When people talk about the future of live theater in America, any optimism is always tempered or qualified. But even those who never feel truly hopeful can acknowledge that 2025 was a pretty good year.
Some Connecticut theaters hit all-time ticket sales or attendance records, while others could boast of well-received premieres or potentially risky projects that met with great success.
Such milestones seemed impossible less than five years ago, when theaters throughout the country were plunged into a sudden government-imposed shutdown during the COVD-19 pandemic. When it first happened, some thought the shutdown, meant to ward off a more widespread health crisis, might only last a few weeks. It ended up lasting a year and a half.
Hartford-based theater director Sasha Brätt didn’t just live through the COVID shutdown, he studied it intently. The freelance theater artist who has worked at a range of theaters in Connecticut, teaches theater at a high school in Naugatuck and also performs in improv shows weekly at Hartford’s Sea Tea Comedy Theater, Brätt spent the last few years writing a dissertation he titled “Survival of Regional Theater in Post-COVID America” in order to complete his Doctor of Education degree from Marshall University in West Virginia.
While the research paper is purposely vague in some details, such as the specific theaters he drew data from or the names of the leaders he interviewed, he said at least one Connecticut theater was in the mix and that he drew some insights from his own extensive work as a theater professional in Connecticut.
His conclusions seem to fit what is happening in Connecticut, a state that has more theaters per capita than many other states and has been a major player in the regional theater movement since the mid-1960s.
“My original thesis was more about what theaters did to stay afloat during the shutdown,” Brätt said. He saw theaters taking innovative approaches to keeping their businesses alive. As a local example, he mentions West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park staging a show atop the dugout at Dunkin’ Park and outdoors in Bushnell Park so that distancing guidelines could be followed.
Streaming productions were rampant, but in many cases short-lived, partly due to the inability of the Equity actors union to adapt quickly to the new format. Brätt himself worked on a streaming show at Playhouse on Park.
West Hartford-based director Sasha Brätt is directing shows this year at Playhouse on Park, Seven Angels Theatre and Capital Classics. He wrote his recent graduate school dissertation on the challenges facing American theaters during and after the COVID shutdown. (Courtesy of Playhouse on Park)
When theaters were able to return to business as usual in 2022, some feared that programming would be tame and risk-averse in case audiences were slow to return. Generally speaking, though, those fears went unrealized as the hiatus had caused an urgency among artists to get creative again.
In his paper, Brätt notes that public protests around the death of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020 created a national dialogue around issues of racial equality. Theaters returned with great purpose. “Some of them didn’t come for two years,” Brätt said of the new sense of artistic urgency. “No one wanted to be in that world for too long.”
Since many theaters had been forced to drastically cut staff or otherwise reorganize to survive the shutdown, they were in a good position to rethink their objectives and diversify their staff as they rebuilt. Brätt’s insight from his research is that the theaters that had the best transitions back to success were “the ones that had invested in people all along.” A lot of theater workers, particularly designers and behind-the-scenes talent, he said, aren’t involved in year-round operations but are desperately needed when productions are being mounted. Those theaters who maintained positive relationships with loyal employees over the years benefited from that good will when the shutdown ended.
Now that theaters have reemerged from bare-bones operations to actually running full seasons and doing longterm planning, Brätt is encouraged by what some of them have learned. He points to how small theaters have discovered the virtue of hiring understudies, a crucial need during the COVID times and a valuable practice now if judiciously done, since it means a performance never needs to be canceled.
For his study, Brätt spoke to theater leaders (mainly artistic directors and managing directors) who had been at their respective theaters both before and after the shutdown. Some hadn’t been there long before COVID happened. “Some of them were like ‘Thank God we have new leadership,’” Brätt said, because new leaders had new ideas to combat unexpected changes, yet “others would say ‘Thank God we have old well-established leaders that know our theater well.’”
Brätt’s own recent experiences as a freelance theater director in Connecticut are a pretty good sign of how things are looking up. He just had a bonafide hit at Playhouse on Park with “All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914,” a rather dark historical choral drama which was not necessarily a surefire piece of holiday entertainment. The run sold out and an added performance sold out in two days. While he was still preparing “All is Calm,” a different hoped-for production at the playhouse fell through when the performance rights became unavailable. The theater asked Brätt if he had any of his own ideas for shows they could do, a gesture he appreciated because, while he has often been given directing assignments, there he hadn’t before had this level of input. The playhouse took his suggestion and Brätt’s production of “Gutenberg: The Musical,” a quirky comedy which was recently seen on Broadway and whose two-person cast assures that it is economical to produce, will run at Playhouse on Park Jan. 21 through Feb. 8, 2026.
