Theatre Isn’t Dying. 
It’s Being Murdered:
​On Authoritarianism, Anti-DEI Policy, and the Quiet Surrender of American Stages.

BY MONTSERRAT MENDEZ
​June 28th, 2025

By now, you’ve heard the news, haven’t you?
Roundabout Theatre Company. Playwrights Horizons. All-male seasons. All-male. Seasons.
Theatres once known for staging the multiplicity of American life, now staging what? A return to monochrome. Theatrical taxidermy. Art embalmed. Art in a coma.

What is this? What’s happening?

Is it just a coincidence? Is it merely the aesthetic preference of an overcaffeinated artistic director Rediscovering the male gaze? Or is it
Let’s name it plainly
A crime scene?

Because theatre isn’t dying.
It’s being murdered.
And the murderers are handing us the noose and calling it a grant application.

Let’s not pretend this is neutral ground.
Let’s not feign surprise that in the shadow of a Trumpist resurrection, this new-old coalition of men who wear the past like armor, the theatres have begun to whisper, “Let’s be safe. Let’s not provoke. Let’s not risk the funds.” As if safety were ever an option for us. As if neutrality were not, in fact, its own kind of violence.

I. The Funding Trap:
When the Money Says "Shut Up!"

Once upon a time, the National Endowment for the Arts (remember them? once courageous, now cowed) flung open its dusty coffers for marginalized artists. The Challenge America grants. The initiatives that said: yes, you, too, belong. You, too, are the story.

But under the Trump administration (and let’s not forget, these seeds were sown long before him; he merely harvested the rot), the NEA’s priorities shifted. Diversity became “divisive.” Inclusion became “unpatriotic.” The grants dried up. The money was rerouted; to celebrations of America’s 250th birthday, to art that waves the flag but says nothing else.

So here is the theatre’s impossible question:
Do we stage the urgent, messy, difficult stories—women’s stories, queer stories, immigrant stories—knowing the purse strings may snap shut?

Or do we stage the safe stories; white stories, male stories, stories already blessed by boardrooms and bureaucrats?

Roundabout has answered. Playwrights Horizons has answered.
They have answered in the programming, in the silence, in the absence of risk.
And please, let’s understand,
this is not random.
This is not some gentle shift in taste.
This is not neglect.
This is design.

II. The Neoliberal Conversion:
When Profit Devours the Public Good.

Here is where Wendy Brown cuts to the bone.

In Undoing the Demos, Brown warns us that neoliberalism does not merely slash budgets; it rewires our very understanding of the public sphere. It converts citizens into consumers and transforms the fundamental question of democracy.

She writes:
“Neoliberal rationality converts the distinctly political question of what we want to do together into the economic question of what is profitable.”

And here
here--
is the poisoned root.

Theatres are not just afraid of authoritarian culture warriors. They are afraid of becoming unprofitable.
They are afraid that unless their seasons can sell
can attract the right donors, can hit the corporate funding sweet spot
they will not survive.

Theatres now talk less about civic duty, and more about audience capture, market alignment, donor appeal.

This is not a stray trend. It is the neoliberal project, fully matured.

Under this logic, the question is no longer: What stories must be told?
The question becomes: What stories can keep us solvent?
It is not: What work can change the world?
It is: What work won’t scare the money away?

Wendy Brown saw this coming. She saw how museums, universities, and arts institutions would begin to behave like corporations; how they would abandon democratic values to survive in a marketplace that punishes dissent.

And what is the result?

A theatre season that looks suspiciously like a corporate memo: safe, approved, de-risked.

III. The Chilling Effect:
The Art of Appearing Apolitical.

Some will protest:

“But we are simply producing good plays. We are simply following our artistic instincts. It’s not political.”

Ah, the exquisite lie of neutrality.
As if the absence of women were a weather pattern, not a decision.
As if the return to all-male seasons were gravity, not complicity.
As if they did not hear the siren call of the NEA’s new priorities.
As if, when the state sneers at “woke art,” when it withdraws support from anything that smells like dissent, that does not leave a mark.
As if theatres
those terrified, donor-hobbled cathedrals
have not already internalized the message.

And the message is clear:
Do not make trouble.
Do not stage the play about abortion.
Do not produce the trans playwright.
Do not set the table for revolution.

And so the theatres, ever so delicately, shift the seasons.
The all-male lineup is not just a programming choice. It is the footprint of fear.

It is the residue of censorship so thoroughly absorbed that it no longer requires a censor.

IV. The Starve-the-Beast Strategy:
How They Win.

We’ve seen this before. In the schools. In the libraries. In the voting booths.

Step 1: Defund the programs that serve the marginalized.
Step 2: Watch those institutions struggle.
Step 3: Point at their failure; Look! No diversity! as proof that public funding doesn’t work.
Step 4: Privatize. Hand over the arts to the corporations, the billionaires, the hedge fund philanthropists who do not love theatre but love the clout it buys them.

The market will save us, they say.
But the market doesn’t know how to save us.
The market knows how to sell us.

And so, the theatres are auctioned off
piece by piece
to the highest bidder, who wants, in exchange, silence.

Side note: (This seasons Amazon Audible, is trying something "New," affordable theatre with star names. A major corporation who can afford to pay big stars will in ten years be taking credit for having created Off-Off Broadway, you just watch!)

This is Wendy Brown’s thesis embodied: a slow-motion dismantling of the public good, sold off for survival.

V. The Unwitting Complicity of the Institutions.

I don’t believe Roundabout wants to do harm.
I don’t believe Playwrights Horizons is sitting in a smoky room conspiring against women.
But this is how authoritarianism wins: not with jackboots, but with paperwork. With grant guidelines. With season announcements. With the quiet tick of the budget clock.

It wins because the choice between integrity and institutional survival is a brutal one.
It wins because survival is so seductive.

But what is the point of surviving if the work no longer matters?
What is the point of surviving if you have abandoned the future?

When you stage all-male seasons in the middle of an all-out war on reproductive rights, on gender equity, on the freedom to tell the truth; you have not merely failed.
You have joined the siege.

VI. Resistance or Surrender: The Final Act.

Not all theatres are surrendering.

Some are risking financial pain to keep their stages open to the disobedient, the radical, the inconvenient.

They are betting, wildly, maybe foolishly, on the idea that the art will save the theatre.
They are choosing the dangerous path
the path that says: Let the money walk. We will find another way.

And as for the rest?

There is no neutral ground.
There is no polite middle.
There is no safety in surrender.

If you program the all-male season,
if you quietly erase the stories that challenge,
if you privilege your endowment over your ethics;

You are not merely making theatre.

You are helping to build the scaffold.

You are tightening the noose.

You are writing the closing monologue of your own art form.

And the lights will come down.
And the stage will be empty.
And you will have called it survival.

But it will be, unmistakably, your funeral.

WORKS CITED:

​Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. MIT Press, 2015.