The Movement is Alive, Turn the Music Up

Directors retire. Movements don't.

When Oskar Eustis announced he will step down from the Public Theater in 2028, the interview that followed handed the field an obituary. "The American nonprofit theater movement is over," he told the LA Times. "It's not coming back." The papers printed it like weather.

I read it on my phone in Boyle Heights and my face went hot. The heat of hearing a eulogy read for people who are sitting right there, alive, passing the rice.

And I understand the pull to grieve with him. I know how an ending sits in a body. I was twenty-three when I was handed a theater company that was already breaking, and I spent the next decade inside its dying and its becoming, learning the difference between the two the slow way. Endings feel like the whole world ending when you are standing inside one.

Let me hand Oskar his flowers, because he grew real ones. He said yes to Hamilton before the world knew what it was. He kept Shakespeare free in Central Park. He insists, to anyone listening, that the people swinging hammers deserve health insurance. Twenty-three years in one of the hardest chairs in the American theater. The flowers are his.

And let me be precise about what he pronounced dead, because precision is the respect he is owed. He never said the theater is dead. He declared a funding arrangement dead: the Ford-era consensus that believed Americans deserved serious art and subsidized a whole architecture to deliver it. About that, he is simply right. It is over. It might never come back. My quarrel is with the word he reached for, and with the future he prescribed.

Because when the leader of the best-resourced nonprofit theater in America says the movement is over, he is describing the weather at one altitude. The LA Times took that forecast and rounded up the artistic directors of the biggest buildings in Los Angeles to confirm it, and the big buildings agreed with the bigger building.

Somewhere in an entire feature about the death of a movement, no one called a storefront. No one called an ensemble. No one asked a culturally specific theater that has been producing for forty years on one percent of the Public's budget what dying feels like, or what building feels like either.

They asked the canopy about the forest.

He looked at the future and saw nothing, and I believe him. He was looking from the wrong floor.

And I will say the next part bluntly, because dressing it up is how it survives. The view from the top of this field has always been white and it has always been rich. The arrangement handed a few men the altitude, and then the field spent seventy years mistaking altitude for insight. When this field wants wisdom, it calls the money. The people who could have said the movement was alive were never hard to find. They were just below the sightline.

So come down with me. The lower you go in this field, the more alive it gets.

Start just beneath the canopy, with the word. He said movement, and a movement is people, practice, and purpose. A movement that lives in enough hands cannot be retired from a corner office. Nobody gets to stand at a podium and declare the blues finished. Nobody outlives son jarocho by press release. Walk into a quinceañera and announce that the culture is over. They will turn the music up.

So if this movement could be pronounced dead in one interview, then whatever died was never the movement. It was the arrangement. The buildings, the boards, the funding consensus: an architecture that held the movement like property and called itself the thing it was holding.

Now look at his prescription, because this is where I leave him. His future, in his own telling: each theater makes its own case to its own community, and the field becomes more commercial. Read that twice. Every organization for itself, formalized. A man who watched the consensus collapse is prescribing more aloneness for a field that was dying of aloneness. I agree with his whole diagnosis and I refuse the treatment. The scattering is the disease.

And the opposite treatment is already on stage. Mexodus, Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson's live-looping masterpiece about the Underground Railroad that ran south, enslaved people fleeing to freedom in Mexico, directed by David Mendizábal, was made by no theater alone. It was built hand to hand: New York Stage and Film to Baltimore Center Stage to Mosaic in Washington to Berkeley Rep, then off-Broadway twice over, producers at every level, artists of color at the center, commercial legs under a story the old arrangement never would have centered. This summer it is playing Pasadena Playhouse, blocks from the paper that printed the funeral. Nothing is dead about a movement that just made that. That show exists because theaters moved together.

Theatre Upstanders wrote the truest passage of the week: "The answer cannot be that theatre produces important content or offers stories. The world is drowning in both. Theatre's irreplaceable value is not content. It is assembly." That passage is a bomb in a lab coat, so let me light it. The world is drowning in content because content scales, and everything that scales gets owned. Assembly happens at one size only: the size of a room with people breathing in it.

And assembly was never only ours, and it was never only entertainment. It is the muscle democracy runs on, strangers practicing how to hold complexity together. It is where grief becomes bearable, because it is held in company. It is the halls where the labor movement learned it was a movement. It is the togetherness that ending anti-Blackness actually requires, because nobody unlearns a system alone. And it is one of the last rooms in America where feeling is still legal: laughter, desire, rage, joy loud enough to embarrass you, practiced out loud, together, in the dark.

Upstanders is right to point at the library, so look all the way at it. Libraries understood their mission was never books, so when the book stopped needing them they became job centers and cooling centers and voting sites and tool libraries, and the public kept funding them because the public could feel what they were for.

