Dean Deborah Nelson convenes a dialogue on the challenges of experimental drama in a time of audience contractions

By Rivky Mondal
 
Photos by John Zich

On April 16, Dean of Arts & Humanities Deborah L. Nelson hosted a Dean’s Salon on the future of live theater—more specifically, the challenge of developing new work in a moment of institutional and political constraints. Hosted at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the public conversation brought together Avery Willis Hoffman, Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director of Court Theatre, and Peter Sellars, MacArthur Fellow and UCLA’s Distinguished Professor in its Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

The Salon took place during America@250: A New Works Convening, a two-day event led by Court Theatre, which welcomed directors, artists, scholars, and audiences to explore how new theatrical work can be sustained amid unstable arts funding and responses to experimentation. The week’s events also included Court Theatre’s production of Out Here, a queer musical created by Leslie Buxbaum (Associate Professor of the Practice in the Arts on the Committee on Theater & Performance Studies), David J. Levin (Alice H. and Stanley G. Harris Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Theater & Performance Studies), and Erin McKeown, award-winning composer and performer of folk, rock, and jazz.

Moderated by Dean Nelson, the Salon explored how universities and theaters can work together as sites of artistic experimentation, civic engagement, and collaborative inquiry with diverse audiences. Throughout the discussion, Hoffman and Sellars emphasized that theater is a public practice capable of sustaining difficult conversations and creating forms of shared experience that are increasingly rare in contemporary life.

Hoffman reflected on what she described as “a journey over the last two decades of thinking about what it means for theater to be a civic space,” a place of “inquiry, curiosity, freedom, failure,” where artists and institutions can support work still in incubation.

Hoffman spoke on her previous work as Program Director of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. Under her curatorial guidance, FLEXN, a dance project directed by Sellars in collaboration with Regg Roc Gray, a Brooklyn flexn dance pioneer, included a pre-show conversation series featuring NYPD officers, formerly incarcerated performers, chaplains, and young people impacted by policing.

Sellars likewise argued that theater’s deepest purpose is to generate lived, embodied knowledge through the pleasure of the senses. Referencing ancient Greek theater at Epidaurus, Sellars noted that tragedy historically swept open spaces for voices excluded from formal democratic participation—women, foreigners, the enslaved, children—and confronting audiences with society’s most urgent and painful questions.

Theater, he suggested, remains one of the few places where communities collectively encounter difficult truths, empathically experience moral consequences of onstage players, and engage perspectives beyond their own. “Theater exists to create the reality that can’t yet exist in reality,” said Sellars. “We make our first steps hopefully towards the reality we hope for.”

Together, Hoffman and Sellars articulated a prevailing desire to move American theater away from the isolating logics of ticket sales or ideology wars. Sustained process, collaboration, and public learning arose as antidotes to not just American theater but its national scene. The Salon embodied that alternative vision: an exchange, with and for the public, that acknowledged the limits of university space while also demonstrating how institutions like the University of Chicago, through deep artistic investment and intellectual drive, can sustain ambitious conversations about the future of the dramatic arts.

Hear these ideas and more discussed in the live recording.