Inside Off-Broadway’s Future
Emily Davis and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in Well, I’ll Let You Go at the Space at Irondale. Photo: Emilio Madrid.
Theater in New York tends to take a summer nap. But in July something stirred Off-Broadway. In a Brooklyn church, Bubba Weiler’s play Well, I’ll Let You Go, starring Quincy Tyler Bernstine—and, for its last 12 performances, Marin Ireland—as a woman racked with grief and confusion about the death of her husband, impressed both critics and audiences.
The play’s popularity highlighted the potency of Off-Broadway, where theater’s most intriguing alchemies—a new venue, an inventive play or musical, a huge star or an unknown about to have their breakout—are honed to create art. Other Off-Broadway shows wither on the vine. What explodes Off-Broadway and what doesn’t is one of theater’s most enduring mysteries.
“When I was growing up, there was no such thing as Off-Broadway. You either got your show on or you didn’t,” Stephen Sondheim once said. Not so anymore.
This fall and winter, offerings span from Tom Hanks at the Shed starring in a play he’s co-written, to Aubrey Plaza at the Atlantic, Dylan Mulvaney at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, the return of Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things, the reappearance of producer Scott Rudin (co-producing Wallace Shawn’s new play directed by André Gregory), and site-specific intrigues such as Slanted Floors, a play in a Brooklyn apartment with a tiny audience of six doubling as dinner guests. And this is merely a micro-summary of the season.
But in both its commercial and nonprofit guises, Off-Broadway is at a crossroads of creativity and brute economics. The financial pressures on Off-Broadway theaters, the ongoing unionization of its backstage workers, the expectation to cast celebrities or create theatrical “events,” and the attention commanded by its better-known uptown cousin—Broadway itself—collectively exert their own strain, especially as Off-Broadway continues to experience the post-pandemic slump in audiences. In 2023, The New York Times reported a steep drop in both the number of Off-Broadway shows and box-office grosses. Where does the sector go next?
“We need Off-Broadway more than ever,” said Patricia McGregor, artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop. Boldness, vision, a sense of risk, and accessibility are vital when it comes to making work in a time of crisis and fear, she said. “We feel the storm, but we also feel the need for art to be a life raft for people to get to the other side.”
The company of Saturday Church at New York Theatre Workshop. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
Jacob Stuckelman, one of the producers of Well, I’ll Let You Go, said the play marked “the renaissance of consumers and audiences wanting to feel that they are part of events, and an interest in seeing theater not in conventional spaces.” The production announced that it recouped its initial investment after 44 performances over seven weeks. This past spring, Stuckelman—who this year won a Tony Award as a producer of Maybe Happy Ending—and director Jack Serio mounted the similarly distinctive Danger and Opportunity by Ken Urban in the intimate new space, East Village Basement.
Costs for Danger and Opportunity had been kept low thanks to support from Actors’ Equity NY Showcase fund, Stuckelman said, adding that his company, Regular People, further cut expenses by overseeing all aspects of production.
The Tony Award–winning actor, director, and producer LaChanze, who directed Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness at Classic Stage Company to critical acclaim earlier this year, said Off-Broadway was a mixed landscape of “all-time high” invention and creativity, alongside intense financial crises and challenges: “Off-Broadway theaters have been really forced to come together largely because commercial theater is costing more than ever to produce.”
Indeed, according to an in-depth New York Times report, none of the 18 commercial musicals that opened on Broadway last season had at the time of writing made a profit yet. The short-run, celebrity-helmed Broadway play has been a greater audience and revenue magnet.
Perhaps this high-spending peril places more attention on the importance of Off-Broadway artistic creation. Meghan Finn, artistic director of the Tank, which presents over 1,000 performances each year, said her venue and others like it are a “vital” part of New York’s cultural ecosystem for emerging artists. New York has lost 27 small theaters and rehearsal spaces since the pandemic, Finn said.