Our mission was never just plays. We behaved as if it was. We narrowed assembly down to one product, at one price, for the people already convinced. We professionalized assembly until only professionals came. We cut ourselves off from every sibling, the organizers, the congregations, the block clubs, the movements, and then called our loneliness a funding crisis.

So hear the obituary again with clean ears. An arrangement can be owned. An assembly cannot. What remains is what can only be shared, and what can only be shared is the entire art form. Oskar has preached this his whole career: the culture belongs to everybody. He is right. And his own creed is the reason nobody, including him, holds the standing to declare it over.

Keep descending, to the forest floor, where things fall. Companies close. Chicago produced 127 full seasons in 2019 and produces 51 today, and the falling started years before anyone said COVID. I knew those rooms. Some were beloved and left a hole. Some, honestly, had calcified long before their lights went out. Either way, closing is not the crisis. Death is how a living field breathes. A forest where nothing ever falls is not a healthy forest. It is a tree museum.

I floated in a bay in Borikén in June and watched what a healthy ecosystem does with its dead. The mangroves feed the water by dying into it. Nothing glows without something that came before it letting go.

Here is the crisis. In a forest, a falling tree feeds everything beneath it. In our field, when a company falls, almost nothing reaches the floor. The building goes to the highest bidder. The endowment dissolves into wind-down costs. The audience scatters. The stage manager loses her insurance on a Friday. We built a field where death feeds nothing, and then we taught ourselves to experience every closing as pure loss, because under this arrangement it is. The arrangement did not just concentrate the resources, two percent of institutions holding 60 percent of the contributed money. It severed the nutrient cycle. That is the design worth grieving, and where we live, we grieved it early, composted it, and kept making.

And the falling happening right now is not weather either. It has authors. The NEA terminated grants it had already awarded while the administration moved to eliminate the agency outright. Health premiums for artists are projected to rise 114 percent as subsidies expire. Beyond theater, the nonprofit sector cut twenty-nine thousand jobs last year, with millions more at risk as public funding erodes. This is arson, and the elegies keep calling it autumn. So be precise about what we defend. The nonprofit was always the vessel, never the value.

Rad Pereira , Federation Architect at the Network of Ensemble Theaters , says it in five words: "Artists deserve temples, not nonprofits." The value is the people and the sacred work of gathering them, and the vessel is being burned on purpose. You do not answer arson by renting again from the same landlord. Rented ground was always the vulnerability. Common ground is the answer. Audre Lorde told us long ago that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." She never said we were toolless. Ours are older than the house.

And since we are down here on the floor where the truth lives, let me empty my pockets, because my love for this field is the only license I need.

I love this field. I love this art. I love what we can only do together. And I am tired of watching idiots get endowed while geniuses get exposure.

I love this field, and I am tired of pretending we built something good while artists I know have no homes. Not homes for their art. Homes.

I love this field, and I have no problem with an artistic director earning close to a million dollars. I am disgusted that we read that number as the vital sign of a healthy ecology, as if the art gets better because the altitude got higher.

I love this field, and I hate how small we think about technology, about innovation, about the future, as if imagination stops being our job at the lobby doors.

I love this field, and I am tired of the stagnation, the erasure, the cultural incompetence dressed up as tradition.

I love this field, and I am tired of the bloat, the bad management, the leadership we all privately agree is failing and publicly keep funding.

You cannot crack open what you do not love. So hear this litany for what it is: an inventory, taken by someone who is staying.

Now go all the way down, underground, where the field has always actually lived. Hull House was making theater with its immigrant neighbors in 1889, sixty years before the Ford Foundation had an idea. El Teatro Campesino played flatbed trucks in the fields for workers no building ever counted. eta and Free Street raised their own Chicago stages in 1969 because the front doors stayed shut. Ensemble practice is older than the system that defunded it, and the defunding was never an accident: colonial systems defund what works, because collective creation builds collective power. The culturally specific companies who carry it have held culture the old way this whole time: audience as kin, practice owned by the room, the show going up because the neighborhood needed it to.

This is the layer the obituary could not see, and it works like the living web under a forest: fungal threads lacing root to root, moving nutrients from the trees that have plenty to the seedlings in the shade. Watch how it answered its own obituary.

A man pronounced the movement dead on a Friday, and before the week turned, the field wrote back from every direction. Michael Rohd reminding us that none of this is news, that artists have been remaking this work for years while the big houses arrive late to rooms other people built. Sara Farrington returning from the archive holding JoAnne Akalaitis, who proposed childcare and artist wages at the Public in 1991 and was gone within two years. Howard Sherman counting the movements and finding us standing in a third one. Ariel Fristoe writing from Atlanta, a hundred community partnerships deep, giving the future a name. Theatre Upstanders mapping the commonwealth to come. Dead movements do not answer their own obituaries. This one answered in five-part harmony by Sunday.

