plays for today
theatre at home
There used to be a program on TV in Britain called Play for Today. It was as you might imagine a play broadcast on tv and the remit for the show was that it be new plays that explored contemporary issues. The BBC series ran from 1970 to 1984, and while original plays were the heart of it, there were also adaptations. In its thirteen seasons it served as the launching pad and/or televisual theatre home for writers Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter, Jim Allen, Simon Gray, David Storey, Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, Alan Bennett, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and more. In 2025, Channel 5 in the UK revived the anthology series.
Much earlier, in the United States, the anthology drama series Playhouse 90 ran on CBS from 1956 to 1960. It featured live to tape productions of the plays REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT, THE MIRACLE WORKER and more and it featured the works of many playwrights, among them Horton Foote, Frank D. Gilroy, Abby Mann, Tad Mosel, and Rod Serling. In 1991 Francis Ford Coppola tried to revive the series. Spike Lee and Jules Feiffer had been commissioned to write play-episodes but the series’ revival never came back.
Bridging the two was the PBS anthology series American Playhouse, where directors Jonathan Demme, Bill Duke, Oz Scott, Marshall W. Mason, Joanne Woodward and more directed plays and adaptations by John Cheever, Ntozake Shange, Lanford Wilson, Stephen Schwartz, Thornton Wilder, Horton Foote, Ossie Davis, Sam Shepard and more. The series ran from 1982-1996.
I am thinking about televised/broadcast and streaming drama at a time when playwriting on screen available to a general, wide audience has all but disappeared. Except for the rare occasions where PBS Great Performances picks up a show from Lincoln Center or Broadway or the West End (Ossie Davis’ PURLIE VICTORIOUS, the musical NEXT TO NORMAL, etc.), Disney Plus picks up HAMILTON, and Apple TV picks up COME FROM AWAY, outside of National Theatre at Home, the venerable audio drama outlets LA Theater Works and Audible, and selected productions available on Broadway HD, Marquee TV, Digital Theatre (and its educational arm Digital Theatre Plus), and the occasional streams from League of Livestream Theatre (LOLST), it is next to impossible for US audiences to regularly see new US writing made for the stage, let alone international works! If you want to SEE work in action and you don’t live near a supposed “centre,” playwriting and new plays might as well be an extraterrestrial concept to many people.
I bring this up because the regularity of play for today and playhouse 90, for instance, meant that new writing for theatre broadcast into people’s homes made it perfectly natural to think of plays as an art form one could experience as part of life and not as a special event OUT THERE that you had to seek out, if you happened to be interested in theatre. There was an understanding with these anthology series that one way to showcase new writing and directing and grow an audience for new plays was by bringing the work TO the people in a readily accessible manner. You turned on the TV and selected the channel at an appointed time (because those early anthology series were during the era of live non-repeatable showtime only) and gathered together or watched alone some new work. It wasn’t an anomaly!
The mix of new writing on these prior series was eclectic, bracing, quirky, often unusual (if you have ever watched Dennis Potter’s stunning play BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS, for example, then you know!) and varied in range and style. In other words, there wasn’t only ONE KIND of play that was a play. The palette on display was wide, thereby educating an audience that many different kinds of plays could be and were being written. Moreover these series sustained an existing but also created a new audience for theatre and its appreciation.
In 2026, Netflix just dropped this week the Broadway “pro-shot” of the musical MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, George Clooney’s production of GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK is on Amazon Prime and other platforms, and the world of stand-up comedy (leaning theatrical and not) is ubiquitous on Netflix and HBO Max and YouTube (i.e. Mike Birbiglia, Jacqueline Novak, James Acaster, Natalie Palamides, Chris Fleming, Kate Berlant, Jerrod Carmichael, Julio Torres, Alex Edelman, etc). In fact, it is stand-up comedy that is the most readily accessible live performance form to a general audience. Is it any wonder why so many new plays favor the monologic rather than dialogic mode?
At a time when the planet is facing an energy crisis, climate crisis, and pandemicene (with its causative epidemic of population-wide mass disablement) why are so many building-based theatres still telling people that the ONLY way to experience a play is to travel via air, car or train to see it?
Why is theatre insistent on privileging an in-person audience as the only “real” audience?
Why is theatre not building on its broadcast legacy using the tools it has had since the mid 1950s to beam new work into people’s homes and laptops?
Why is most theatre (save for a few) pretending that the digitally-native, streaming and hybrid work created during 2020-21 was not the beginning of a revival of doing what it had done once not that long ago?
Why is theatre always talking about how to find an audience for new plays when it can cultivate one (and cultivate new works made for theatre by a wide range of artists) by showing people WHAT WE DO?
Dear theatre, you knew how to do things once. You can do it again.