Generational change impacts not only society but also the performing arts that reflect and comment on it. This is an important point to keep in mind as you continue your online performing arts education. Harvey Young, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, and Elizabeth Bradley, Broadway theater critic and professor at New York University, share their thoughts on emerging African American playwrights and how they’re transforming the dynamic of the theater.

Harvey Young sees a passing of the torch from August Wilson, whose plays chronicled the 20th-century African American experience decade by decade, to notable Black playwrights giving voice to the African American experience today. “You see Suzan-Lori Parks, you see Lynn Nottage, receiving additional support and mentorship. You begin to see folks like Katori Hall emerging as well,” Young says.

“You can see every 20 years, there is this generational passing in which the lessons, the struggles as well, the histories, the life lessons go from generation, to generation, to generation,” he observes.

“If the job of art is to tell society what it can’t know without art, I think that the white American theater has stepped back far too long from that responsibility,” says Elizabeth Bradley.

She comments on the contributions of the new generation of Black voices: “The playwrights who have emerged in the last four to five years, whether they have been working quietly away and we just haven’t discovered them, or they are new voices such as Lynn Nottage, who has had a very long career. A more recent career is that of Jeremy O. Harris. Dominique Morisseau is another example of a very important African-American female writer.

“Of course, Suzan-Lori Parks has been heralded for decades now and is a Pulitzer prize winner. Katori Hall is another example. With plays like ‘Fairview,’ and plays from the African diaspora like ‘African Mean Girls’ or the ‘School Girls’ play, there has been a push forward. Tarell Alvin McCraney with ‘Choir Boy’ or Branden Jacobs Jenkins with ‘Everybody.'”

Bradley continues, “It has been manifest that there is a depth of talent on the musical side. For example, there’s Michael Jackson — not the one with the white glove, but the one who wrote the musical, ‘Strange Loop,’ which is the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner. “These voices are coming to the forefront, and they are going to change the conversation between artist and audience,” she concludes.

Look for this and other generational shifts as you continue your performing arts education and pursue a career in the field.

One of the most challenging things about an actor approaching a script is that by time they finish working on it, they’re going to be living inside a role with a really unique perspective about that story. But in order to do that well, they have to start from a much more zoomed-out place.

That moment when you first read the text, you can never get back. And so it’s really important that when you first read it, as you move along, you take notes about the things you expect to happen, the things that surprise you, the way you think the relationships are happening inside the script, where you think the story is going. That is the journey your audience will take when they eventually come see the production or the film or watch the TV show. And there’s no way to recapture that experience when you already know how it ends.

Once you’ve gotten that initial, raw response to the text from an audience’s perspective, then you can begin to explore the text in a few different ways. In the performing arts, it’s important that actors go on a journey of curiosity to explore the things they don’t understand about the world that the text inhabits.

Maybe it’s about specific places that they don’t know anything about. Maybe it’s about the job that the character has. Maybe it’s about the nature of the relationship between the character and other people. No script is without a huge number of things to get curious about and dig into as a part of the research process in your online performing arts education.

There are classic ways of thinking about performing arts genres. For example, there are dramas and comedies and musicals. Talking about genres isn’t the same as talking about tones of theater. Even still, we can say that the tone is dramatic or comedic and that there’s musical theater and so forth.

To me, that becomes both interesting and complicated because much work in the contemporary moment actually jumps through those styles and those tones in really exciting ways. For me, the barrier building that comes with classifying genres and tones is not very helpful in online performing arts education. My personal interest lies in disrupting all of that.

Let me give you a little personal context about myself. I grew up in northern Mexico along the border with the US. The city where I’m from, Ciudad Juarez, is right on the border of an American city called El Paso, Texas. I grew up crossing the border between those two cities every day. That is how that community worked. My experience was both 100% Mexican and 100% American. It involved interacting with those communities and bringing the best of them to create and support my community.

For me, the idea of crossing borders is ingrained in who I am. As a theater maker, the minute that I’m given these kinds of binaries and I’m told, “This is this and that is that,” my immediate question is, “What happens when you begin to cross that border and begin to actually create a third space?”

I hear the ideas of playwright-driven work and collaborative work and classical work. I hear of proscenium in the theater work and site-specific work and immersive work. And when I do, I start to think of ways that we can begin to blur all that together and create another space that’s dynamic.

