The Inflating Cost of Artistic Freedom

Recalculating art, activism, and risk from inside the American theater.

In the early ’90s, I landed my first professional job as an actor. After the turn of the century, I became a teaching artist, which led to directing plays, and later independently producing my own work. Across three decades, my understanding of theater’s meaning and purpose was formed by the artists who came before me, and the ones working around me. My conception of what theater is and what it can do is now solid in my artistic soul, but, over the last decade, the scene around me has changed. 

This past year, the toll this change exacts on artistic freedom increased in ways I never anticipated—and it is far steeper than I ever could have imagined.

On Shifting Stages

Unlike film and television, theater has no rating system. Free of this restriction, American theater provided opportunities for playwrights eager to challenge the prevailing norms of the twentieth century. Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) exposed the devastating impact of moral panic; Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) put gay men onstage speaking plainly when that kind of visibility was dangerous; Terrence McNally’s Love! Valor! Compassion! (1995) presented gay lives as complex and lovingly humane in the face of the AIDS crisis.

When the price for pushing back was too high, playwrights turned to metaphor and suggestion. Arthur Miller used the Salem witch trials in The Crucible (1953) as an allegory for McCarthy-era persecution, while Tennessee Williams relied on implication and subtext to explore forbidden desire in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

In the early twenty-first century, American theater artists pushed boundaries even further. Musicals like Avenue Q (2003) and The Book of Mormon (2011) skewered societal standards through irreverence, profanity, and even blasphemy. Spring Awakening (2006), a pop-rock adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s once-banned nineteenth-century play, put adolescent sexuality, repression, and hypocrisy center stage.

For the majority of my career, I had only known a theater powered by an “outside the box” attitude, producing provocative plays designed to shine a spotlight on the shortcomings of the status quo. Sometime after 2014, I noticed a change. Artists around me who once prided themselves on confronting conformity began repeating the same expressions, supporting similar causes, and adopting a worldview concerned with identity, power, and harm toward select identity groups. This worldview is often described as Critical Social Justice (CSJ). As liberal humanist Helen Pluckrose defines it, CSJ holds that knowledge is culturally constructed to maintain oppressive power systems and must be analyzed through the lens of identity and systemic oppression. While I understand and support the impulse to widen the scope of viewpoints presented on the American stage, as I document in the remainder of this essay, the excesses of CSJ activism in the arts have eroded freedom of artistic expression through overreaching policies, practices and hostility to dissent.

Historically, threats to artistic freedom came from outside the theater. In 1923, the entire cast of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance endured an obscenity trial over an onstage kiss between two women; four years later, Mae West was jailed for her play Sex. Today, I see the most powerful pressure to conform coming from within the theater itself.

Administrators committed to CSJ now hold positions of authority within arts institutions, many elevated through hiring initiatives implemented in the years leading up to the 2020 peak of the so-called “Great Awokening.” Despite frequent claims that we have passed “peak woke,” arts leaders who shape hiring practices, programming decisions, and institutional norms show little interest in reconsidering the frameworks they have implemented—and more such people aligned with this outlook are soon to assume these positions.

In October of 2025, New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) announced a search for an Associate Arts Program Specialist to oversee aspects of the Cultural Development Fund (CDF), which provides roughly $85 million annually in support for non-profit cultural organizations. The first responsibility listed states the new-hire will participate in “equity-based reforms” to the CDF. The job description does not articulate what “equity-based reforms” entails, but it is reasonable to ask whether these reforms will allocate funding based on identity over artistic merit. Additionally, if by “equity” the reforms endeavor to implement a version of affirmative action in the arts, are these reforms time-limited or permanent? More importantly, will anyone measure how these reforms impact the kind of art that is made after funding decisions from leadership are disbursed to working artists?

The pressure to conform does not solely flow down from administrators; it also radiates sideways, peer to peer, influencing what kinds of stories are told and which questions are stage-worthy. As a result, more and more contemporary theater—especially in the independent sphere—draws from a dwindling pool of ideas focused on grievance, dismantling hierarchy, and eradicating “harmful” topics and words.

A paradoxical proclivity of this milieu was on display in a recent New York Times think piece about the ethics of using a slur sometimes slung at gay men, which appears in the titles of at least six contemporary productions. The essay mainly questions whether use of the slur causes harm or aspires to reclaim the word.

