A look at this extraordinary moment of contraction for the U.S. theatre field, including a complete list of closures since March 2020.
At the Bay Area’s California Shakespeare Theatre, which opted to pause productions in 2023 but has several ambitious recovery plans in the works (detailed in the next section), executive director Clive Worsley did concede that “some legacy diehard Shakespeare audience members weren’t willing to come along for the ride to a more diverse casting and/or politically relevant or perhaps even politically charged adaptations.” But he affirmed the theatre’s commitment to diverse programming on pragmatic terms as much as principled ones. “I think that there will always be some relevance for Shakespeare,” he said, “but not enough in and of itself to float an organization of this size.”