So for me, getting a handle on genres is an important and interesting part of performing arts education, but only inasmuch as it allows you to begin to blur the lines and acknowledge what’s inherited.

What are the inheritances that we have from our really old theater tradition? Those traditions stem from as early as the human creature delving into imagination and ritual. I like to cause trouble when it comes to that.

Even still, it’s important to understand where a work comes from so that it’s legible. You need to understand where the traditions come from. Again, to me, getting wonderfully lost in that is a really cool thing and a really exciting thing.

First, you write a play. If you’ve been invited or commissioned, then you have a place to submit it. If that isn’t the case, you have to figure out how to get your story put out in the world and entice industry professionals to read it. You have to know the market. It’s important to be aware of the kind of play that different theaters and directors are looking for. You can acquire this valuable insight from a performing arts education.

Then, after writing your play, you can submit it to theaters or directly to literary managers, if you know them, where they read scripts to artistic directors. If you have a director you prefer working with, you can submit the play to that person who might then pitch it to a theater.

These are some of the more effective ways of sending your work out for consideration. The National New Play Exchange allows playwrights to post scripts and describe them. This program attempts to reverse the traditional submission method. So, a theater might find your play on the National New Play Exchange and approach you instead of you trying to contact them.

I am often asked how to get a play produced. It’s not like sitting in a factory assembly line where you’re doing the same thing each time. Each script submission is always different, as an online performing arts education will teach you.

If you’re curious about how to get your play produced in Hollywood, off Broadway, or on Broadway, one thing is critical: it has to be good, and it must be enjoyable. Performing arts professionals have to like it and want to produce it. I discovered this when I asked Jay O. Sanders, who’s a well-known actor, to direct my play. Not only is he a friend, and I love his work, but I also knew his name recognition was going to bring Chris Noth into the mix, and then Barry, and then my investor to bring my story to life.

You’ve got to have a good product. You need to have a good story. You must have a good screenplay. But you then have to put together a team that’s compelling and committed. A little trickery, if you will, doesn’t hurt. When I called Chris Noth, I said, “Jay’s pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And when I called Jay, I said, “Chris is pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And as soon as I said Jay was in, Chris said, “Oh, well, if Jay does it, I will.” Then, Jay said, “Oh, I’ll do it. So Chris is in; that’s great.” The simple thing they had to do was to be a presenter. Teamwork in the performing arts can help a playwright to achieve that otherwise-elusive success.

Gianni Downs tells us that if you’re working in New York, almost every house is a union house. That means there are specific people who are trained and paid to do certain jobs. So, for instance, as a designer working on a Broadway show, you aren’t supposed to touch certain things on stage because there’s someone else who is employed to do so and knows how to do it safely.

Because of this, you want to be very conscious of what you’re doing in any house with which you’re unfamiliar. You want to make sure that you talk to your production manager, and also talk to the union heads who might be there with you. You need to find out what you’re allowed to do and which things require that you ask permission before you proceed.

These things are also true across the country. Yes, New York has many union houses, but most of the other major cities do as well. And those unions also might control different aspects. So, for example, you might work in a scene shop that isn’t union, and you might load a set right to the doors of a theater. Then, the union crew will take it and load it the rest of the way from there. That’s because the actual theater itself is a union house. Your scene shop, however, is not union. This type of thing is a pretty common experience for people who are doing shows and traveling from space to space.

Perhaps you’re in some sort of tour or you have a small professional theater, and you’re renting other houses to do your productions. “You can also be unionized in your shops themselves,” says Downs, “and these are people who have been trained and have joined the union, whether it’s IATSE, or in my case, I’m a USA 829 member.” This will not only dictate what you’re able to do professionally, but it will also help when you’re negotiating your contracts. As a union member, you’ll have certain guarantees within your contracts that will help you negotiate with potential producers and employers.

You can learn more about these concepts with performing arts education, or even learn from home with online performing arts education.

Openly experimental plays are the pieces of performing arts that will try to say, “we’re breaking down forms” when they invite the audience into a space. We’re really putting things together differently. Be prepared for the adventure of an environmental movement of immersive theater.

These are examples of things that changed the relationship between the actor and the audience. You are much more directly involved and implicated. You’re not simply sort of sitting in a red tufted seat and behaving yourself and clapping when appropriate.