But this focus on potential harm or reclamation obscures more interesting questions: When different artists, creating work independently, all use the same slur in the title of their work, what does that say about the state of the arts? Does it point to fearless originality, or a culture that rewards a limited range of approved transgressions? The answer may be explained by the cultural marketplace in which these works are produced: what once risked social scorn now earns easy applause.

Further, the slur is no longer the progressive provocation it was when Larry Kramer used it in 1978 as the title of his scathing novel. Today, its overuse is a signpost that reads “I’m in with the in crowd.”

To my knowledge, there has not been a study examining the causes behind changing ideological trends in the U.S. arts sector. However, in May of 2025, Freedom in the Arts published a report titled “Afraid to Speak Freely,” presenting survey findings that indicate a significant number of U.K. artists feel pressure to self-censor—avoiding disfavored subjects, themes, or views. Given the study’s implications, it is curious that no comparable research efforts have been announced to ascertain if, or to what degree, internal and external pressures might be informing the work American artists create.

While no studies have emerged from the professional arts sector itself, a January 2026 study of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE), “College Free Speech Rankings,” found students in theater ranked among the least politically tolerant majors—even below gender studies. The report surprisingly revealed “men in theater have the lowest right-wing tolerance of men in any major… by a large margin (~5 percentage points).” Absent further study, I am left to wonder if the cause of changing trends in the professional realm originates on campus.

Broadly, there appears to be a lack of consensus as to whether or not the “vibe” has shifted. This past year I heard many commentators declare the era of CSJ cultural dominance was fading. Evidence supporting that view appeared compelling: many large corporations rolled back DEI initiatives, the Supreme Court struck down the “extra burden” that was previously imposed on majority group members who filed employment discrimination lawsuits, and an op-ed by Andrew Sullivan criticizing the excesses of the Gay Rights Movement found its way into The New York Times. 

But, from my vantage point as an independent theater artist, the threats to freedom of expression feel no less acute, and the cost of standing apart from the crowd appears to be rising.

The Cost of Saying “No”

I am trained as a teaching artist and a theater director. Before voicing my objection to embedding CSJ concepts into K–12 instruction, I had steady employment as a teaching artist. After refusing to comply, my workload was cut to a fraction of what it once was. Teaching theater and directing plays is not just my profession; it is what gives my life meaning. I am not alone in observing that the price of exclusion from the arts is equal parts financial, psychological, and spiritual.

In conversations with people who insist we are past “peak woke,” I often explain the difference between our experiences. “You may feel that way because you’re still able to work in your field,” I say. “I’m not as certain, because I’m evidently barred from full-time employment in mine for refusing to affirm activist beliefs.”

Arts and education employers have become adept at ensuring dissenters never make it past the gate. Last summer, I applied for a leadership position at a small performing arts venue in Brooklyn. With two master’s degrees and a long career in the arts, I met or exceeded many of the listed requirements.

Then I reached a bullet point under “qualifications” that read:

Demonstrated commitment to fostering creative community and supporting diverse artistic voices, including a commitment to the organization’s values: anti-racist and anti-capitalist principles; BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disability justice; inclusivity; access; sustainability; and freedom of expression.

What kind of cultural moment are we living in when a job description explicitly requires commitment to “anti-capitalist principles”? This organization is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that cannot survive without capitalism. It relies on income from various sources—ticket sales, grant funding, individual donations—in order to produce work. In addition to receiving funds, presumably this organization participates in other capitalist practices such as paying artists and their electric bill.

It is reasonable to wonder whether anyone on this organization’s board questioned how “freedom of expression” could coexist with mandatory ideological commitments. But I suspect no one raised such questions because, by now, many of us have learned that even asking them can result in professional exile.

Last September, I heard academics who had been hounded out of education for their disfavored views speak at the Columbia Academic Freedom Council’s Academic Freedom Prize event, which honored heterodox educators. One scholar who had miraculously retained his position warned faculty without tenure that they would be foolish to assume they could keep their jobs if they expressed certain opinions.

Some argue these concerns are overblown because the current federal administration has taken action against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education. While it is true that executive orders purport to curb illegal discrimination, academic job postings tell a different story.

A listing for a full-time theater-directing faculty position, posted after those orders were issued, included this statement:

[The department] strives to create a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, anti-racist, and socially just environment through intentional pedagogy, recruitment, and community culture. We welcome applicants who will sustain and expand our commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism.