“The pressures around increased costs of production and other financial and political pressures mean it becomes more and more difficult for small or mid-sized companies to stay afloat,” Finn said. “There should be multiple spaces supporting new and exciting playwriting and up-and-coming directors.”
At the Tank, artists don’t pay rent and split ticket profits with the venue, allowing the organization to exist as a “luxury permanent fringe space,” said Finn, who thinks that theaters, when temporarily dark between productions, can feature other programming. The Tank has been involved in a number of “Re/Venue NYC” pop-ups at venues across the city, including A.R.T./New York Theatres, University Settlement, Paradise Factory, Mark Morris Dance Center (with a second scheduled for Oct. 24), the Bechdel Project, and Mabou Mines theater. Future pop-ups will follow.
“What can be made that doesn’t need to be a giant spectacle, but can be made with rigor and artistic integrity?”
Ryan Dobrin, director of Slanted Floors, believes the nonprofit and commercial worlds of Off-Broadway are “slowly becoming one thing.” The rise of commercial theater Off-Broadway is nourished by people’s hunger for invigorating new work, he said, alluding to the success of Job, directed by Michael Herwitz, first Off-Broadway in 2023, before moving to Broadway the following year. That transfer and Oh, Mary!’s success led creators to ask, “What can be made that doesn’t need to be a giant spectacle, but can be made with rigor and artistic integrity?” said Dobrin.
“The value system of Off-Broadway is slightly different to Broadway,” said James Ijames, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Fat Ham, which migrated uptown from the Public Theater; he most recently co-wrote the book with Damon Cardasis for the queer musical Saturday Church at New York Theatre Workshop.
“Off-Broadway gives you a little more space to fail, it’s a little more forgiving,” said Ijames (pronounced “Imes”). “The thing you’re making is tied up to the mission and aesthetic vision of the theater you’re working for. Commercial productions are really about the producers, and what they think is the best way to move forward with the show.”
Changing times
The aftereffects of the pandemic continue to roil the world of theater. According to Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the nonprofit Public Theater, “No one knows where things are going to settle. Theater is being challenged to re-prove why it matters, and why audiences should care about it. Fortunately we’re doing OK.”
The Public’s audience has returned post-pandemic, he says. “We won’t charge what commercial theaters charge for tickets.” (Tickets at the Public range from around $80 to $120, with rush tickets sometimes as low as $38.) “But philanthropically, people are challenged, and the major foundations and government are not giving money like they used to. Every theater is on its own. Some theaters will close, some won’t. Right now, the government doesn’t understand this environment, or the purpose of theater.”
Joey Monda, president of the Off-Broadway League—the trade organization that represents both commercial and nonprofit Off-Broadway theaters and producers—said its membership “continued to be healthy” but has shrunk from its pre-pandemic levels.
“The economics are challenging, and the physical and labor costs continue to increase,” said Monda. “Unlike Broadway, Off-Broadway venues are small and can only raise their prices so much. Overall, we are operating at a robust level of business, but hurting. We continue to be in recovery from COVID. The audience slowest to return to all New York arts institutions is the local audience, and that is the core audience for Off-Broadway.”
Making the production model even more difficult, Monda said, was the decision of New York City Tourism + Conventions to cancel this fall’s Off-Broadway Week, a marketing initiative that facilitates two-for-one ticket deals for shows. Broadway Week and Restaurant Week remain untouched.
“They said they were going to take time to reassess the program,” Monda said. “It’s particularly devastating for our members, who are doing all they can to produce theater in such financially challenging times.”
A spokesperson for New York City Tourism + Conventions confirmed that although Off-Broadway Week would pause this fall, the program will resume early next year. “We regularly evaluate our community marketing programs to ensure they are best serving consumers and the industry,” the spokesperson said. “In the interim, we remain committed to continuing to spotlight Off-Broadway theater to visitors through our ongoing marketing, press, trade and sales efforts.”
The spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions, seeking to clarify why Off-Broadway Week had been canceled when the Broadway and Restaurant Weeks had remained intact.
Another profound shift in the industry? Production companies owning actual real estate. Look to the new, star-led, event-theater venues such as Studio Seaview, Audible at Minetta Lane, and A24’s acquisition of Cherry Lane Theatre. (Other shows, like Titanique and the redoubtable Little Shop of Horrors have settled into profitable runs at fixed Off-Broadway venues.) The Astor Place Theatre will reopen its doors this fall—following the end of Blue Man Group’s long-running tenure—with a production of Shakespeare’s Richard II starring Michael Urie.
With Studio Seaview, Seaview Productions is making its brick-and-mortar home at the former Tony Kiser Theater, which was the longtime residence of the nonprofit Second Stage Theater. Its inaugural in-house production featured John Krasinski in Penelope Skinner’s Angry Alan; this fall, Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot is in residence after its debut run at Playwrights Horizons, running alongside Jesse Eisenberg’s new solo play The Ziegfeld Files, which will be performed on Monday nights, October to December.
Prince Faggot moved to Studio Seaview after its original incarnation at Playwrights Horizons (pictured here). Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
“We want this to become a space that is a physical manifestation of the things we believe in,” said Seaview Productions CEO Greg Nobile. Productions at Seaview, he said, “should feel like there has to be a reason to be there, that you have to see it right now. Just as important as what is on the page is the question: Can we make an event out of it?”
The Tony Award–winning Oh, Mary! director Sam Pinkleton is a master of shepherding award-winning, headline-making, original theater. After the success of Cole Escola’s play, Pinkleton has barely drawn a breath. Over the summer, he directed two buzzy Off-Broadway shows—Josh Sharp’s Ta-Da! and Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank?—and is premiering a new musical, Ceilidh, in Baltimore before returning to New York to helm The Rocky Horror Show revival set for spring 2026 at Studio 54 on Broadway.
“I should probably state the obvious, that I’ve had an incredibly good experience working Off-Broadway,” Pinkleton said, laughing. “That was down to a commitment to making really good work with producers letting artists be artists and take risks. There’s this idea that commercial theater is more conservative and fearful, but my personal experience is that the artists are encouraged to do crazy shit,” said Pinkleton. “Everyone likes to run numbers, trends, and make predictions, but for me it’s about trying to do good work. And if you think the only way to encourage good work is to charge $400 dollars to see a celebrity in an Off-Broadway show, we have a problem.”
Alex Poots, the founding artistic director of the Shed, and Madani Younis, the venue’s chief executive producer, said the post-pandemic theater era is both “very difficult” and “a period of opportunity” for artists and venues.
Malcolm Mays, Alani iLongwe, and André Holland (from left to right) in The Brothers Size at the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy the Shed.
While the Shed will attract headlines with the arrival of Tom Hanks, starring in the play he has written with James Glossman, This World of Tomorrow, both Poots and Younis emphasize that Hanks shares space this season with The Brothers Size, a 20th-anniversary revival of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play. “Our job as producers and presenters is to try and anticipate how things are moving forward, and not to be stuck in one rut,” said Younis.
Star power
The presence of celebrities doesn’t guarantee a show’s overall success, no matter how big the stage. While stars like Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal, and George Clooney helped break Broadway box-office records last season, their shows—Othello and Good Night, and Good Luck—didn’t win any Tony Awards.
“People tend to forget those big stars often got their breaks Off-Broadway, and love theater,” said Jacob Stuckelman. “And the presence of a star can attract people to the theater who may not otherwise go, like with Andrew Scott’s Vanya [at the Lucille Lortel earlier this year]. The question for all producers and directors is: Does the presence of a celebrity work best for that show?”
