In a New York Times op-ed, Isaac Butler raised a well-worn complaint.

The American theater is on the verge of collapse.

Granted, it’s the sort of thing someone involved in theater would say when things aren’t going well, and given the impact of the pandemic and the shuttering of America, it should come as no surprise that even the arts suffered. But Butler’s argument isn’t merely that the theater has taken a hit, but that its financial viability is crashing and burning.

Here’s just a sampling of recent dire developments: The Public Theater announced this year that the Under the Radar festival, the most exciting of New York’s experimental performance incubators, would be postponed indefinitely and later announced it was laying off 19 percent of its staff. The Humana Festival of New American Plays, a vital launching pad for such great playwrights as Lynn Nottage and Will Eno over the past four decades, was canceled this year.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the country’s oldest and most storied regional theaters, recently announced a second round of emergency fund-raising to remain operational. The Lookingglass, a major anchor of Chicago’s theater scene, is halting production for the year. The Brooklyn Academy of Music laid off 13 percent of its staff. BAM’s Next Wave Festival, which helped catapult generations of forward-thinking artists to prominence, presented 31 shows in 2017. This year, it will present seven.

While Broadway theaters have largely bounced back from covid, non-profit theaters have not, and that’s where both content and artists are developed that end up on a Broadway stage. Without the pipeline of regional theater, not only are people who don’t live in Hell’s Kitchen denied access to the theater, but the theater itself with starve to death.

The explanations proffered for this situation are twofold. First, that people are no longer subscribing to the theater or patronizing plays because the costs are much too high. Second, that the habit of theater going has been broken by the pandemic, which apparently means people just aren’t going out to the theater anymore.

Butler raises an extreme solution to the problem.

So how do we avoid this catastrophe? Just as in other areas of recent American life where entire industries were imperiled — banks, the auto industry — this crisis requires federal intervention.

That’s right: The American nonprofit theater needs a bailout.

While aspirational beliefs are all the rage these days, should the theater be yet another unicorn prancing on the federal budget because it can no longer pay for itself?

The letters to the editor raised the problem that most of us considered, even if we were reluctant to say it out loud.

One of the main reasons that nonprofit theaters are closing is the increasingly political nature of the plays they are presenting. More and more, stage plays are becoming narrow, didactic, political propaganda, rather than complex, broad-minded and mature explorations of being human, of life itself.

A sizable swath of the country with a different viewpoint has rejected today’s theater, and now the subscribers previously committed to supporting theaters are doing the same. Limited, preachy, one-sided plays make not only bad art, but also bad economics.

Much as public habits may have changed as a result of covid, that’s not the only moving part involved in the collapse of the theater. Who wants to see Death of a Salesman, but with Willy Loman a morbidly obese black transsexual fighting against climate change?

Others see this as a good thing, and one worthy of federal support for the arts, constrained only by the Republican Luddites.

Isaac Butler might opine that the federal government should step in and bolster American regional theater, but to expect such an intervention from our fractious federal leadership is naïve. It is no secret that Republicans loathe what good theater promotes — critical thinking.

The theater of the moment is suffering from a backlash against its pendulum swing toward “wokeness,” and conservatives won’t support this in any way, and as long as the balance in Congress is so evenly split no support will ever be forthcoming.

What is infuriating is that there are so many individuals and corporations who could easily wipe away the financial woes of our cultural institutions with the stroke of a pen.

Still others argue that fear of offense has stifled creativity, turning art into vanilla pudding.

Isaac Butler makes a very important point about the need for money to reinvigorate the theater. However, make no mistake: This is not solely a problem that American government funding can fix….

Her cohort of well-educated, successful theater makers are faced with the same reality — producers are reluctant, if not frightened, to present work that may offend. Nonprofit theaters’ artistic directors worldwide have chosen, in their desire not to offend, work that seemingly suits the current landscape; risk-taking is verboten.

For those of us who believe in the intrinsic value of art, of theater, to society, the death of the theater would indeed be catastrophic. But has theater been murdered by cheapo patrons and people refusing to leave their homes, such that a federal bailout can fix it, or has theater committed suicide between allowing only politically correct productions and stifling the very thing about art that matters for fear that it will offend someone, as pretty much everything does?

Does it even matter?

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.