What Theater Knows About America

Happy Friday 👋🏼 It’s the 4th of July. Cue the fireworks. The sparkler emojis. The grill smoke.

That’s the version of the day that we see. Then there’s the version we feel. The one made of family histories and half-learned civics lessons, inherited fears and unspoken dreams, of shame, pride, hope, heartbreak, and everything in between.

And the more time I spend working in theater, the more I see the overlap. Both are built on story. Both promise something bigger than the individual—and rarely deliver it cleanly. But even with all their flaws, I still believe in the possibility buried inside them. Because if you ask me, theater has always been one of the most honest ways we tell the story of this country. Not as it was, but as it felt. And as it could still be.

Let’s talk about that.

Theater as a Mirror

Theater has always been a place where this country sees itself more clearly—not in its most polished form, but in its most human. It doesn’t offer a cleaned-up version of the American story. It holds space for the mess. The contradiction. The ache of wanting more than what’s been handed to you.

Where textbooks flatten history, theater restores its texture. It brings voice to the people who’ve been written out. It lets us sit in the questions long after the anthem ends. And it reminds us—sometimes uncomfortably—that freedom has never looked the same for everyone.

The way Ragtime threads ambition with injustice.
The way Death of a Salesman shows how the American Dream devours the very people it promises to uplift.
The way Fences breaks open the personal cost of being Black, working-class, and unseen in the “land of opportunity.”
The way Parade reminds us that patriotism and prejudice often wear the same uniform.
The way West Side Story stages the American melting pot as a powder keg.

The examples are endless. Because that’s what theater does best. It doesn’t tell us what to believe—it shows us what it feels like to be alive inside a country still trying to define itself.

The Civic Power of the Stage

In a country increasingly defined by division, distraction, and disconnection, theater remains one of the last places where strangers gather to feel something together. It’s not just entertainment—it’s ritual. Civic, communal, embodied.

When the lights go down, we sit shoulder to shoulder with people we may never otherwise meet. We agree—consciously or not—to pay attention, to stay quiet, to enter a shared world. For two hours, we practice listening. We practice witnessing. We feel things in real time, in public, with other people. And in that way, theater becomes a kind of emotional infrastructure. A place where empathy gets exercised.

There’s something radically democratic about that. It may not fix the country. But it reminds us we still belong to one.

Theater as America

If theater reminds us we belong to a country—then commercial theater reminds us how that country actually works.

Because commercial theater, like the nation it lives in, runs on a delicate (and sometimes delusional) balance: hope and hustle, vision and access, myth and machinery. Both sell dreams. Both are built on stories of reinvention. Both promise opportunity—and bury the fine print.

It’s often called “the dream”—but it’s also a bureaucracy. A business. A machine with gatekeepers, investors, eligibility windows, and impossible odds. And yet people keep showing up. They chase the thing anyway. They pour themselves into something that might never return the favor.

If that’s not American, I don’t know what is.

It’s easy to romanticize Broadway as pure art and America as pure aspiration. But in both cases, the truth is more complicated—and more human. They’re beautiful not because they’re perfect, but because people keep trying to make them better. From the inside. Over and over again.

Art as an Act of Patriotism

I used to think patriotism was about pride. Flags, anthems, a kind of practiced certainty. But the older I get, the more I believe that making art in America—especially honest, human, complicated art—is an act of faith. Not faith in the systems, but in the people. In the audience that’s still willing to listen. In the collaborators who keep showing up. In the fragile possibility that something we make might outlast us.

There’s nothing glossy about it. It’s not always noble or romantic. It’s long hours, tight budgets, bruised egos, and lots of “no’s.” Like planting wildflowers in concrete. You don’t know if it will bloom. You don’t know who will see it. But you do it anyway, because the act itself says: I was here. I tried. I believed it could grow.

Patriotism doesn’t have to look like pride. Sometimes it looks like effort. Attention. A refusal to turn away.

A stubborn love.

One Last Thing…

The 4th of July has meant a lot of different things to me over the years.

When I was a kid, it meant big backyard parties—friends, family, too much food. Later, at overnight camp, it meant fireworks in downtown Minocqua, sitting cross-legged on blankets with people who felt like my whole world. Then I moved to New York, and it became rooftops, late nights, sparklers held above the skyline.

Now it’s changed again. Two years ago, Sam and I got married on July 3rd. We wanted to reclaim the holiday—not just as a national ritual, but as a personal one. A celebration of our own making. Something small and sacred and ours.

I think that’s what I love most about days like this. They keep changing. They carry memory. They mark the passage of time in ways we don’t always notice until we look back.

And maybe that’s the quiet power of ritual—not that it stays the same, but that it reminds us who we’ve been along the way.

Where we were. Who we loved. What we hoped for.

So whatever you’re up to today, this weekend, I hope it’s worth remembering.

See you next week ♥️