And the network has builders, and they have names. Rad, whose temples you just heard. Annalisa Dias , co-director of HERE Arts Center and co-founder of Groundwater Arts. Lauren Turner Hines at the Andre Cailloux Center for Performing Arts & Cultural Justice in New Orleans, anchoring a kinship network of Black-led companies across the South, sharing staff and revenue, carrying its building into a community land trust. Libertad Guerra at the Clemente. Miranda Gonzalez at Urban Theater. And so very many more. The Chicago organizers who arrived at NET's federation table with nine worker cooperatives already formed. When this field's story gets told next, these are the calls to make, because the forefront was never missing. It was misfiled.

What is held in common can be received when it falls. Property cannot compost. That is the whole difference between the field that just got eulogized and the field under your feet. So the question in front of us is bigger than what theaters should do now. It is who holds what comes next. And the just answer is the oldest one: the people do. Measure the next movement by them.

Is leaving survivable?

Do the companies that kept culture alive on nothing, the Black companies, the Asian, the Latinx companies, the Indigenous companies, the queer collectives, the ensembles, enter the next chapter the same as ever?

Do the people who assemble hold the ground they assemble on?

No one is coming to save us. No one was ever coming to save us, and that has never once stopped us from saving each other. Three years ago, in a room at the Andre Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice in New Orleans, members of the Network of Ensemble Theaters, the national network I help steward, said the quiet truth out loud: the work is thriving and the workers are not.

A network that gathers us is beautiful. A network that can catch us when we fall is survival. So we are building the catch, the way steelworkers and nurses and domestic workers built theirs, by pooling the one thing cultural workers have always had in abundance: each other. Healthcare that travels with the worker instead of the job. Ground that belongs to the neighborhood instead of the highest bidder. Resources moving like water, because water does not grieve a cracked vessel. It moves, and it finds the living. The work in this field has been thriving for a long time. Now the workers will too.

And now the part the elegies are designed to help us skip. The whole discourse keeps calling this moment passing the torch. But if the movement is truly over, then say it with your hands. Dead things have estates, and this one's estate, the buildings, the endowments, the royalties, the political capital, was accumulated in the movement's name, by the movement's labor, on a promise that the culture belongs to everybody. If the movement is dead, the will is open, and the heirs are easy to find.

I am not handing anyone a blueprint, because a living system never has one answer. The transfer will be plural or it will be nothing: a building moving into community trust here, an endowment seeding a commons there, workers written into governance, royalties feeding the ground they grew from, and forms none of us have imagined yet.

What I am saying is that the estate conversation has not even started, and the elegies are how it keeps not starting. While the field was at the funeral, the settlement was proceeding without it. So to every institution nodding along with the obituary: you do not get to agree that the movement is over and keep everything it built.

And Oskar, this is the invitation under all my quarrel, offered with respect: you have two years left and the loudest microphone in the American theater. Spend them handing things over differently. Make your exit the first act of the next movement instead of the last act of the old one. We do not need the torch. We need the collective deed.

If you tell this field's story, you have the group chat now, and the forecast from the forest floor deserves to be printed as the weather too.

And if the obituary left any of you grieving, let me hold that with you, because something real is passing and pretending otherwise is its own lie. Grieve the arrangement if you loved it. It made beautiful things possible, and it broke faith with most of us, and both are true. Then look down.

The field was never up in the canopy.

It has been under your feet the whole time, alive, threaded through every room where people gather to make meaning together. Then throw the doors open, because what we hold is what people are starving for. People are starving for more than plays. They are starving for somewhere to feel. This country is full to the teeth with rage and grief and desire and joy, and it has almost nowhere public left to put them. A room where feeling is practiced out loud, together, is not a luxury in a time engineered for numbness. It is the resistance. What does anyone need more right now than a door opening into that?

So this is the work, and it is not keeping every building standing. It is restoring the nutrient cycle: building the ground that receives what falls, so the practices get carried, the people get caught, the audiences get re-homed, and the resources return to the living instead of the lawyers. A field like that can let things die without losing anything true. A field like that can watch its giants step down and feel something better than fear.

We have lost so much. But we are not lost. I was handed a breaking thing at twenty-three and there was nothing underneath me. Somewhere out there is the next twenty-three-year-old, and the ground we are building is for her: when it breaks in her hands, and it will, she falls two inches instead of forever. And to you, Oskar: the culture you served is doing what living systems have always done with what their elders leave.

In a forest, when a great tree falls, nobody holds a funeral. The light reaches the floor, and everything that has been growing in the shade gets its turn at the nutrients from the sun. The tree goes into the ground through a network older than any single trunk, all those years, all those cycles, all the stories, and becomes everyone. Returns to a collective state.

The mycelium does not mourn the tree the way we were taught. It receives it.