The Comfort Politics of Regional Theater

A response Michael Paulsons 12/15 NYTimes Article on Regional Theater

The most striking thing about the New York Times’ recent article on regional theaters is not what it says, but what it carefully avoids saying.

Framed as a neutral examination of why some regional theaters are “defying the odds” in a post-pandemic landscape, the piece presents stability, capital expansion, and audience satisfaction as markers of success. But neutrality is an illusion. What the article actually offers is a case study in how comfort becomes policy — aesthetic, institutional, and ideological.

That comfort has a look. It has a voice. And it has a conspicuous absence.

No visibly people of color are quoted as central artistic or executive authorities, and the piece still frames leadership through a white mostly male (theres one woman featured in the article), comfort-first lens. This is not incidental. It is a framing choice, one that signals whose leadership is legible, whose stewardship is stabilizing, and whose vision is safe enough to stand in for the field.

Paulsons article equates success with avoiding friction. Harmony is valorized. Disruption is quietly sidelined. The theaters that are supposedly doing well are praised for making audiences feel welcome, without any interrogation of who has historically been centered by that welcome, and who has been forced into the margins. While the article never explicitly invokes “the public good,” it implicitly reframes it, equating public value with audience comfort, donor satisfaction, and financial growth, rather than equity, representation, or civic accountability.

This is not subtle. In his own framing, Paulson identifies “programming philosophies that prioritize what audiences might want to see over what artists believe audiences would benefit from seeing” as a defining trait of success. That sentence alone reveals the article’s thesis: audience comfort is positioned as wisdom; artistic challenge as liability.

This is where the rhetoric begins to echo something more familiar.

The article does not explicitly align itself with partisan politics, but it mirrors a broader cultural logic that has increasingly shaped current public discourse: stability over transformation, broad appeal over accountability, comfort over confrontation. These are not overt political arguments; they are cultural dog whistles. They reassure readers that nothing unsettling is happening here. That no one is being challenged too hard. That the institutions in question are, above all, safe.

And worse, they imply that theaters that are not following this model are somehow irresponsible or in trouble precisely because they are defiant. Because they are doing what theater was created to do: to place art and the artist at the center of civic life; to treat performance as a form of civic engagement; to engage, disrupt, and provoke reflection; to create a public space where audiences are invited to reckon with power, contradiction, and possibility.

This narrow framing thwarts the very principles of theater — and the reason many of us who became professional theatre makers were taught to engage the world through drama in the first place. Theater was never meant to be merely reassuring. It was meant to be participatory, unsettling, communal, and alive to the conditions of the world around it.

This supposed opposition between tradition and challenge, between broad appeal and accountability, between stability and disruption, is a false strawman. A historically marginalized person telling their story is not didactic. It is not preaching to the choir. It is not an attack on the audience. It is simply a reflection of the society we actually live in — part of the fabric of public life — and a claim to space within institutions that exist precisely to hold that complexity.

What too often happens in large, publicly funded arts organizations is that they accept everyone’s taxpayer dollars, philanthropic support, and civic goodwill, only to funnel those resources back into work that reinforces the status quo and serves a narrow, familiar few. And when those same institutions begin to tell stories that do not center whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, or inherited power — stories that reflect the full range, contradiction, and humanity of the macrocosm — they are met with accusations of preaching, of alienation, of not liking their audience. But that charge is a deflection. The current theatre audience is seeking comfort. What the artist is actually demanding is access: access for storytellers, access for stories, and access for audiences to encounter a fuller, truer account of the world they share.

And when challenged, those same institutions will point to their receipts. They will say, of course we tell stories about Black people! Look at the last August Wilson play we produced. Or of course we care about queer stories! Look at how many times we’ve done Angels in America. But what they are really saying, even in those choices, is that they will always choose the version of those stories that feels safest to them. They choose the canonized work, the already-approved narrative, the story that has been metabolized enough to no longer threaten the audience’s sense of self.

And so the problem persists. You have an entire community of artists across the country urgently trying to engage in a discourse about what is actually happening to humanity. About violence and the joy, the gains and the dispossession, and the grief, power, survival, and the systems that shape our lives. And you have a generation of gatekeepers actively thwarting those attempts. Not because the work lacks rigor or craft, but because its reflection hurts their feelings. Because it asks them to see themselves, or the systems they benefit from, reflected as complicit. What follows is a profound act of invalidation. When an artist makes work about sexual assault, or the brutal murder of a Trans person, or enslavement, or the brutal colonization of this country, or the ongoing erasure of Native and Indigenous people from this land, that work is dismissed as provocation. As agenda. As an attempt to make someone feel bad. The story is no longer understood as an articulation of lived experience or historical reality, but as an attack on the feelings of those who identify — consciously or not — with the victimizer.

