If you have ever felt that the American political landscape resembles some kind of nightmarish circus, you may find catharsis in the new play Kramer/Fauci, in which the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer faces off with a C-SPAN caller wearing a yellow inflatable chicken suit. It's a grand touch of surrealism in a play that makes theater out of one of the most quotidian sources imaginable: an hour of C-SPAN footage from 1993. The script is drawn word for word and um for um from that broadcast, in which Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then one of the country's leading AIDS researchers, debated the impediments to finding effective treatments for what Kramer furiously deemed a 'plague.' The chicken suit is not a feature of the original broadcast. Neither is the machine that, partway through the play, noisily turns the stage into a great berg of foam, which slowly subsumes a resigned Kramer. In a work that is otherwise remarkably true to fact, those two audacious intrusions ask the audience to contrast the earnest engagement between Kramer and Fauci with the cheap carnival rules to which some viewers in this cynical age may expect them to adhere. This is America in 2026: Debate is supposed to be a gaudy, brash show, a game of big winners and big losers. What are these two dorks doing'respecting each other'...

Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump engaged in a spree of cuts to federal arts funding, alongside partisan assaults on national cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center, I found myself thinking about the Depression-era origins of government-funded art in the United States. During a time of economic and social strife, Washington responded by investing in the arts'even if it resulted in work that made some Americans uncomfortable. The Federal Theatre Project, an arm of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, may have been the closest thing the country ever had to a true national theater. From 1935 to 1939, it engaged out-of-work actors, writers, directors, and stagehands across the country to produce plays, many of them free, that toured the U.S. and were enjoyed by some 30 million citizens, a majority of whom had never seen a live play before. Yet the most American thing about the FTP might not have been its populist spirit, but rather its tumultuous demise. The project's more progressive features turned it into a hot-button issue in the Capitol. Some productions involved racially integrated casting; others advanced radical visions of the country's future, such as the possibility of a female president. Still others warned of the rapidity with which democracy could give way to dictatorship. In a dark American era plagued by Jim Crow and rampant poverty, the plays of the FTP tended to engage frankly with some of the grimmer American truths....

Many nonprofits face growing pressure from their donors and other funders to do more with less as their costs rise and their budgets don't keep up. One way these organizations are responding is by trying to save money on their staffing by hiring contractors, consultants and temporary staff instead of full-time employees. We are two nonprofit management scholars. We analyzed data collected from 2008-2018 that was drawn from 7,838 museums, theaters, community arts centers and other arts and cultural nonprofits across the country. As explained in studies published in two peer-reviewed journals around the same time, we identified a gap between the promise of flexible labor arrangements and their actual outcomes for arts and culture nonprofits. First, we assessed the nonprofits' operational performance using in-person attendance at theatrical performances, museum exhibits and other live events as a proxy for how well these nonprofits were delivering services and reaching their target audiences....

A singalong version of the Netflix animated film 'KPop Demon Hunters' is on-track to earn $18 million to $20 million in theaters this weekend, making it the number one movie at the domestic box office. And that's despite only being in theaters for two-thirds of the weekend (namely, Saturday and Sunday). This isn't the first time a streaming title has topped the box office charts. In fact, Apple's 'F1' (distributed in U.S. theaters by Warner Bros.) opened to an even more impressive $57 million earlier this summer. But this marks the first time Netflix has had the biggest movie in theaters. The victory comes with some asterisks, most notably that Netflix doesn't announce box office returns itself. So these aren't official numbers from the streamer, but rather preliminary weekend estimates from other industry sources. This was, admittedly, a quiet weekend, without major new releases. Besides 'KPop Demon Hunters,' the top-grossing movie was 'Weapons,' which made an estimated $15.4 million in its third weekend in theaters, for a $115 million domestic total....