In “The Balusters,” a new comedy up for best play on Sunday night at the Tony Awards, an exasperated white man complains about how woke culture is making him feel bad. He goes so far as to compare himself to Sisyphus, saying, “I don’t want a medal. I just want to stop feeling guilty.”
The play’s author, David Lindsay-Abaire, is satirizing this hand-wringing — but gingerly and with the understanding that the show’s mostly white audiences can relate. “The Balusters” is set in an affluent East Coast suburb (the kind that many Broadway ticket buyers know well), where a meeting of the neighborhood association neatly assembles a diverse array of viewpoints (a Black gay travel writer, a centrist Latino business owner and so on) and everyone appears to be fair game. But the play’s animating assumption comes from the idea that many theatergoers, and white liberals in general, are tired of being called out. Much of the show’s comedy is mined from a wary sense of self-recognition. It seems to me that by encouraging the audience to laugh at presumed versions of themselves, the play is offering them a sense of forgiveness.
Five years ago, a lot of new theater was in a less indulgent mood. As the industry awoke in 2021 from pandemic shutdowns, many playwrights and producers were eager to champion the values of the social justice movement set off by the killing of George Floyd the previous spring. Works, often written by nonwhite artists, challenged audiences to face up to their latent biases — no matter how well intentioned they might have assumed they were as theater-loving liberals.
In New York there came a wave of shows that pushed boundaries and prodded progressive audiences. “Slave Play,” Jeremy O. Harris’s incendiary dark comedy about race and desire, which opened on Broadway in the fall of 2019, returned for an encore engagement. “A Strange Loop,” Michael R. Jackson’s hall-of-mirrors musical about a fat Black queer playwright grappling with his own subjectivity, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for best musical. A slew of plays, including new works like Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” an urban parable partly inspired by “Waiting for Godot,” and Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” about the interrogation of an N.S.A. whistle-blower, as well as revivals by Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange and Alice Childress, crowded Broadway stages.
Not anymore — or at least not this season. The preponderance of shows fueled by social and political fervor over the past several years has taken a turn or perhaps simply shifted into neutral gear. The Tony Awards race is dominated by plays that are more affirming than confrontational, offering the sort of benign provocation unlikely to keep people awake at night or wonder why they paid good money to feel unsettled.
Read think pieces on the industry’s recent woes or scroll through audience message boards, and you’ll see a refrain that crescendoed in the early 2020s: Audiences complained of feeling preached at, of plays that felt like doing homework while being chided for not doing the homework.
The fact that many of those challenging postpandemic plays closed at a financial loss is no surprise: A majority of Broadway shows do. But the economics have grown only more challenging in recent seasons, leaving many producers more eager than ever to sell tickets by catering to popular tastes. Increasingly, theater is engaged in some version of what every American media and entertainment industry is tripping over itself to do with growing urgency, which is to give paying audiences what they already want.
But theater demands a certain measure of discomfort — that people come willing to stick their necks out and maybe feel the whiz-bang of a guillotine. Soothing audiences instead can lead to shows that feel like self-congratulatory pandering.
So we get what feel like surefire bets: A-list stars extolling feel-good values loud and clear. Last season “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which George Clooney helped write and produce and starred in as Edward R. Murrow, minted money at the box office while championing the free press. Dialogue that seemed to resonate with current events, like President Trump’s legal battle at the time with CBS News, reliably drew midshow applause. (By now, all of that may seem quaint: CBS News recently fired the executive producer of “60 Minutes” and three of its seven correspondents, amid accusations of political bias.)
Occupying the same theater this spring, we have Nathan Lane in “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s reliable elegy to the downtrodden working class. Though the play is set in the middle of the last century, the production emphasizes its contemporary resonance, even outfitting the Everyman Willy Loman’s boss as a tech bro. Reviews praised it as both timely and timeless.
Then there’s John Lithgow (competing against Mr. Lane for best actor), with his sour and prickly turn as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant,” a fiery topical debate lightly outfitted as a drama. The play, which premiered in London in 2024, finds Dahl mired in public controversy over a review he wrote about Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried,” which documents Israel’s 1982 siege of Lebanon. As the play begins, Dahl’s essay has been denounced as antisemitic, and his editor and an emissary from his publisher, both Jewish, arrive to seek a public comment that will calm the waters before the release of his next book, “The Witches.”
The play, which quickly recouped its Broadway investment, raises two major questions, to my mind. One is why we continue to insist on making art about terrible men. The other is this: Does “Giant” succeed in dramatizing the interplay between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or does it flatten that debate because Dahl is so obviously a grotesque bigot? Mr. Lithgow’s performance is a kinetic marvel, but there’s no question that his Dahl is a snarling and even gleeful hater of Jews.
The cynical view would be that “Giant” seeks to validate the anxiety, including among some supporters of Israel, that those who oppose its state actions must also be antisemitic. The less cynical view would be that all of this makes “Giant,” at the very least, a less interesting play for simply offering up an obvious villain.
“Liberation,” which is set amid a women’s consciousness-raising group in the Ohio suburbs during the early 1970s, has already won its playwright, Bess Wohl, the Pulitzer Prize for drama and is up for best play at the Tonys. I think it should (and will) win. In a way not unlike “The Balusters,” it assembles a diverse array of women (an anxious older housewife, a young blond secretary, a Harvard-educated Black book editor who had to return home take care of her mother) but to a different and far more satisfying end: Ms. Wohl performs an anthropological and historical excavation of the question on pretty much every liberal’s mind: How did we try so hard to change the world for the better and still wind up here?
There is an exquisite catharsis to collectively mulling that over, in the company of the play’s grass-roots feminist characters and among people in the audience who presumably share a value system that we not so long ago took for granted — or at least assumed had been partly settled in court. I experienced “Liberation” as a communal grieving ritual, the kind our society sorely lacks and that theater can deliver at its best. The play concludes with a tender, uncertain conversation between a mother who dreamed big and a daughter trying to trace the messy result. Its lack of emotional resolution feels refreshingly honest.
I’m not alone in feeling that this season on Broadway mostly lacked that sort of difficulty — or as The Times’s chief theater critic, Helen Shaw, put it to Wesley Morris on his podcast last week, “excellence that asks something of you.”
Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, shortchanging the medium’s potential. Why pat people on the back when what they really need — and what live performance is uniquely poised to deliver — is a punch to the gut?
Naveen Kumar is a critic and journalist. He is the associate director of the National Critics Institute.
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