That is the inversion at the heart of this debate. The artist is accused of harm for naming harm. The institution claims neutrality while protecting comfort. And the public space that theater is meant to provide — a space for reckoning, empathy, and collective growth — is narrowed to accommodate only what does not disturb those who already feel most at home.

The danger of this reframing is not abstract. When theater is reduced to a marker of safety and reassurance, its civic function is hollowed out. The question is no longer what a theater is asking of its audience, but how little it can ask to keep them. In that shift, discomfort becomes suspect, risk becomes failure, and the very practices that have historically allowed theater to function as a public forum are rebranded as liabilities. Safety becomes the default.

Some readers, particularly those outside the theater sector, may reasonably wonder why any of this matters. What is at stake if the New York Times frames homogeneity and safety as the reasons certain theaters survive while others fail? Why does it matter if the images accompanying the article center white leadership, often male, framed against construction zones and capital expansion — quietly establishing a visual shorthand for what American theater leadership should look like? Who cares, if I don’t even go to the theater in the first place?

It matters because theaters, like all arts nonprofit organizations, are charged with serving the public whether the public attends or not. They are meant to reflect the society as a whole. In one sense, these images do reflect American society. They reflect a version of American institutional life in which whiteness and maleness remain closely associated with legitimacy, authority, and success.

But for the Times, this innocuous story about the American regional theater becomes the perfect site for this kind of storytelling precisely because the stakes are perceived as low. Few believe democracy hinges on Gulfshore Playhouse or Milwaukee Rep. And so the Times can perform “bothsideism” without consequence, advancing a cultural argument without naming it as such.

But there is another layer.

If you look closely, not just at the images but at the language, you see it in what is celebrated as “universally impactful,” in what is placed on the main stage versus the black box, and in what is framed as audience-pleasing versus artist-driven. What emerges is not innovation but regression: a recycling of the same aesthetic logic theaters were rightly criticized for during the We See You, White American Theater (WSYWAT) movement, and long before that during every movement when historically marginalized artists demanded equity — not asked, but demanded accountability from leadership to shift systems rather than uphold white, male, heteronormative supremacy; to tell fuller stories that reflected the whole, not whiteness positioned as the default lens through which everyone else is understood.

And it was not only WSYWAT.

That reckoning emerged from a much broader, field-wide uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when artists, workers, and audiences across the country — from Broadway to regional theaters, from Hawaii to Maine — called for equity, accountability, and inclusion across the entire American theater ecosystem. The call was not symbolic. It was systemic. It demanded that institutions interrogate leadership, governance, hiring, programming, donor influence, and the ways harm had been normalized in the name of tradition, donor development, or audience satisfaction.

WSY was frequently criticized precisely because it did not present a single leader, spokesperson, or hierarchy to negotiate with. There was no head to co-opt, no centralized authority to placate. The decentralization was intentional — a refusal of the very power structures that had long protected inequity and exclusion.

Paulson, Power, and Recapture

This regression is especially striking in light of Michael Paulson’s own reporting history — and my own experience of being written about by him.

In 2019, Paulson wrote the NY Times article that used the announcement of my historic appointment as artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a signal moment — one that ostensibly marked a generational shift in American theater leadership. But in my view, that announcement was quickly used as a pivot. Rather than centering the implications of that moment on their own terms, the article redirected attention toward a familiar institutional lineage, focusing on my colleagues and friends Maria Goyanes and Stephanie Ybarra, both of whom had recently been appointed after formative tenures working under Oscar Eustis at the Public Theater, alongside Hana Sharif, Robert Barry Fleming, and Jacob Padrón (who had also worked under Eustis)

I do not name this to diminish those leaders, all of whom are my personal friends and all of whom are accomplished, visionary, and deserving. I am interrogating the gravitational pull of institutional power. What lingered for me was how quickly a moment that could have been framed as a rupture instead became a story about continuity: about pedigree, mentorship, and legitimacy flowing through a known center. In my assessment, the narrative ultimately bent back toward Eustis and the Public Theatre as the organizing force behind this “new” class of leadership.

That framing matters.

It suggests that even when leadership changes, the field remains invested in reaffirming where authority is imagined to originate — and who is seen as safely connected to it. It is about how those appointments were rendered legible. The language of “gates” and “doors” did more than describe access; it established conditionality. It suggested that authority was being granted rather than assumed, that legitimacy still flowed through an implied threshold controlled elsewhere. Even in a moment that could have been framed as rupture, the narrative quietly recentralized permission. Gates and doors also reek of the fears associated with replacement theory. As if someone left the gate open and these undeserving leaders took over what wasn’t theres to take.