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Brätt will also be directing later this year at Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury, a gig which, despite his longtime involvement at that theater, was not a given since Seven Angels just underwent a full change in leadership over the summer. Brätt is also scheduled to direct “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for another long-running local company, Capital Classics, outdoors at the University of Saint Joseph this summer.
Brätt has a theory, which he developed from his fondness for TV wrestling as well as his ongoing relationships with a variety of different local theaters, that simple and direct packaging is a triumph. “With wrestling, the way you know a character is doing well is if you can sum him up with one word. Theaters that have that identity, where it’s instantly clear what kind of shows they do, are the ones that have shown the greatest success right after the shutdown.”
Brätt also sees theatergoers acknowledging that live theater is “a unique artform” that they don’t want to see disappear.
Brätt’s dissertation ends with a too-long list of U.S. theaters that have closed for good since March 2020. Quite a few of them were known for producing new works or assisting in the early development that would go on to greater fame elsewhere. In the paper, Brätt shares that “of the past 34 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 32 have premiered at not-for-profit theater companies.
Yet he also feels boundless optimism at how the theater world has apparently rebounded faster than anyone expected. “A friend of mine put it this way,” Brätt said: “There may be a lot fewer trees in the forest, but the trees there now are stronger.”
The fresh energy coming from Connecticut theaters is also reflected in new programming ideas at long-established institutions. The Westport Country Playhouse is one of a few theaters that have gained new audiences by expanding their schedules to include many more one-night concert attractions alongside the multi-week theater offerings. The Ivoryton Playhouse has announced a patriotic theme for its 2026 season, tying in with national celebrations of the semiquincentennial of the founding of the United States. The Connecticut Repertory Theatre at the University of Connecticut in Storrs is doing a large-cast adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ “The Three Musketeers,” which moves the action to the French Resistance during World War II and makes the title characters female.
This is also the year that the eagerly awaited collaboration between Hartford Stage and TheaterWorks Hartford will take place in June on a new production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd.”
The Yale Repertory Theatre and Western Connecticut State University are also each doing their own productions of Eugene Ionesco’s allegory of creeping Fascism “Rhinoceros.”
Ivoryton Playhouse is among the Connecticut theaters finding new ways to present famous works that might otherwise be out the reach of small theaters. Last year, the playhouse did “My Fair Lady” with an ensemble that was less than half the size of the ensemble the show usually requires. This year, Ivoryton Playhouse will tackle another large-cast musical, “1776.” (Courtesy of Ivoryton Playhouse)
One small theater that is emblematic of how organizations are not just renewing but transforming themselves is TheatreWorks New Milford, a community-based theater with a seating capacity of just 112 that has been around since 1958. McAdory Lipscomb Jr., who serves as vice president of the TheatreWorks New Milford board, is among those leading the charge in finding not just new audiences for the theater but new projects to entice them. In November, the theater held a reading of a new play by actress/playwright/producer Dorothy Lyman, whose TV acting credits include “Mama’s Family” and “All My Children” and who has worked in life theater her entire career. In December it presented “What the Dickens?,” a “Christmas Carol” parody written and directed by a local playwright, Matt Austin.
The 2026 TheatreWorks New Milford season contains some titles you’d expect for a typical suburban community theater, such as the ubiquitous small town comedy “Almost, Maine.” But other selections are quite ambitious or unexpected, like “King Lear” or the bracingly dark coming-of-age musical “Spring Awakening” or Rupert Holmes’ multiple-ending musical based on Charles Dickens’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” or the recent comedy/drama about the making of “Jaws,” “The Shark is Broken.”
Lipscomb, who has a background in both public relations and venture capital, considers TheatreWorks New Milford “one of the hidden gems of the New York City suburbs.” He and other new members of the board have been working with the existing artistic leadership team to make the theater more distinctive. “It was very much like a club, and we thought it could be more than that,” Lipscomb said. “We’re looking at what we can do with an idyllic little theater.”