I do not have the legal expertise to determine whether this language itself flies in the face of executive orders. A closer look would be needed to see how the department interprets concepts like “equity” and “anti-racism,” and whether it implements policies that favor certain faculty or students over others based on immutable characteristics. But the language used here illustrates some institutions remain ideologically defiant.

More troubling, the listing signals a search for a politically aligned scholar. I do not believe a professor teaching theater directing should be required to affirm activist aims. Students hold a wide range of views and aspirations. A professor committed to ideological neutrality is better positioned to support students with varied artistic impulses, whether those include directing explicitly political work or work wholly divorced from activism.

Although I was interviewed for this position, I was not hired. I cannot know whether that outcome was a result of my unwillingness to signal a commitment to specific beliefs, my public dissent from orthodoxy, or some other factor. What I do know is that ideological screening has become so normalized that these questions are now unavoidable.

I have been candid in my conviction that CSJ has had a corrosive effect on higher education. I object, in particular, to the way Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) is often presented not as one interpretive framework among many, but as objective truth. That is how it was taught to me. During my graduate school experience, no texts were assigned that presented alternate perspectives or critiques of Freire’s “oppressor-oppressed” binary worldview. As Baylor University professor David Corey documents in “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy” (2023), Freire’s book is widely cited in academic social sciences, frequently assigned in philosophy of education courses, and has “exercised a powerful influence not only in higher education, but also in K-12 teaching.” Faculty have a right to select texts appropriate to their courses, but institutions have a responsibility to ensure students encounter a variety of viewpoints. If not, they risk teaching students that “life is a battle between good people and evil people,” as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt pointed out in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). The authors demonstrate how binaries like “good vs. evil” or “oppressor vs. oppressed” ultimately “harm the individuals and communities who embrace it.”

Nothing will change unless people speak up. But speaking up carries costs.

That reality hit home when I learned my alma mater was considering requiring graduate students to write about their racial complicity in “systemic oppression” as part of their thesis work. I wrote a formal complaint to the dean, arguing that compelled speech of this kind amounted to ideological indoctrination and might be legally questionable. I asked whether the institution was a truth-seeking, educational institution or an activist training camp.

Following an investigation that lasted over three months, the dean sent a letter essentially saying, “Nothing to see here.” The letter was perplexing—not for what it said, but for what it did not. Nowhere did the letter address the possibility that students could be required to write about their race or complicity in systemic oppression. Instead, it reframed my concern as a personal grievance and emphasized that the program’s content aligns with its intended outcomes. This side-step said it all: If the intended outcome is activist training, the administration seemed to have no objection.

My complaint ended a long friendship with a faculty member who alerted me to the impending thesis policy. Speaking out when it counts has cost me both professional opportunities and personal relationships. Yet, in my heart, I know staying silent would have exacted a fee from my conscience I could not live with.

A Sharp Chill in the Air

Over the past year, I have repeatedly wondered: Has society truly passed peak woke? Some say the worst of the worst is behind us because people can publicly air concerns they once only whispered. Perhaps. To me, the nagging question is not whether dissenting views are allowed, but what risks people believe they incur when they speak openly.

That concern became impossible to ignore after the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Only the night before he was killed, I watched Kirk in a segment on Next Up with Mark Halperin. On the program, Kirk engaged criticism without resorting to insults. Whether I agreed with his views or not, I observed him demonstrating the kind of open debate a liberal democratic culture depends on to air disagreements. His death shocked me because it shattered my assumption that in contemporary America, speech—even offensive speech—does not carry mortal risk.

As this realization hit, I understood that I now had to consider risks I never did before—not because they were inevitable, but because they were no longer unthinkable. In an instant, the lens on my recent artistic endeavors refocused, as if lighting had abruptly switched mid-scene, revealing a stark, sinister stage. Three days before the murder, a play I directed with material some might have found offensive closed its run.

In February of 2024, playwright Tom Rowan reached out to me after reading an essay I wrote about activism in theater. He asked if I would direct his new play, Dismantling Prospero, which explored the tension between artistic freedom and CSJ orthodoxy in college arts programs. In Rowan’s play, a college dance instructor develops a ballet adaptation of The Tempest and casts himself as Prospero. A colleague committed to DEI intervenes, and the ballet implodes as faculty and students fracture along ideological lines.