That kind of framing did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflected a longer pattern in which non-white, non-male leaders were acknowledged while simultaneously contained. Celebrated, but not fully authorized. Leadership was named, but its power was softened.

It was in response to this pattern — and others like it across the field — that We See You, White American Theateremerged the following year. WSYWAT did not arise from a single incident, but from an accumulation of moments in which representation was offered without a corresponding shift in power. The document articulated what many already understood: that inclusion without accountability leaves underlying structures intact.

The murder of George Floyd and the onset of the pandemic did not create this critique; they intensified it. What had been circulating as resistance became unavoidable. The conversation widened, moving beyond leadership optics to a field-wide demand for equity, accountability, and structural change.

What Paulson does in this recent New York Times article is reject any notion of this demand for shift. Instead, it tacitly restores the hierarchy. It restores the patriarchy. It restores a vision of American theater in which legitimacy is anchored in stability, capital expansion, donor confidence, and leadership figures who reassure audiences that the institution has not changed too much.

Seen through that lens, the trajectory from Paulson’s 2019 framing to his current one is not a mystery. It is a reassertion of power over who gets to define success and legitimacy. It reflects, and reifies, a longing for a time when wealthy white people could enter a theater confident it had been curated for their comfort above all else — when institutions were rewarded not for transformation, but for stability; not for reckoning, but for restraint.

The article supplies its own evidence. Gulfshore Playhouse’s artistic leader rejects what she calls “poke-you-in-the-eye theater” — defined as work that challenges audiences or makes them uncomfortable — and frames that rejection as a necessary survival strategy. Milwaukee Rep’s artistic director is quoted saying, “We actually like our people. We’re not trying to be didactic and lecture people.”

The implication is clear: challenge is equated with dislike; rigor with moralizing; equity with agenda.

The implication of harming the audience is wild! No one is asking theaters to lecture their audiences. No one is advocating for didacticism. Artistic leaders across the country , including at Baltimore Center Stage, the Alliance Theatre, and Arena Stage are not preaching. They are expanding form, audience, and imagination. Yet none of these voices appear in the article. Any of them could have complicated the narrative. Any of them could have introduced possibility.

What makes this omission particularly egregious is the article’s lack of any memory of the pandemic. All of the aforementioned leaders were appointed right before or as the pandemic began. Those of us who lived through it remember the panic. We remember theaters fighting not just to save individual institutions, but to save a field — reimagining production, renegotiating labor, expanding access, and redefining leadership under existential threat.

I remember it because I was in the middle of it, fighting to save my own theater — and succeeding.

That story is not here.

Neither are the stories of leaders like Pam MacKinnon (ACT), Marissa Wolf (Portland Center Stage), Melia Bensussion (Hartford Stage) , among others — people who navigated the same crisis with the same urgency, and whose leadership does not conform to the visual or ideological shorthand this article uses to define success.

Instead, the New York Times offers a narrative the field already knows by heart: success looks like capital campaigns, construction projects, donor confidence, and programming that reassures audiences they are good people.

That is not new. It is not revelatory. And it is not brave.

Art that exists — or that is created — solely to make people comfortable is relentlessly forgettable, and the people who make it are also forgettable. The art we remember, the artists we remember, and the theaters we remember are not the ones that reassured us that nothing was at stake. They are the ones that asked something of us. They are the ones that disrupted our assumptions, expanded our thinking, and forced us to sit in discomfort long enough to evolve our perception of our collective humanity.

What makes this moment especially unfortunate — and honestly, a travesty — is that the very theater leaders quoted in this article and their audiences who are now insisting on comfort, know this. They remember what it felt like to sit in a theater and have their ideals challenged, their thinking stretched, their sense of the world enlarged. That is the theater that shaped them. That is the theater that mattered. Not this theatre of obsolescence comfortably regurgitating a retired version of postwar harmony.

And when journalism stops interrogating that truth, something vital dies. The public imagination that understands art as a site of resistance rather than reassurance erodes. The living tradition that binds art to dissent, democracy, and public life fades. When art is reduced to entertainment, its civic force is stripped away. What also disappears is our shared belief that we have the capacity to do better, the will to be better, and the imagination to resist those who would have us believe we are better when we are bound together by our comfort instead of growing together in our discomfort.

That may be politically safe.

But it is not neutral.