The context within which we do our work is ever-changing. Even so, it’s critical to understand a particular moment in time. As we wrap up this celebration of our 65th anniversary, I move between the need to stay focused on the work at hand, and the imperative that we keep our heads up, tracking the many rapid changes and anticipating the future—continually asking what is needed, what is possible, and what we can learn from our history that can help us navigate this precarious moment.
Shortly after I arrived at SDC in 2008, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of this mighty and incomparable Union of leaders. Even as a looming recession weighed heavily on our shoulders, we dug in and began what would become the most extraordinary period of growth SDC experienced since its founding. The context within which we were growing didn’t immediately lend itself to success: the recession of 2009, which brought with it a 20 percent reduction in employment in the nonprofit sector; the seemly insurmountable challenge of responding with urgency and intelligence to the #MeToo movement and what would follow; tough negotiations; changing audiences; under-capitalization; and widespread recognition from the field (long overdue) that there was work to do to make certain that a career in the theatre would not be the purview of a select few, representing a single demographic.
Year in and year out the Executive Board, as duly elected representatives of the Membership, sets strategic goals, adjusting as necessary. Against the odds, SDC Membership doubled in size as our jurisdiction expanded through organizing, increasing the number of employers utilizing SDC contracts and providing Union protections to new groups of artists: fight choreographers and Broadway associates.
We made it through Covid—wondering who we would become. We once had to imagine a world without the theatre. That is now something we no longer need to do. We lived it. Now we are faced with a new set of challenges. These are more turbulent times than we have ever experienced, more uncertain, more perilous.
The layers are too many to explore in this forum as I consider the very real possibility that we may lose the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and as we struggle to imagine what the Kennedy Center may look like in the years ahead. I think we are drawn to the question of the Kennedy Center today as a tangible manifestation of threats we are experiencing more broadly to the arts and humanities.
My anxiety might be partially fueled by the question of leadership. Where will we find our leaders, the fierce advocates for the arts and humanities, in this time of such turmoil across all the texture of our lives? Where are the champions who might help show us the way?
I pause to consider the world as it was during the first decades of SDC. Those were fitful, tragic, and hopeful times for our country. Amid the turmoil, we had leaders who recognized and fought for the fundamental importance of the arts in American society. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established a commission for a new public auditorium in Washington, DC. In 1958, he signed the National Cultural Center Act, establishing the principles that would continue to guide the Center’s work.
One year later, in 1959, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers signed articles of incorporation.
Also in 1959, troops on the ground, we entered what would be the first phase of the Vietnam War. Fidel Castro was named prime minister of Cuba, establishing a communist government, having overthrown dictator Fulgencio Batista.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, at a fundraising dinner for the National Cultural Center, said, “Art and the encouragement of art is political in the most profound sense, not as a weapon in the struggle, but as an instrument of understanding….”
That year, the Union secured recognition and, with it, its first agreement with what would become, in just a few months, the Broadway League.
After President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law legislation renaming the National Cultural Center as a “living memorial” to Kennedy, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
At the same time, with a burst, theatres sprang up throughout the country. The regional theatre movement was fueled by individuals whose collective energy gathered behind a vision that has helped us explore, in communities across the nation, what it means to be American, in all its diversity and complexities. However flawed, that movement—led in part by a few fearless, visionary SDC Members, some of whom are highlighted in this book—would create the infrastructure that continues to provide, by far, the most employment of any jurisdiction for SDC Members.
The first decade of the Union’s life, a decade of sweeping change, took place during a remarkable period in our country’s history, with a backdrop of civil unrest and transformation. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X. The tragedy that was the Vietnam War. The premiere of 60 Minutes, the first televised newsmagazine. We walked on the moon, and to this day benefit from the discoveries and the science it took to get us there. The first successful heart transplant and Woodstock. Seeds were planted for the changes we would see, or hoped to see, in every corner of our society over the next five decades.
In his 1965 State of the Union address, President Johnson made a proclamation. “We must,” he said, “recognize and encourage those who can be pathfinders for the Nation’s imagination and understanding.”
Johnson’s Great Society initiative, a series of domestic programs enacted between 1964 and 1968, was the president’s most successful legislative achievement. In a six-month period, Congress passed 84 out of 87 bills proposed as part of the Great Society package. The center of this work—aimed at ending poverty, reducing crime, abolishing inequality, and improving the environment—created the largest social services safety net in modern history.
An additional central tenet of the administration was support for the arts and culture. On September 29, 1965, President Johnson, with bipartisan support from Republican and Democratic leaders in House and Senate, stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. This established the National Endowment on the Arts and the Humanities Foundation as an umbrella for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and their respective councils.
“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage,” Johnson said. “For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation.”
This national commitment to American arts and humanities wasn’t brought about to fix something wrong—as the WPA had been created to pull the country out of the Depression, to get us back to work. Rather, this was born of the recognition that to be our best selves—and nation—we needed the experiences that only arts and culture can bring.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” Johnson said in his Rose Garden remarks.
In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon would call on Congress not only to extend Johnson’s authorization for the NEA and NEH but also to increase its funding dramatically. He stated, “Our creative and performing artists give free and full expression to the American spirit as they illuminate, criticize, and celebrate our civilization. Like our teachers, they are an invaluable national resource.”
For the gala opening of the Kennedy Center in September 1971, SDC Member Gordon Davidson directed the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS. Nixon, following advice from Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, did not attend that event, Haldeman having described the work as, “very, very bad, maybe really bad…[it] has some political overtones and it’s very depressing, a sort of everything’s-gone-wrong kind of thing.” Even so, Nixon remained a steadfast supporter of the NEA and NEH.
And now it’s 2025. What will we say about 2025 in 65 years, of what this decade brought and how those moments informed us over the next five decades? Our work at SDC, our work as a Union, has never been more important. Our work together, all of us in the theatre, has maybe never been more important. To tell stories, to tell all the stories. To gather, and all that that means. This is a moment for us to come together.
Today, we must not be paralyzed. We must find a way to create shared language that might influence and inform cultural policy that would in turn make it possible for transformation and for sustainability.
What matters is being part of a community that thrives because of a vast and complex ecosystem, not despite it. To be responsible to a community, ensuring that those who follow, those who we are opening doors to, can build a life, professional and personal, in the theatre. Where the connection to live theatre fills the full measure, the breadth and depth of our communities. Where people know they are not alone as they laugh and question and get a glimpse of their lives and the lives of others—together.
As humans, we are responsible to others, both to those with us now and to those who will follow. A responsibility that can only be fulfilled if we are informed. Theatre is uniquely positioned to build and maintain an informed citizenry. The theatre, when available to all, when central to our lives, tells us stories that open us up, deepen our understanding, and increase our empathy for one another. Traveling through stories we become informed. Our curiosity and our outrage fuel us and a sense of possibility compels us to engage in civic discourse and action.
Of President Kennedy’s many quotes, this one, said in 1962, is my favorite: “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose…and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
Every generation has its challenges, to be certain, and today we are facing a very real threat to so much of what has brought us here, with all our shortcomings. Let us work to make our theatres and our culture work for everyone and strengthen the infrastructure so that those who follow will have jobs that support their lives, in whatever form and manner they choose.
And let us remember the inspiration and influence of all the extraordinary directors and choreographers who contributed to the establishment of SDC and whose unwavering commitment today leads the Union into the future with hope and determination.
Laura Penn
Executive Director