I agreed to direct the play mainly because Rowan’s writing did not reduce characters to villains or heroes. They were complex, flawed people pursuing values they sincerely believed in, with tragic consequences. When Rowan and I first discussed the project, I doubted any theater would produce it because it dared to ask questions many would rather keep offstage.

Over a year later, Dismantling Prospero received a FAIR Artist Grant. Emboldened by that support, Rowan submitted the play to a festival in New York’s East Village which, to my surprise and delight, accepted it! Considering the play’s subject matter, I thought the decision to include the play in the festival was remarkably brave. The production received a thoughtful, nuanced response from audiences and critics.

During one intermission, a colleague approached me with a smirk asking, “Is the show cancelled yet?” Another colleague overheard a nearby audience member ask, “Is this really what campus is like?” A reply came quickly: “I am in graduate school. This is exactly what it is like.”

In some ways directing the play was cathartic; in others it was unnerving. Sometimes watching the actors play out the scenes felt like witnessing reenactments of my own professional nightmares. At the same time, that was a clear signal Rowan’s writing was on the money. In the end, I was deeply grateful for the opportunity to direct a play that asked difficult questions. Walking out of the theater after the final performance, I felt a fragile flicker of hope—maybe, just maybe, the stage might be warming to voices left out in the cold.

Three days later, Charlie Kirk was shot on a college campus. This real-world violence, immediately following the fictional campus drama I had just directed, forced me to confront my own naïveté. I had thought the risks involved in presenting Dismantling Prospero were primarily professional or reputational. After Kirk’s death, I wondered whether the boundaries I assumed still existed—between speech and violence, dissent and danger—had collapsed.

I am not suggesting that artists now face the same risks as national political figures. But when violence enters the conversation at all, it alters how people calculate the cost of dissent—even in fields once thought of as insulated from such danger. 

My fear was not entirely abstract. In early 2025, I was writing text messages while riding the subway when a stranger leaned into my ear and said, “You should kill yourself.” He vanished before I turned around. Did he recognize me from public statements I have made opposing activism in education? Or was he reading text messages over my shoulder and objected to what I wrote? It was frightening at the time, but I did my best to put it out of my mind. After Kirk’s death, it haunts me with new resonance.

Days after Kirk’s murder, FIRE released survey data showing that acceptance of violence to silence speakers had risen from one in five college students in 2020 to one in three. Before Kirk’s death, I had considered whether Dismantling Prospero might be a good candidate for a campus tour. Now I wondered what risks that would entail. 

It is impossible to ignore that colleges and universities have increasingly suggested “harmful” words constitute a form of physical violence. Jonathan Rauch noted this dangerous trend decades ago. In his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, Rauch warned, “you do not have to be Kant to see what comes after ‘offensive words are bullets.’” Twenty years later, in his aforementioned critique of Freire, professor David Corey pondered whether teaching students “all oppression ‘constitutes violence,’ and that justifies violence in return” was informing campus behavior. By 2025, the equation of speech and violence appeared to shift from philosophy books to the evening news. 

Later in the fall, I watched a video of FIRE president Greg Lukianoff speaking at the university where Kirk was killed. Lukianoff described his own parents’ escape from authoritarian regimes as an attempt to “step outside of history.” “History,” he said, “is the story of being afraid to say what you really think because someone might kill you for it.” 

For a theater director like me, who presents work in public, these are not abstract theories—they are legitimate concerns, demanding a sober recalculation of risk. In sum, taking the year into account—the cost of artistic freedom has, in fact, inflated to new heights.

The New Price of Admission

While I remain hopeful the scene will change again, this time to a more open forum, I have to be honest about the current state of the stage. Before this year, I estimated the price of artistic expression in professional and personal terms; now I can no longer assume it comes without greater risk.

If the prevailing arts culture had truly moved beyond peak woke in 2025, I doubt I would have written this essay. I suspect I would have been too busy in rehearsal—arguing passionately, collaborating freely, and making art without ideological preconditions. If CSJ were no longer the north star of arts institutions, I might be doing this work within a welcoming theater. 

But I have not given up; I have done the only thing I could do—produce my own work. Since 2021, I have produced three stage adaptations of under-acknowledged literature, and I am about to begin work on a fourth. I do not expect my work will break into the current establishment. But creating work outside of mainstream institutions may force change by creating competition through theater offerings audiences are unable to find on legacy stages.

