How the Left Stole the American Stage

For years, the American stage has doubled as a political pulpit, where leftist dogma jostles for space with whatever art remains. The industry has moved decisively toward progressive narratives — not just in niche productions, but in some of Broadway’s most celebrated hits. Hamilton, for instance, continues to dominate the box office with its race-conscious casting of America’s Founding Fathers. Hadestown weaves climate change themes into its retelling of Greek myth.

A Strange Loop (2022) brought a queer Black man’s anxieties and identity politics to the stage and claimed top prize at the Tony Awards while Slave Play (2019) skewered “white liberal racism” in a sexually-charged satire. What the Constitution Means to Me (2019) reframed the nation’s founding document through a feminist lens, and Fairview (2019) literally pulled white audience members onstage to confront their racial assumptions. Even classics have been retooled for ideological effect, from the gender-swapped 2021 Company revival to Oklahoma! restaged as a stripped-down, politically tinged meditation on violence and land.

In 2022, a wave of theater cancellations further fueled the debate over artistic freedom on campus. Texas Wesleyan University scrapped a civil rights drama over repeated use of the N-word, despite the black playwright’s defense of its historical accuracy. Quinnipiac University’s student theater abandoned a 1950s-set LGBTQ play when actors balked at performing period-accurate homophobic slurs, replacing it with Alice in Wonderland.

Progressive, identity-focused messaging has become so commonplace in American theater that audiences now take it as a given. On Broadway and in major regional houses, the default expectation is that new work will center marginalized voices, reframe historical narratives through a social justice lens, or explicitly address race, gender, and sexuality.

Critics will praise such themes as inherently virtuous, and marketing campaigns will lean into them, framing productions as moral statements as much as entertainment. For many ticket buyers — especially in urban cultural hubs — this ideological framing isn’t a surprise or a provocation; it’s simply the baseline for what “serious” theater is supposed to deliver.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The politicization of the stage is the natural outgrowth of an academic system that, over the past century, transformed theater from a campus curiosity into an ideological training ground.

It’s hard to believe now, but the main mission of American academia was once the cultivation of male scholars and clergy. College curricula emphasized liberal arts such as theology and the humanities, considered essential for training ministers and educated gentlemen. In fact, pursuits like the performing arts were often seen as distractions from moral and intellectual formation. From Harvard’s founding in 1636 until the late 1800s, many colleges outright restricted theater on campuses.

Between 1900 and 1925, however, that started to change. From the end of World War II through the 1960s, theater as an American academic study boomed, coinciding with the general expansion of the university system nationwide. This growth in curricular theater was sustained from the 1970s onward by ballooning federal funding for academia and student bodies. While only a few courses in theater were offered in the early 1900s, by the 1970s there were well over 14,000, according to Anne Berkeley, a professor of theater at the University of North Carolina.

In a 1962 article for the New York Times titled “The University and the Creative Arts,” American businessman W. McNeil Lowry noted that the growing university had assumed the function of professional training in the arts. He observed that the professional art school had lost its power to the “irreversible” trend of universities becoming the primary place of art education. From 1960 to 1967, the number of theater teachers and majors in undergraduate academia tripled and the number of theater courses grew by 71%. And as conservatories got established in universities, the number of students seeking a M.A. and Ph.D. in theater doubled, per numbers from Berkeley.

As theater’s foothold in colleges expanded in the mid-20th century, the left’s hold on academia was growing, too. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, it was discovered that many card-carrying communists had infiltrated the nation’s universities, with party cells in Columbia University, New York University, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Harvard, M.I.T., and the Universities of Michigan, California and Minnesota. Leftism in academia soon metastasized into cultural marxism — a self-loathing of America and western civilization and an obsession with social justice characterized by phrases like “microaggressions,” “privilege,” and “oppression.”

All that rises seems to converge: American theater and “woke” academia became inextricable one from another. Now, they function as two of the loudest institutional representatives for the cultural left, and aspiring stage actors can’t afford to sidestep either.