Celebrities can and should find a home Off-Broadway, said Ryan Dobrin: “Moderation and caution are important. I think they need to be there for the right reasons, doing rigorous artistic work eight days a week. Will they bring the caliber audiences will expect from them? I hope if A-listers are doing Off-Broadway now, they use it as a chance to support new work, not just do classics.”
As well as at its new home, Studio Seaview has produced celebrity-led shows at the Lucille Lortel, including Adam Driver in Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, Aubrey Plaza in John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and—this fall—Dylan Mulvaney in her autobiographical solo play, The Least Problematic Woman in the World.
Dylan Mulvaney in her solo show, The Least Problematic Woman in the World, at the Lucille Lortel. Photo: Andy Henderson.
“One of the enormous benefits Off-Broadway provides is the size of the venues—500 seats or less,” Seaview’s Greg Nobile said. “Not having tons and tons of tickets available means a show can become an event if everyone wants a ticket. There is intense interest when people want to spend time with a celebrity in such intimate confines. It’s exciting for the artists too, particularly those who spend so much time in front of the camera on a set. And it’s a tremendous amount of pressure to be on Broadway. Off-Broadway, they are not having to sell out a 1,200-seat theater every night, and are able to enjoy making art in smaller houses.”
Celebrity-led theater has also found a home at the Minetta Lane Theatre, home of recent short-term projects from Together, the Sonia Friedman and Hugh Jackman company, starring Jackman and Liev Schreiber and launched with the Amazon subsidiary Audible.
With all projects taped for global online distribution, Kate Navin, head of creative development for North America for Audible, said she is guided not by celebrity but by what content “is best served” by being staged there. “We’re also looking to a global audience for audio, and what will resonate there.”
This season sees the run of the hip-hop musical Mexodus and the queer history-themed The Pansy Craze, followed by more yet-to-be-revealed celebrity-led projects.
Navin didn’t want to speak for high-profile actors who have appeared in Audible’s shows, but said their eagerness to join the productions often came down to the flexibility of the short, impactful runs, and the opportunity to exercise their “acting toolbox” on a smaller, intimate stage.
“We don’t see celebrities as essential at the Public,” said Patrick Willingham, its executive director. “The Public’s largest theater has 300 seats, the smallest has 100. That frees us from having to deliver a revenue-driven production.”
Of course, Off-Broadway housed celebrities “long before it was cool, and long before Broadway was so reliant on the star model,” Monda said. “Stars use Off-Broadway as a place they can do risky work, and take bigger artistic risks as performers. Whatever else, no one involved in working Off-Broadway is doing it for the money.”
Small is beautiful (and nerve-wracking)
When it came to dreaming up Well, I’ll Let You Go, Jacob Stuckelman and director Jack Serio knew that “less is more” would marry both financial necessities and their creative vision of a spare staging. “All shows operate as small businesses. Financing any theater is hard and not for the faint of heart, whether it’s big or small, expensive or not,” Stuckelman said.
Joey Monda noted that the “most exciting and popular” work of recent times on Broadway—like Oh, Mary!, Stereophonic, Slave Play, and Kimberly Akimbo—evolved “in their original incubators” Off-Broadway.
People might assume winning a Tony means an artist would only want to work on Broadway, Sam Pinkleton said, “but I desperately want to make things Off-Broadway. If you told me three years ago that audiences would want a show about Mary Todd Lincoln being an alcoholic cabaret singer, everybody would have thrown that idea in the bin.”
So, artists don’t want to automatically transition to Broadway, given the chance? “Aggressively no,” said Pinkleton. “I’ve choreographed three Broadway shows, I’ve seen good and bad work there, and the best work on Broadway didn’t start there. With Oh, Mary! nobody said the word ‘Broadway’ until two months into the downtown run. Cole [Escola, playwright and star] and I never talked about it. Our wish was to do the play, and to do it well the way we wanted to. When Broadway came up as a possibility for Oh, Mary! I was like, ‘Can we be happy with what we’ve done?’ I was very happy it went to Broadway, and in many ways it played better than it did downtown. But that was a process.”