One of the preeminent examples at this moment is a remarkable piece called Sleep No More by an incredible company from England called Punchdrunk. This is a really remarkable exploration of a Shakespearean play and the source material within it. The audience actually walks into this incredible, abandoned hotel, which is a warehouse. You travel through it. You are really experiencing this in a truly immersive way.

There are many other remarkable companies, like Third Rail Projects, that are exploring this in really exciting ways. Again, location becomes really interesting. Now that is not all the kinds of theater there are in terms of genres, but it is a way to understand contemporary theater when studying performing arts education or online performing arts education.

If you look at the beginning of the whole idea of the United States, what does it mean to move from a colonial place to a place where there are a lot of different kinds of people doing a lot of different kinds of things? This is a question worth pondering as you pursue your online performing arts education.

There are people who are very clearly connected to a European sense of theater. That might have to do with Shakespeare. It might have to do with a certain formal kind of theater that has ties to Europe.

Meanwhile, in the United States, there are a number of other kinds of folks who are looking for something else, something that feels American, something that speaks to a kind of roughness, a kind of humor that is rougher and bawdier.

And then there are also all these Black people, these Black people who are here with other kinds of theatrical traditions, other kinds of musical traditions, and other ways of telling stories that involve sound and a certain approach to energy, an approach to the voice, an approach to movement.

One of the ways in which the United States developed this whole way of thinking about theater hearkens back to the early 1800s, when there was a white traveling theatrical performer named Tom Rice. He supposedly saw a Black groomsman in the street, somebody who took care of horses. The story is that this enslaved man was singing a song and doing a dance, and when Tom Rice saw it, he said, “Oh, I’m going to copy him.” And so he copied him, including blackening his face. And he created this notion of blackface comedy.

Now, blackface existed before then, but in the United States in the early years of the 1800s, it really started to take off, and it became this massively important entertainment form. From around 1830, through the 19th century and into the very early years of the 20th century, it continued.

When you think about Broadway, you think about the American musical, you really want to think about all the roots that are in it. In performing arts education, you’ll learn about all the things that had to come together to make what we know in today’s theater.

In the period from 1900 to 1920, there was a lot happening. There were different kinds of epidemics that were happening. I think we all know about the Spanish flu in 1918. Sexually transmitted infections were also extremely dangerous. And STIs took a lot of folks out. Syphilis, for example, was responsible for a large number of deaths.

Some leading African American theatrical figures died for various reasons early in the 20th century. Ernest Hogan, the first Black entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show, died in 1909. Bob Cole and George Walker, prominent figures in early 20th-century African American musical theater who began their careers in blackface, passed away in 1911.

Now, these folks were at the center of organizations. They weren’t just solo people. So, when they died, a certain kind of large-scale Black musical theater started to become more scarce, certainly no longer being seen on Broadway.

When it comes to the performing arts, I start with this question: where is the audience? No matter how different the shows are — and some of them are on the streets, some of them are in museums, some of them are in theatres — what they actually have in common is that they all deeply focus on the relationship with the audience. That’s where we get to interactive theater.

Interactive theater is a type of theater where the shows interact directly with the audience. I emphasize ‘directly’ because, actually, theater always interacts with the audience. You can’t have theater without the audience, so even when you’re in a super-traditional space and you have the fourth wall, like you may learn about in performing arts education, you may think that there is no interaction. In actuality, there is; the actors, live on stage, respond to the energy from the audience members. That’s not something you can always see with an online performing arts education, but there are examples.

If all the spectators suddenly go to the bathroom, besides creating huge lines, the show would stop. If everybody laughs, that creates a type of energy in the theater. Essentially, even if we think that we’re doing a run of the same show, the show itself is never the same: the audience is changing it. The audience kind of becomes a co-creator of the show because part of the show is how they perceive it, how they imagine it, how they do the other half or quarter of the show. It really depends on how much you allow them to contribute.

Because of that, a lot of my shows put a huge emphasis on giving audience members an opportunity to be aware of their power, to be aware of their important, essential place.

In the world of performing arts, there are multiple different categories, or “buckets,” of theatrical performances. We have a canon of work in which the plays are performed in what would be known as elevated language. In this bucket, you could put the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe. You could also put in the restoration comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. You could even put in latter-day 20th-century verse plays by playwrights like Maxwell Anderson.

When it rhymes, or when the language is particularly poetic or unusual, that would certainly be one canon. And Shakespeare, for one, is still among the most frequently produced playwrights across the United States. Here in New York, we have the New York Shakespeare Festival in the public theaters that still remain committed to classical work. So that covers the first bucket.

