Are We Keeping American Theater Alive Despite What’s Killing Us? By Claudia Alick

I’m tired of being asked whether the American nonprofit theater movement is over. I’ve been hearing that it’s dying for my entire career. Every time marginalized artists fight our way into an institution, gain some power or finally get the opportunity to make work for our own communities, suddenly the vision for the future becomes limited. The models that were pitched as a generational solution are no longer sustainable.

I’ve seen this cycle before. It’s the enshittification of culture.

I remember subscribing to UPN because it had Black-centered programming. Then it became the WB network with less Black content and the it transition into the CW which was mostly white teens. Black-centered content that had attracted audiences like me gradually disappeared. The audiences and cultural capital we helped build were no longer the priority.

We see versions of the same cycle in Hollywood with the Marvel. White male superheroes get movie after movie, sequel after sequel. But when Black-led or female led projects finally get opportunities, suddenly we’re having conversations about whether audiences are tired of superhero movies, whether the genre is oversaturated and whether the business model is still viable. These projects receive less investment, they get marketing poorly. The failure is by design.

Why does the conversation about sustainability seem to arrive just as marginalized people begin getting access to the resources?

This reminds me of gentrification. Marginalized communities create culture, aesthetics, entertainment and social capital. Our creativity makes spaces desirable. Other people find ways to extract wealth from what we’ve built. Eventually, we get priced out of the very places we made valuable.

Then we’re told to go somewhere else and build again.

That’s what this conversation about the death of nonprofit theater feels like to me. We spend generations providing cultural sweat equity. We work for free, accept poverty wages, build audiences, develop artists and create institutions with almost no resources. We fight to get seats at the table, only to discover that somebody keeps switching the seats. Maybe the table itself is a myth.

And now we’re supposed to start over?

We’re supposed to go build new institutions in another underresourced community, on colonized land, sacrificing another generation of artists so that maybe the generation after us will finally experience equity?

I’ve spent my entire career watching Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer and other marginalized theater makers develop extraordinary cultural infrastructure under conditions that were never designed to let us thrive. And I’ve watched the institutions that benefit from our labor, our innovations and our audiences receive resources we could never access.

This is not simply a problem of changing audience tastes or rising production costs. I believe the economic models themselves reproduce supremacy culture. They reward accumulated wealth, inherited relationships, property ownership and proximity to powerful donors. They depend on our creativity while making it extraordinarily difficult for us to accumulate the resources needed to sustain our own institutions.

We create the cultural value. Other people accumulate the capital. Then they announce that the model is dead.

And I want to challenge the assumption that the nonprofit model ever worked for us in the first place.

Did it work for the Black Arts Movement? Did it work for disability justice theater? Has it allowed Asian American, Latine and Indigenous theater companies to build generational wealth, own their spaces, compensate their artists and pass thriving institutions to the next generation?

Or have we been subsidizing American theater with our unpaid labor, our personal resources, our health and our lives?

I don’t want us to confuse our extraordinary ability to survive with evidence that the system is working.

I also don’t want our resilience to become another excuse for withholding resources. Every time we demonstrate that we can make extraordinary art with almost nothing, someone decides that almost nothing is an appropriate budget for our work.

That’s the enshittification cycle in nonprofit theater. Our communities create value. Institutions extract that value. The people who created it are pushed out or underfunded. And when the system stops delivering the returns that powerful stakeholders expect, they declare a crisis and invite us to invent the next model.

I don’t want to build another future that requires my generation to sacrifice itself so that somebody else might eventually thrive.

I want to know where Black-led theaters are alive. Where disability justice theater is flourishing. Where Indigenous, Asian American and Latine theater makers are creating work that their communities love. I want to understand the economic conditions preventing these organizations from thriving and what it would take to make them generationally sustainable.

I want us to examine ownership, endowments, land, labor, access, governance and the distribution of wealth. I want us to stop celebrating cultural innovation without investing in the people and communities responsible for it.

I us all to ask whether the nonprofit model, as we’ve inherited it, is actually capable of delivering that future. Perhaps we need different ownership structures, different relationships to philanthropy and different ways of sharing resources. Perhaps the movement has always been more alive outside the institutions that claimed to represent it.

The question we are presented with is: Is the American nonprofit theater movement over? Is the American Theater dead?

The better question is: How are we keeping American theater alive despite the economic systems that are killing us? And can we build a model that finally allows us to thrive instead of demanding that we sacrifice another generation to keep it alive? What is the theater was need now? Calling Up Justice was built to respond to this question.

Articles that inspire me to write this!

Feature, Not a Bug: How Regional Theater Keeps Setting Leaders of Color Up to Fail by Al Heartly
https://alheartley.substack.com/p/feature-not-a-bug-how-regional-theater

Fxck you White American Theatre by Nataki Garrett Myers
https://bealadderleader.substack.com/p/fxck-you-white-american-theatre

Exit us by Kelvin Dinkins, Jr.
https://kelvindinkinsjr.substack.com/p/exit-us

‘It’s not coming back’: Giant of the stage and L.A. theaters confront the end of the nonprofit movement By Jessica Gelt
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2026-07-24/oskar-eustis-la-theaters-nonprofit-theater-crisis

Oskar Eustis, Theater Giant, Is Stepping Down. First, He Has Thoughts. by Michael Paulson
https://archive.is/0Gva0

Is the American Nonprofit Theater Movement “Over”? Devos Institution of Arts and Nonprofit Management
https://www.devosinstitute.net/initiative/is-the-american-nonprofit-theater-movement-over/