The Institution Preserves Itself

Message-Driven Theater and Performative Social Justice

In my first year living in New York, I reached out to a number of queer theater makers — writers, directors, designers, producers — asking if they’d meet with me. I was seeking community, as well as opportunities to develop my own work and support the work of my peers. Around this time, an artistic director agreed to chat on the phone. We spoke a bit about his background. Then, he provided some resources for me. And then, the conversation turned to my work:

“I have a play called MASK4MASK. It’s about a country singer who is outed and decides to reinvent himself as a gay pop star.”

“We don’t do art for art’s sake,” he responded, almost too quickly, like it was rehearsed, the language he used on grant applications. “I love that kind of theater, though,” he added, covering. “But we do message-driven plays.”

If I had the confidence at the time, I might have replied that MASK4MASK is not, in my opinion, art for art’s sake. It’s about the process of identity formation that all queer people go through after coming out. It’s about the ways queer culture helps and hinders that process, as well as the limited models offered to us. It also explores how both pop music and gay male culture appropriate and steal from Black culture, and asks how we move forward from this.

In my opinion, it has a message.

But I didn’t say this, maybe, in part, because I understood that it was still not “message-driven.”

If you’ve seen New York theater more than a couple times in the past decade, you’ve probably seen a message-driven play. They’re everywhere. You know the kind. It often includes some kind of lecture, or at the very least, a monologue explaining its themes and ideas. Characters talk in a way that is neither realistic nor stylized. Mostly, it tells rather than shows. Usually, the people onstage are from a marginalized group, and most of the audience is White, straight, cisgendered, and middle to upper middle class. As a result, the artists are asked to explain their identities rather than inhabit them. You might be tempted to call it didactic, preachy, or heavy-handed. But you won’t. Because you’re socially obligated to like it.

Message-driven theater teaches through information. Art teaches through catharsis. (Entertainment, which I think was meant by “art for art’s sake,” doesn’t teach at all.)

Message-driven theater, like propaganda, tells its audience what to think. Art, conversely, leaves room for viewers to draw their own conclusions.

Art is riskier, as it requires a certain level of trust in your audience, but it is ultimately, more effective. The strongest antidote to fascism is independent thought. When we resort to propaganda, we are no better than our oppressors. We mimic the church and the state.

And audiences know it. It insults their intelligence. It turns them off.

Theater should feel like a shot of adrenaline, not a multivitamin.

So how did we get here?

In his book Theatre of the Unimpressed, playwright Jordan Tannahill explores the pitfalls of our theatrical model. Off-Broadway, regional, and nonprofit theaters rely on subscribers and donors to stay afloat. Most of this base is older, wealthy, White, and cisgendered. Theaters feel compelled to program shows this audience will find non-threatening. In 2015, when Tannahill wrote the book, this meant theatrical seasons were dominated by “The Well-Made Play,” in which “the conflicts of human psychology were…waged through conversations on the battlegrounds of middle-class parlours.” Think O’Neill, Shaw, Miller, and their descendants. Playwright Mac Wellman would likely call this “Theatre of the Already Known” or “Geezer Theatre.”

However, in 2016, with the first election of Donald Trump, the model shifted. Suddenly, their subscribers and donors were awakened to the reality of social injustice, seemingly for the first time. “What do you mean there’s still racism, misogyny, and homophobia,” they asked. “How can that be?” They scrambled to use their time and resources in ways that could assuage their White guilt.

Suddenly, theaters had to compete for funding and attention. How could they ask their audience to donate to them, rather than to organizations like Planned Parenthood or March for Our Lives, which were actually making a difference on the ground? Easy — they just had to rebrand themselves as social justice institutions. And just like that, the Well-Made Play was replaced by the Message-Driven Play.

Theaters began pouring their resources into creatives from historically underrepresented communities, reserving their fellowships, residencies, writing groups, and commissions for the artists they deemed to be the most oppressed. They guided these artists in the development of new, message-driven work, which they then shared with their audiences. If ever they did program “The Well-Made Play,” they reimagined it, through casting, direction, design, etc., to comment on the current political moment.

In this way, they convinced their subscribers and donors that they were pushing culture forward and actively fighting injustice. Each time their audience came to see a show, their guilt could be momentarily assuaged with the illusion that they had done something. (In 2018, for example, I was cast in a message-driven play about gun violence. To promote it, some of my cast members claimed that attending the play was some sort of political action.)

On the surface, the theater industry’s focus on diversity was an incredible thing. American theater has historically been dominated by artists who are White, cisgendered, able-bodied, and American or European born. By investing in the development of POC, trans, disabled, and immigrant artists, theaters could correct this inequity.

However, much of it has been performative.

