half. Some of it is hopeful. Some of it is exhausting. Most of it is confusing.

There’s an understandable desire to believe that we’ve made it through something — “the pandemic,” “the closures,” “the audience evaporation,” choose your euphemism — and that we’re now entering a new phase. You hear it in artistic director speeches and panel talkbacks: we’ve emerged, we’ve learned, we’re building back differently. But spend any real time in the rooms where work is being made — in the off-nights, the scrappy talkbacks, the shaky previews — and what you actually find is a collective held breath. Not panic. Not certainty. Just people hoping the lights stay on long enough to finish the act.

Broadway, that perennial barometer of theater’s cultural standing, continues to produce both miracles and monstrosities in equal measure. Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal drew standing ovations before the house lights even dimmed in Othello, and yes, ticket prices really did touch four digits. That a ticket to Shakespeare could cost more than rent in Cleveland isn’t shocking anymore. It’s practically part of the mystique. Brian Cox made headlines for calling the price tags obscene, which felt less like a protest and more like a sigh. Everyone knows it’s broken. The game continues anyway.

Just a few blocks south, a different kind of experiment is underway. Hugh Jackman and Sonia Friedman’s Together series — a pop-up, close-range project staged in a 199-seat house — feels like an attempt to resuscitate the idea that theater is a public good, not a boutique luxury. That it’s still possible to sit elbow-to-elbow in a black box and watch a story that isn’t underscored by LED spectacle or brokered by Ticketmaster. The storytelling is modest. The gesture is not. It’s a reminder that intimacy is not an aesthetic. It’s a politics.

Elsewhere, the geography of the American stage looks less like a rebirth and more like a slow molting. The LORT theaters — the regional institutions that once served as the spine of new play development — are… surviving, sort of. Some have slashed their seasons, or gone dark for months. Others have restructured, “paused operations,” or adopted euphemisms so gentle they might as well be scented with lavender. Yet inside that wreckage, there are still embers. At the small (non-LORT ) Rogue Machine in Los Angeles, an aching new revival of Will Arbery’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing managed to conjure existential dread from fluorescent lights and road salt, and did so without apology. Nobody flew in from The Times. But in the lobby, people stood around awkwardly, wanting to talk but not quite knowing how. That counts too.

It’s tempting, in moments like this, to reach for metrics. Subscription numbers. Donation totals. Post-pandemic audience growth charts. And yes, the numbers have ticked upward, slightly. Some venues are reporting a 28% increase in ticket revenue compared to 2022, though these stats exist in a post-peak world, where comparison is mostly mood-based. Are we better than we were? Depends who you ask. Are we back? Not even close. Are we different? A little. Or maybe we’re just wearing new costumes to the same existential play.

What’s more revealing than data is what kinds of stories are being told, and where they’re finding their shape. At South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Keiko Green’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! doesn’t merely engage with climate anxiety — it throws it a confetti-splattered farewell party. A drag oracle leads the charge, ghosts interrupt the dinner table, and Greta Thunberg herself arrives like a punk prophet. This is not a cautionary tale. It’s a glittering scream into the void, staged in a region more known for beach towns than doomsday cabarets. And yet, somehow, it fits. Audiences laughed, gasped, and stayed through the talkback. That’s not nothing.

The new frontier — or at least the one that grants applications are most excited about — is tech integration. Virtual and augmented reality are not new ideas, but they’ve now been absorbed into the dramaturgy, not just the marketing. A few companies are exploring what happens when a performance isn’t just immersive but unfixed: when the actor you see is not in the room, or even human. There’s promise there, but also peril. The theater already has a hard time convincing people it’s real. The more it mimics the screen, the more it risks being judged by the screen’s rules. Not everything needs to be scalable.

Politics, too, has entered the lobby. Not through the plays necessarily — though many have the scent of protest — but through the institutions. The Kennedy Center, once a flagship of bipartisan support for the arts, has grown cautious, even antiseptic. The current administration’s influence has reshaped its programming into something safer, more commercially viable. The ripple effects are quiet, but real: fewer risks, more revivals, less room for the kind of messy, angry work that might accidentally offend someone with a corporate badge. Some artists have walked away. Others smile through their teeth and call it partnership.

If there is a shape to this moment, it is contradiction. Everything feels overbuilt and underfunded at once. Audiences want magic, but they don’t want to pay for it. Theaters want relevance, but fear controversy. Critics want something to champion, but often find themselves parsing tone. And through it all, the people who make this work — who tape down the spike marks, who nurse their second jobs, who whisper “five minutes to places” into a backstage void — are still here, still building something with no guarantee it will last the night.

But maybe that’s always been the point. The theater is not a monument. It’s a gesture. A gathering. A flicker of light before the blackout. In 2025, the American theater is neither triumphant nor dead. It’s in the middle of a sentence. And the next word has yet to be spoken.