“Broadway is about celebrity names and selling tickets, not necessarily the art. Off-Broadway, you lead with the playwright and the work.”
Off-Broadway nonprofit spaces give directors who want to “reflect what society really looks like” the space to do so, said LaChanze, who in her own work hopes to diversify both the stories on stage and the audiences who see them.
“You get to take more risks Off-Broadway, to represent more authentically what the writer is trying to communicate without people saying, ‘We need to get a star,’” LaChanze said. “I’m a Keanu Reeves fan and can’t wait to see Waiting for Godot on Broadway, but there are many other incredible plays coming up this season we’re not yet talking about. Broadway is about celebrity names and selling tickets, not necessarily the art. Off-Broadway, you lead with the playwright and the work.”
Like LaChanze, Ryan Dobrin has worked on shows, big and small, on and off Broadway. “They are more similar than some people might expect,” he said. “I appreciate the structure of a giant Broadway show, and also love the restraints of a smaller-scale production. Fixing some of the issues in a small apartment for Slanted Floors is exciting. Theater-makers are, by nature, artists of constraints. All walls are opportunities to find paths around them.”
Audience members look on at Adam Chanler-Berat in Billy McEntee’s Slanted Floors in a Greenpoint apartment. Photo: HanJie Chow.
Many artists embrace being Off-Broadway, said James Ijames. For many years, he had a fulfilling life as a playwright in Philadelphia. “I’m always of the mind I want my work everywhere on every level,” he said. But Ijames also wants the work to affect change, and for as many people to see the work as possible. “And one way to ensure that is for it to go to Broadway,” Ijames said.
Follow the money
Who’s paying to see and make the work? “We always feel theater is about to fall off a cliff and die, never to return, because every season we’re running around with our heads cut off trying to make ends meet, and trying to get audiences to come to our shows,” Greg Nobile said.
“Money is always the thing at every level hanging over our heads,” said Ijames. “Regional and Off-Broadway theaters don’t have enough money, but are creative and resourceful. Commercial productions invest so much in capitalization, and always have this tension of wanting to push the form forward versus having to sell enough tickets to stay open.”
Every Off-Broadway theater is trying to compensate for the inequities in the industry’s structural problems, said Ijames, and “every theater is trying to course correct.” When he considers the future of the industry, Ijames laughs; he always thinks of his grandmother saying: “You could always do better!”
Nonprofit Off-Broadway ventures are struggling more than commercial ventures, said Joey Monda. The Off-Broadway League continues to lobby for the expansion of the New York State tax credit that enabled Off-Broadway shows to keep ticket prices low. “We are in a single ticket buyer landscape,” said Monda. “You’re not marketing a season, you’re marketing a particular show to a particular demographic.”
Monda would like the city to recognize the economic importance of Off-Broadway: “Film and TV are given a lucrative tax credit program to minimize risk and incentivize production. Theater has an exponentially higher rate of return. We drive tourism, support restaurants. I would hope we find ways for the government not to subsidize us, but to help us as it helps film and TV.”
The successful push by Atlantic Theater crew members to unionize earlier this year—making the Atlantic the first nonprofit, solely Off-Broadway producing company to have a union agreement covering its production workers—was followed by the Public Theater ratifying a similar agreement, enshrining workers’ rights in the areas of fair pay, benefits, and health care.
“It will make things more expensive for us, but it rights a wrong that’s been going on for 75 years,” said the Public’s Oskar Eustis. “Some theaters might say, ‘We can’t afford this,’ but they will just have to make adjustments.”
Given that Off-Broadway furnishes Broadway with talent of all kinds, the Tank’s Meghan Finn suggested the latter could “pay it forward” by its theaters collectively forming a “slush fund” to siphon money to cash-strapped Off-Broadway companies.