In 2020, 300 BIPOC theater artists cosigned “We See You, White American Theatre,” a manifesto outlining a path towards a more equitable theater industry. Many of their demands address the pitfalls of the theater as social justice model: “Ensure BIPOC artist work has the audience for which it was intended,” “Stop tokenizing and fetishizing BIPOC artists and work, especially for donor dollars,” “Stop pitting us against each other or attempting to use us to control one another,” “We demand to be valued for our worth as artists, not just how we racially or ethnically identify.”

Little has changed since then.

When applying for opportunities, marginalized artists are asked to sell their identities, rather than their work, competing with one another in a sort of “oppression olympics.” This is objectifying and dehumanizing.

If they receive institutional support, they are expected to amend their work to appeal to subscribers and donors. They are asked to write message-driven plays that educate rather than express. They must engage in respectability politics. Their work cannot be too challenging to a White, older, cisgendered, and wealthy audience. Instead, it should feel like preaching to the choir, another kind of “Theater of the Already Known,” in which a liberal audience consumes ideas they already agree with. Marginalized artists are rarely given funding or support to create work for their own communities, as theater often is not financially accessible.

I have seen plays ruined by this process. I have seen plays in readings that were delightfully absurd, lived in, clever, and alive. But after being workshopped by a theater, their witty dialogue was replaced with long message-driven speeches. They were drained of their nuance and artistry.

And although theaters claim to value the work of marginalized artists, their leadership is still largely composed of White men. Recently, there was a change in leadership at a theater company I know, and the new artistic director shifted focus to BIPOC, trans, and lesbian stories. This is a promising and exciting redirection for this company. But the new artistic director is a middle-aged White man. If he is truly invested in the development of underrepresented voices, why take the job to begin with? Why not recommend a BIPOC, trans, or lesbian artist in his place?

The institution isn’t interested in social justice. The institution is interested in preserving the institution.

As a result, its actions arise more out of a fear of cancellation, than an interest in developing a truly diverse theatrical ecosystem. Otherwise, they would have more nuance.

As theaters search for the most historically underrepresented voices to highlight, they claim that they are correcting a long history of White, straight, male dominance. But the White, straight, male legacy artists are doing just fine. No one has stopped producing work by Tracy Letts, John Patrick Shanley, or David Lindsay-Abaire, all of whom had premieres this year.

And new straight, White artists are largely preferred by commercial and Broadway theaters, who are producing work with tourists from Iowa in mind.

Instead, this model has created a middle ground of unproducible artists: artists who are too fringe for Broadway and commercial theater (which, as INTO reported in 2024, is “obsessed with and structured almost entirely around straight people and problems of heterosexual coupling”), yet still too historically represented to receive the support of nonprofit and Off-Broadway theaters.

For example, in reflecting on the gay theater I’ve encountered over the past decade, I’ve realized that most of the new plays have been independently produced or have been small partnerships with Off-Off-Broadway nonprofits (with limited institutional support).

As playwrights, there are very few paths to legitimacy and financial sustenance. There is the Off-Broadway, nonprofit, regional path, in which playwrights achieve cultural legitimacy through funded MFA programs, grants, residencies, writers groups, fellowships, and commissions, opening up teaching opportunities and more substantial grants. And there is the commercial theater path, in which, if a work achieves a certain degree of success, resources may come in the form of film and television adaptations and lengthy commercial runs. Both paths also open up the opportunity for better paying film and TV work, as well as licensing.

Self productions (and by extension, small independent productions), notably, are not one of these paths, as the costs associated generally greatly exceed the returns. Also, the industry still regards the need to self produce as a failure of the artist, rather than the system. They tend not to view these productions with the same level of respect.

So what happens when an entire generation of gay stories is relegated to this model?

It’s a difficult question, since historically, gay men especially have been well-represented on the stage. Shows like Boys in the Band, Torch Song Trilogy, Normal Heart, and Angels in America advanced gay narratives long before gay characters were leading films and tv shows. So the logic goes: we’ve had our turn. It’s time to step aside.

But it’s a strange logic in a world that is still dominated by straight, White stories. Why is gay theater the lineage that must end?

As a playwright focused on these stories, I’ve encountered the assumption that gay male work is inherently unserious. (“Art for art’s sake,” after all, was a philosophy initially championed by Oscar Wilde.) Since we are no longer dying of AIDS, we must have nothing substantive to say. (Apparently, we’re only interesting when we’re dying.) This is homophobia. It is rooted in the centuries’ old assumption that gay men, because our sexual activity does not produce children, are just frivolous fairies who flit about and fuck.

It also assumes that the problems gay men face, in their relationships for instance, are personal rather than systemic. As if the legacy of growing up in a world where “gay” was used as a playground slur, where we were called “faggots” by our classmates, where we saw our elders die on tv, and where we watched closeted gay governors outed and then forced to resign from office, does not ripple into our adult lives, regardless of what rights we might now have.