Even so, independent producing has not restored the full scope of artistic freedom I once took for granted. I have so far avoided producing work that directly confronts contemporary orthodoxies. Instead, I have adapted literature from the past, selecting works containing themes that echo in our moment. Old short stories and novels contain an added bonus: they provide an aesthetic distance that allows the audience to watch characters navigate dilemmas in a time and place far from their own, effectively giving the audience permission to view the drama as witnesses rather than defendants.

I did not produce Dismantling Prospero; I was hired to direct it, which was an opportunity to step away from my own productions and experience what the cultural traffic will actually allow. The experience was largely a success. I directed a worthy play that sincerely and respectfully asked questions many would rather keep behind the curtain.

I am proud of the work, but I would be lying if I said I was not more uneasy after the show closed than I was before it opened. Looking back, I can see there may have been dangers beyond the reputational and professional risks I already knew well.

I don’t know whether I would direct another play that baldly critiques contemporary culture. Part of me wants to say “yes” without hesitation. Another part of me knows the calculus has changed. At the very least, every potential risk needs to be bluntly considered.

At the same time, I think about the playwrights who took center stage at the beginning of this essay—surely Lillian Hellman, Mae West, and Arthur Miller would relish any opportunity to critique compelled conformity. In my heart, I know I should not demur either.

But then the wheels in my brain turn to the potential costs.

Until conditions for artistic freedom significantly improve, honesty requires me to ask: how high a price will artists be asked to pay for the freedom to express what they believe?

Index of Hyperlinks

• Mike Cummings, “Defending an ‘Indecent’ play: ‘The God of Vengeance’ in the Yale University Library archives,” Yale News, October 15, 2015.

• American Masters, “The time Mae West spent eight days in jail,” PBS, June 12, 2020.

• Helen Pluckrose, “What Do We Mean by Critical Social Justice?” The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain, March 20, 2021.

• John Moore, “American Theatre’s Leadership Vacuum: Who Will Fill It?”, American Theatre, August 31, 2017.

• “Associate Arts Program Specialist,” City of New York, October 28, 2025.

• Erik Piepenburg, “It’s a Homophobic Slur. What’s It Doing in So Much Theater?”, The New York Times, December 1, 2025.

• Denise Fahmy, et al., “Afraid to Speak Freely,” Freedom in the Arts, May 6, 2025.

• Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, “Which academic majors are the least politically tolerant?”, Expression, January 1, 2026.

• Conor Murray and Molly Bohannon, “IBM Reportedly Walks Back Diversity Policies, Citing ‘Inherent Tensions’: Here Are All The Companies Rolling Back DEI Programs,” Forbes, April 11, 2025.

• United States, Supreme Court. Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. June 5, 2025. Supreme Court of the United States, slip opinion, No. 23-1039.

• Andrew Sullivan, “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way,” The New York Times, June 26, 2025.

• Mary McDonald-Lewis, “The Artist in Exile,” FAIR for All, December 16, 2025.

• “The CAFC Academic Freedom Prize,” Columbia Academic Freedom Council. Accessed January 2, 2026. 

• United States, Executive Office of the President. Executive Order 14173: Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. Federal Register, Vol. 90, No. 20, January 31, 2025. pp. 8633–8636.

• David Corey, “Paulo Freire’s Oppressive Pedagogy,” National Affairs (Winter 2023).

• Mark Halperin and Charlie Kirk. “The Charlotte Stabbing Shows Why America’s Crime Debate Is More Divided Than Ever, with Charlie Kirk.” YouTube, uploaded by Next Up with Mark Halperin. September 9, 2025.

• Kevin Ray, “Social Justice Activists Are Dismantling Theater: I Watched From the Inside,” The Black Sheep, January 22, 2024.

• Noah Simon Jampol, “Review: The Aisle Is Full of Noises: ‘Dismantling Prospero’ Demands as it Delights,” Thinking Theater NYC, August 31, 2025.

• Ryne Weiss and Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, “Student Acceptance of Violence in Response to Apeech Hits a Record High,” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, September 12, 2025.

• Greg Lukianoff. “The free speech message every American should hear.” YouTube, uploaded by FIRE. October 31, 2025.

Other Works Cited

• Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (London: Penguin Press, 2018).

• Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, expanded edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).