New producing models are also being tried. Chris Douglas of Boundary Road Productions, which produced Julio Torres’s Color Theories, hopes to build “a sustainable model where artist-led work can thrive. The needs of the art should lead, and the structure should support it,” he said. “Instead of squeezing a project into a budget template, we want to know what each piece needs to reach its full potential and find an audience that will be best suited to engage with it.”
Writer and performer Julio Torres in Color Theories at Performance Space New York. Photo: Emilio Madrid.
The Public’s Patrick Willingham said that “a significant number of donors evaporated” during the pandemic. But recently he senses a revival of donor-interest. “A corner has been turned. I’m not sure what street we’re on, but a corner has been turned.”
Future tense
The impact of the second Trump administration on theater—from economic uncertainty to whatever flows from its culture-related obsessions—remains to be seen and absorbed.
“I think there is a lot of fear everywhere, and it’s a scary time to be alive,” said Sam Pinkleton. “But audiences seem to have an appetite for weird new shows. The things that are not surviving are old ideas.” Pinkleton cautions producers against trying to emulate the success of a show like Oh, Mary! “A number of people said afterwards, ‘We’re going to make the next Oh, Mary!’ That shouldn’t be the goal. I feel very nervous about the herd mentality of our business. People should make something new and different on their own terms.”
The Shed’s Madouni Younis would like artists in New York to be given stipends to help them financially survive. Funding a city’s cultural sector may require new levels of innovation, Younis said. Would it be possible, he wondered, for New York to institute something akin to the “tourist tax” suggested for London by that city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan?
“I want work to shake the table, and wake people up.”
Or perhaps even more experimentation is necessary. The Shed’s Alex Poots would like all those involved in theater’s production and presentation to foster a supportive environment of “ambitious, flawed experiments,” where artists are not terrified that one bad review could imperil their career.
James Ijames hopes Off-Broadway will remain the place where creative envelopes are pushed and artistic resistance to the second Trump administration percolates. “I want work to shake the table, and wake people up,” he said.
New York Theatre Workshop’s Patricia McGregor values collaborations and theaters supporting each other, rather than competing to survive. Maya Choldin, NYTW’s managing director, said their company was looking into all possible revenue streams: “philanthropists, funders, people who support our vision.” While times may be perilous, financially and otherwise, that is when the most exciting art can be created, Choldin said.
The power of theater is physical and emotional, and the bringing together of people “living in a world of violence, disarray and fascism” in a space to watch and hear a story “is very powerful,” said the Tank’s Meghan Finn. “AI can’t replace theater or playwriting. You need people in a room to make it, and people in a room to see it.”
Similarly, for McGregor, theater provides “both a public service and a public health good” by countering “the epidemic of social isolation and entrenched inability to be in dialogue with each other.”
Since starring in Trouble in Mind on Broadway in 2021, LaChanze—who’s also president of Black Theatre United—says making sure Alice Childress’s work is better known has become a “personal mission.” Following the success of Trouble in Mind and Wine in the Wilderness, LaChanze hopes to produce and direct two more of Childress’s plays, Florence and Gold Through the Trees, and engage audiences with the “humanity” of Childress’s plays.
LaChanze and the company in rehearsal for Classic Stage Company's 2025 production of Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness. Photo: Allison Stock.
In today’s climate, Eustis hopes theater can help revive “the idea of the common good,” which in the 1960s encompassed a belief in the enhancing value of all forms of culture.
For Eustis, the Public has a vital role to play and “will do what we can,” he said. “As my friend Mr. Kushner [Tony, the playwright] said, hope is not a feeling, it’s a moral obligation. What is scary is what we are facing—out-and-out fascism. Either democracy is going to win, or democracy is going to lose.”
In this sense, theater—and Off-Broadway in particular—embodies both a vital force and purpose. “The ideals of what nonprofit arts stand for are terribly important,” Eustis said. “Culture belongs to everybody. It ties us together as a society.”