The first play I ever wrote was in the fifth grade. It was about a girl, whose evil mother sent her away to find the Sphere of the Future, and, of course, the friends she made along the way. I showed my parents, and that was the first time I was told that theater was a dying art. Rather than being put off, I was proud. Proud that I was the last of a dying species, the protector of a sacred art. I thought I would be protected and nurtured, as the sole heir to the Theater Throne. But then I auditioned for the fifth grade play and I realized there were at least 35 other heirs. I tried to work crew, but was rejected again. I watched the play that spring in tears. I vowed I would never write another play.

Spoiler alert: I wrote another play. Since freshman year, I haven’t stopped writing plays. I attend writing workshops, host playwriting workshops, work as a marketing intern for a local theatre company, and worked on Northwest Theatre Workshop’s project Fragments. Every time I go to an event or host a playwriting workshop, people remark about how young I am. Sometimes I blush and change the topic, and sometimes I tell them I’m actually 30. But typically, they respond by warning me that theater is a dying art.

Why does everybody seem to think theater is dying? Well, because we are watching it die. As of 2023, we’ve seen The Public Theater lay off 19% of its staff and that their Under the Radar festival get indefinitely canceled. Similarly, The Humana Festival of New American Plays, which has run annually for the last four decades, has not run since 2021. The Signature Theater has halved its usual run and the Lookingglass in Chicago halted its production.

In our own back yard, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival had to call for a second round of emergency funding (New York Times). We are watching these famous, well-established theater organizations crumble beneath our feet, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. Nothing we can do but brace ourselves for the theater’s complete collapse. All we can do is say, “theater is a dying art.”

But that’s not true. Theater is not a dying art. We think that the ease of streaming services and the itty-bitty attention span of this goshdarn new generation is making live art inconsequential. These new youngsters just don’t appreciate theater. According to NPR, the average Broadway attendee is 40.4 years old. Meanwhile, straight play audiences have dropped 33% and musical audiences have dropped 9% from 2008 to 2012 (New York Times). The logical conclusion that many people have come to is that the previous theater audience is aging out, and young people aren’t filling their absence. But what if it isn’t a problem of desire, but ability?

According to a Guardian survey, the most likely group to want to attend the theater are ages 16 to 19, and the least likely being ages 45 to 54. So maybe the new generation doesn’t lack the will but lacks the resources. The average Broadway ticket is $136, and the average price for theater tickets is $35 to $60. When your primary income is still Christmas cards and babysitting jobs, even that’s a little out of your price range. Maybe, the problem isn’t that theater is dying, but we, as the Guardians of Theater, are killing it. Theater lives on, but we are failing it by withholding it from the new generation.

Just at my high school, theater thrives. From the people breaking out into song and dance in the hallways, to the live performance posters plastered on the walls, to the annotated scripts passed around at lunchtime. When I tell people I want to be a writer, or that I attend playwriting workshops, or I’m working on a script, they don’t respond with discontent or disinterest. Most of the time they ask me if I’ll read their script. Almost every day groups of students eat lunch together in the black box theater, gossiping about their favorite character in Into the Woods, or about the controversial costuming decisions in & Juliet. If we could only liquidize the thespianism of my school and inject it into every other public high school, theater would be fine. But is my school really that different?

The annual state thespian festival is attended by more than 1,700 Oregon students. And these aren’t your everyday casual thespians. These are more than 1,700 students who want to spend their weekend learning about theater with a bunch of other theater lovers, and spend countless hours before then preparing performances, portfolios, or monologues. This doesn’t just include actors, it includes playwrights, customers, technicians, etc. By this logic, in four years Oregon should produce 1,700 future thespians. But we don’t. Something happens in between high school and the “real world” that turns a majority of these thespians into salesmans, managers, marketers.

“It’s a very scary life path,” says Sonja Seidman, a sophomore at Grant High School. And that pretty much sums it up. Every four years, Oregon produces at least 1,700 theater-loving, hard-working, dedicated young adults. But these young adults are faced with the terrifying world that is reality.

Being one of those young adults, I can attest that fear is enough to make you go blind. Fear is enough to reshape your truth, and turn theater from a passion into something that’s childish, and will die with your high school self. Fear is enough to turn you into an accountant.

We need working in the theater to be like working in finance. Kids should tell their parents that they want to work in theater and instead of clutching her pearls, their mom’s should say, “that’s a very sensible decision.” Kids should tell their friends they want to be a playwright and their friend should say, “oh my uncle’s a playwright!” For most kids, their only theater role model is their high school drama teacher. So when they look at the “real world,” they don’t see the theater.

“Being able to know people who have experience in the theater relieves those fears,” continues Seidman. “It makes it a more accessible future.”

I am incredibly lucky that I grew up surrounded by countless incredibly talented theater professionals. Because if I didn’t, I’m not sure I’d be writing this article right now. Honestly, I’d probably be applying as a marketing major to some university in the middle of nowhere.

For the majority of my theater experience, I have been an exception. I have lucked into the ability to be a part of groups that typically don’t accept minors. But it is those groups that make me want to be a playwright. I’ve participated in opportunities for fellow kids my age, but in those groups we are treated like kids, and that makes theater feel like something for kids.

We need a serious group for theater not designed for kids, but that includes kids. Especially older kids, as young as 14, who are seriously starting to consider what their future might look like. I feel like sometimes adults don’t understand what a 14-year-old is. At 14, I wrote the music and book for my first musical The Disastrous Dr. Bonk and his Panicked Patient. It received a Zoom production in 2020, since, y’know, Covid, and it turned into something I was very proud of. But every person I worked with, every actor, every audience member, were shocked about how young I was. That I was motivated and hardworking enough to do all this, and that I had an adult-enough mind to create something adults could actually enjoy. The irony is, I believe at least 75% of 14-year-olds are capable of the same things I was, if given the resources.

Cupid Hale was one of those hardworking 14-year-olds. Now 18, and my best friend, Hale has been working as a technician and actor for as long as I’ve known them. They are one of the most passionate and dedicated people I know. However, Hale has the same problem as many minors interested in theater: nobody takes them seriously.