Theater Isn't Dead: It Stopped Waiting for Permission

How institutional gatekeeping killed itself and why artists are building their own stagesIn 2009, I got my golden ticket.The Roundabout Theatre Company, that venerable nonprofit with three Broadway houses and a subscriber base older than most of the plumbing in Manhattan, invited me in for a staged reading of my play Smoke.To understand the Holy Shit level of this moment, you need to know where I was coming from. I'd been working in the hotel industry for 20 years, writing in the evenings. Most of my scripts had debuted in the local Indigenous arts community at places like the American Indian Community House and Amerinda. After a reading at the Public Theater, I got recruited for their Emerging Writer's Group, a program designed to give writers outside the usual university pipelines a shot at breaking in.Mission accomplished. They gave my script to Charles Randolph-Wright, a renowned producer and director. He organized the reading with a dream cast: Ariel Shafir, Chaske Spencer, Lisa Ramirez, Vanessa Aspilaga, Jennifer Rice. Only two actors were Native on a script that was supposed to be all Native, but still. I was levitating.Charles promised me that Todd Haimes, the Roundabout's artistic director, would be there.Then he...