There is also another bucket, which consists of new playwriting—plays that have not been produced previously in a professional context. Oftentimes, these plays can be written in everyday conversational language. However, of course, the language of these plays varies enormously from context to context and playwright to playwright.

For example, an Irish playwright like Seán O’Casey or a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh would be writing in an Irish dialect, but they’re also experimenting with form enormously. So you could have a black comedy, you could have elements of horror in what is a conversational text-based play. As you can see, it gets harder and harder to actually come up with the different bucket labels for genres.

Playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, of course, represent a form of 19th-century naturalism, which was all about character and closely observed character. Now, certain American directors are approaching that work and staging the context in which those plays appear so that we will either discover them anew or see them differently.

Spectacle theater is represented, in some cases, by the Greeks although it is certainly possible to do an intimate production of a Greek play. There has been a tremendous interest, particularly in the last 20 years, in physical theater, in which the movement is certainly as important, or perhaps even more important, than the words.

You can learn much more about the history of theater and the many different forms it takes by exploring online performing arts education. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits and lessons of performing arts education from the comfort of your own home.

When online performing arts education professional and NYU Tisch professor Ruben Polendo is in conversations with students on making or engaging in theater, one of the questions that come up is about the history of theater. “How did theater start? Where did it start?” he asks. “How did it develop to the kind of theater that we recognize now?”

Theater in Prehistory

The history of the performing arts probably begins 200,000 years ago with the origin of modern humans on the savannas of Africa. It could go back even further to the evolution of pre-modern ancestors one or two million years ago. “The impulse to tell me a story is really built into us on a very biological level, that we organize the world in terms of stories,” says Dr. Jeff Kaplan, a performing arts professor at Manhattanville College.

We communicate in terms of gestures. The meaning of words really constitutes a very small part of communication. Therefore, having somebody telling a story to the group or expressing themselves through abstracted movement are probably things that go back to the beginning of time.

Theater in Greece

The origins of theater began in Ancient Greece, at least from the Western tradition. It was a series of festivals to the gods: citizens who lived in the area would gather to attend plays. They were treated as competitions and festivals. The playwright Sophocles might have battled it out against Euripides or others, sharing their newest work.

Ancient Greek theater mirrors today’s tradition if you were to see your favorite writer revealing and presenting their newest creation for the first time. “It was new. It was raw. It was kind of like watching Hamilton for the first time,” comments Dr. Harvey Young, the dean of fine arts at Boston University.

It was neighbors sitting next to neighbors, looking down and seeing each act play out on stage. It was not only a chance for people to see how these stories could reflect society. It was also their way of being part of the civic life of Athens or of other places across Greece.

The tradition of a community coming together to hear a new work and see themselves on stage has existed throughout the history of theater. It began in Ancient Greece, where Aristotle walked around lecturing and talking about the work of Homer as an epic poet, all the way through to the early 20th century.

Theater in Broader Geography

People will very quickly refer to the Greeks and the idea that Greek tradition is the beginning of theater. Ruben Polendo pushes back against that statement. “The Greek tradition, which is really remarkable, finds us in about kind of 400 BCE, give or take a few hundred years in that moment,” he says. Though Greek theater is clearly a very important moment in the history of theater, it isn’t the only moment in history where there was a spark on theater.

In fact, looking even further back into history, we see many different traces on theater and the performing arts all over the world. “Because over time and space there’s been this kind of focus on a kind of European inheritance – and Greek history has been attached to that – there’s been this kind of push to really align the beginning of theater with this kind of European narrative,” Polendo explains. He believes that alignment is not the case. Theater has existed in many different geographies and cultural frameworks through time.

Technology and Tradition

As theatrical traditions and techniques blend together in the modern day, there has been a great deal of experimentation with the way technology can be harnessed by storytellers. Technology may coexist alongside ancient theater forms such as the Noh theater in Japan.

Kabuki, Chinese opera, shadow puppets in Indonesia, and kathakali in India are other examples of these ancient forms. “Many of the cultures of the world have developed their own forms,” comments NYU Tisch professor Elizabeth Bradley. “And it would be a mistake to think that they haven’t influenced, in fact, what is felt to be mainstream Broadway theater. Because there would be no Lion King if director Julie Taymor had not been funded to go to Jakarta and learn about shadow puppets.”