This wasn’t always the case. According to David Marcus, a former actor of 15 years and co-founder of a theater company in New York City, actors in the mid-twentieth century could “show up at a theater company, you swept the floor, you tried to get an audition, and that was how you made a career.”

Today, the competitive theater market makes that nearly impossible. Most aspiring musical theater stars are advised to go through the leftwing academic machine, and most do. From 2016-2020, almost 95% of performers and 97% of those in leading roles on Broadway had a college degree.

Leftism, then, had already become the standard in theater — long before woke ideology had entered the mainstream. By the mid-2000s, playwright Libby Emmons, a Columbia University drama student in the school’s playwriting department, endured a particularly tense class in which a black playwriting student exploded in anger over what he saw as the “magical negro” trope. Rather than debating it or unpacking the text, he hurled a chair across the room.

“There were also so many assumptions about white privilege,” Emmons recalled, “and the white students just accepted it as a legitimate mental framework.” For her, the frightening moment made clear not only the social volatility of the arts, but also the new identity-based standards for who was allowed to analyze the work.

“They started saying, ‘This one’s just for black women playwrights, this one’s just for Latino women playwrights, this one’s just for people who are LGBT writing about the LGBT experience,” Emmons said. “‘This one’s just for South Asian creators writing about climate change.’ They all got really specific.”

Conservative students everywhere feel forced to hide their beliefs from their peers; but nowhere is this more pronounced than within theater, according to stage actress Grace Bydalek. When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Bydalek was studying theater at the University of Michigan, one of the nation’s most prestigious musical theater programs.

The Michigan campus held vigils at which the president of the university spoke, decrying racism’s prevalence. Classes and tests were cancelled, and there were teary group therapy sessions. Bydalek, a conservative, tried desperately to engage her theater peers in conversations of good faith. One friend, for instance, had never met a Republican before.

“There was a lot of ideological strife in the department,” Bydalek said. “I tried not to hide my perspectives all that much, but of course was worried about the fallout coming from a conservative background and having the ideological convictions that I did.”

But even Bydalek, a longtime conservative, felt the intense pressure to conform so she could achieve her dreams. Much of the faculty, whom she respected and from whom she learned the trade, actively worked on Broadway. If she ever wished to find work as an actress after graduation, it was best to keep her mouth shut.

“You were aware that they were your direct pipeline to the industry, and if they didn’t like you neither would the industry,” she said.

Smart student playwrights, too, realized these same leftist frameworks were required of their work — if they wanted their play to be funded, that is. In the world of professional theater, funding is almost exclusively given to those with the utmost degree of left-wing messaging, according to Libby Emmons. And unfortunately for most playwrights, there are only two avenues of making money: Get an agent and work in television or win those very grants.

While granting organizations typically demand a great deal of applicants, these fresh requirements eventually came to look exactly like DEI goalposts. Some grants, for instance, were female-playwright specific. The grants soon became racially-focused, too. Emmons herself felt the corrupting effect of these preferences, and she eventually molded her work to win the money. Otherwise, she felt she’d be forced to leave the arts entirely.

“Artists don’t care where their money comes from,” she added. “There’s no reason that they really should. So you write whatever you’re told to do to get the grant, and then you take that money and do whatever else you want to do with it. This is your gig, do the gig.”

As the corrupting power of leftism became stronger, granting organizations grew indifferent as to whether the women granted funds were even biological women. They soon started to ask for women playwrights or women-identified playwrights. “That really started to tip me off that we had a problem,” Emmons said.

By following the money in theater, it becomes clear that leftwing heavyweights are trying to drive the narrative. This determines which ideas make it to scripting, rehearsal, and eventually stage debut — and which ones don’t.

Aspiring industry professionals are all too eager to heel. By 2020, a group of playwrights had organized an initiative called a “Jubilee year,” in which theaters across the U.S. were encouraged to only produce works by minority, female, LGBT, and disabled artists.