There’s also the assumption that we do not need institutional support, since we have access to power through our social and sexual networks. This is also a page out of the homophobic playbook. During the Cold War, for instance, gay men were forced out of government roles, due to the assumption that their loyalty to their international sexual community superseded their loyalty to the country. They were regarded with suspicion, believed to be members of a homintern, or gay mafia. When the industry looks at us and says, “they don’t need us, they have each other,” they are reading off the same script.

The reduction of institutionally-supported gay theater has also likely paved the way for the disappearance of out gay characters on tv (as I explored last month). Historically, the stage has been one of our primary modes of visibility. If that’s taken away, all other media quickly follows.

To be fair, gay men (and White gay men, in particular) do have a tendency to dominate queer and marginalized spaces. To suck the air out of the room, so to speak. To direct attention and resources towards themselves, without acknowledging the greater privilege and access to power they possess.

But most of my peers’ work apprehends this. It acknowledges the intersection of privilege and oppression at which gay men live. It wrestles with the complexity of a community that has attained power through assimilation and economics, rather than true liberation. It also challenges White gay apathy, which is used by the system to uphold structures of oppression.

(Ironically, the work that doesn’t apprehend this is the work receiving longer commercial runs. For example, Messy White Gays claimed to satirize White gay apathy, but largely, excused it.)

If anyone is sucking the air out of the room, it is the administrators, producers, and donors that are tokenizing marginalized artists, pitting them against one another, and rewriting their stories to meet the institution’s aims. Rather than imagining a truly intersectional theater in which BIPOC, queer, trans, disabled, and immigrant artists can work together to create art by and for their communities, they are segmenting us and asking us to create propaganda that serves their bottom line.

So what might a truly intersectional theater look like?

Last fall, I saw Prince Faggot by Jordan Tannahill, which was regarded as one of the best plays of the year, and rightfully so. It is a piece of speculative fiction, imagining that Prince George is the first openly gay member of the royal family, navigating his first serious relationship.

It is also metatheatrical. The narrative is framed by five performers: a South Asian British man, a White trans woman, a Black man, a middle-aged White gay man, and a Black trans woman who collectively play all the roles (including Kate, William, and Charlotte) other than Prince George. It doesn’t minimize George’s experience, necessarily, but contextualizes it within the broader queer community.

George anticipates homophobia from his family that is never quite there. He views himself as oppressed, even as he occupies one of the most powerful positions in the world. He ultimately loses his relationship with Dev, his South Asian British partner, because he cannot fully apprehend his own privilege, or relinquish the respectability politics of the throne. He borders on self destruction via excess, seeking “more attention, more cuddles…one more kiss.” At one point, he is haunted by former, closeted royals, confronting the reality that his life of assimilationism may be no better than a life in the closet: “my own blood, on my own hands.”

Through George’s story, Tannahill explores the emptiness and excess of the contemporary White gay male experience. He allows us to empathize with George, and thus, challenges us to see ourselves in him, but he also never excuses his behavior.

George, after all, is not really the subject of the piece. The other performers are. Throughout, the narrative is interjected with monologues: direct addresses that are framed as autobiography. The White trans actress contrasting her experience with George’s, the Black male actor discussing the complexities of playing the king of England, the middle-aged White gay actor discussing the use of kink during the AIDS epidemic, and the Black trans actress discussing power, community, and belonging in queer spaces.

At a book signing in February, I asked Jordan about the process of writing these monologues. Some of them were in the initial draft of the script, others were written with their performers in mind, and N’yomi Allure Stewart’s monologue, which closes the play, was adapted directly from an interview with her, about her experiences in the ballroom scene.

In that sense, the play is a true collaboration between various members of the queer community, and it is addressed to “the queers in the audience” (adding “I’m assuming that’s most of you”). It is by and for a group of intersectional queer people.

It has a message, but it’s not message-driven. It’s kinky, sexy, shocking, funny — human. It doesn’t suppose to have the answers, but allows the characters (and the audience, by extension) to wrestle with the questions. And as a result, it is beloved. It brought people into the theater who might not otherwise go. It invited its audience into a new perspective, rather than forcing an ideology onto them.

Towards the end of the play, when George marries his White partner, the news correspondents suggest “this must feel like something of an endgame, does it not, for the LGBT struggle for rights and visibility.” It echoes the way the media responded to gay marriage.

It is also, I imagine, the way a donor, a board member, a producer, an artistic director feels every time they put a marginalized artist onstage.

But as the character Dev notes: “Everything, in fact, stays exactly the same.”

The institution preserves itself. A gay prince doesn’t change that, and neither does a message-driven play.

The play ends with a focus on how queer people anoint one another as divine, beloved, royal.

And maybe, that’s the future, as it was the past. Not with the institutions, but in spite of them.

As Tannahill writes, “We’re in a theater after all. The faggot’s palace.”