“White male playwrights were supposed to take a step back and not produce any of their work … and not go out for any of the grants that year,” Emmons said. “And no theater company was supposed to produce white male writers during that year. And this was supposed to be a big antiracist thing where all the white writers would recognize their privilege.”

The political and economic grip of grantwriters on the theater industry only grew stronger with the rise of the non-profit theater movement. Suddenly, theaters’ priorities shifted, no longer intent on pleasing audiences but, rather, pleasing grantwriters. Without the need to turn a profit, these new theaters could focus almost exclusively on virtue signaling. These theaters account for no small margin of working stages today: One historical analysis based on IRS data indicates that non‑profit theaters account for nearly half of all theater revenue.

Progressive “dark money” helped establish this non-profit model nationwide — notably from the Ford Foundation, self-described champion of social justice and opponent of “patriarchy” and “an economic system that exploits some and advantages others.”

Founded with automobile innovator Henry Ford’s fortune, it became a flagship of liberal arts philanthropy under W. McNeil Lowry, who developed its Humanities and Arts program and later served as acting president. The Foundation, a key player in the Left’s dark money network, now funds causes from reparations to student loan cancellation. And in theater, Ford has driven DEI efforts, awarding over $156 million to minority arts groups after the pandemic. 

The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1966 also helped fuel extensive growth in resident non-profit theaters. Just like taxpayer-funded public broadcasting descended into leftist groupthink under the facade of political neutrality, the NEA, another taxpayer-funded venture, has been accused of bias against traditional values and religion since the 1990s.

To provide some contrast, take a look at commercial productions. These ventures answer only to investors and audiences, not ideological gatekeepers. Relatively apolitical shows like David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot can still run on Broadway under traditional constraints: stick to the script, pay for the venue, and sell tickets. “Commercial producers don’t care and they don’t have to care,” Emmons said. “If you have the money, you can put it on.”

The entrenched woke theater movement certainly has its enemies. Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to reshape the industry’s leftist trend, using D.C.’s Kennedy Center as his bludgeon. In early 2025, he replaced much of the Center’s leadership and installed himself as chairman. His public vow was unambiguous: the Center’s era of drag performances, identity-driven programming, and diversity mandates was over. In their place, he promised a return to “luxury and glamour,” signaling a shift away from the social justice propaganda that has dominated the institution’s recent seasons.

His changes, of course, continue to spark backlash from the arts community. Broadway’s Hamilton canceled its 2026 engagement at the Center, citing an incompatibility of values. Hollywood figures like Shonda Rhimes and Issa Rae withdrew from scheduled appearances, warning that Trump’s heavy hand would erode the Kennedy Center’s “artistic independence.”

It’s clear that American theater’s political problem runs too deep for half-measures. For American theater to be redeemed in total, academia’s entrenched leftism would need to be rooted out – a mammoth task for one administration. The Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI and gender ideology in academia is a step in the right direction, but in a more perfect world, a college degree wouldn’t be viewed as a prerequisite to pursuing a career in professional theater. Like anything else, this will take time. One day, the stage may revert to recognizing raw talent and grit, rather than college training that many Americans can increasingly not afford anyway.

Theater’s financial incentives must change, too. One solution would strip the charitable status from all theaters, forcing them to compete in the free market and earn their money from paying audiences, the rightful judges of worthy performance. Here, elected conservatives — currently in control of the federal government — could, and should, wield their power.

Following in President Reagan’s footsteps, Trump has already cut funding for the NEA, cancelling grants for artistic projects that don’t elevate the “nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity.” Gone is the funding for the NYC-based National Queer Theatre, the racially-focused Radical Evolution production collective, and Colorado-based Creede Repertory Theatre, which has proudly endorsed Black Lives Matter. 

President Trump is on the right path. The road back will be long, but a theater rooted in true art rather than ideology is still within reach.

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