The most common form of theater across time and space has been solo performance. Think of a storyteller going into a public space, often accompanying themselves with music or speaking in poetry. These performers go by different names: bard, rhapsode, skald. In some ways, a rap artist is a direct inheritor of that tradition.

But Jeff Kaplan says, “When we think of a play in a theater with the lights off and a curtain and we applaud at the end, that form really begins in the 19th century.”

That might sound strange, but it’s true. Kaplan points to the year 1876 as an important turning point in performing arts education. In that year, the German composer Richard Wagner built an opera house in Bayreuth, Germany. In that opera house, the audience all sat facing the stage.

That was different from anything previously known. Before, the lights would be on, and the upper class would sit on the sides facing each other. They wanted to see what each other looked like. The middle class would sit in the middle, and the lower class would sit up in the high areas and throw things and yell and scream.

It was very raucous. It was very much a social event. Kaplan elaborates, “This modern notion in which we’re all sitting very quietly, and we’ve all purchased a ticket so we can consume the content, you know, that’s actually pretty recent.”

As you move through a European idea of theater, you’ll come to Shakespeare the verse plays. Next in online performing arts education, you’ll move on through the 19th century and the creation of naturalism and realism. Of those styles, Elizabeth Bradley explains, “We’re meant to actually suspend disbelief and feel that lives we can relate to are being reflected on stages.”

Realism and naturalism are terms that are often put together, conflated or used interchangeably. Bradley uses a recent important revival of “Our Town” — considered by many an iconic American play — as an example.

Of that particular production, she says, “Using all of our senses as an audience was important. So actual bacon was frying on stage in an actual frying pan in real time. And that’s an example of a kind of heightened realism.”

We still have the (David) Belasco Theatre on Broadway. In the very early years of the 20th century, David Belasco was a producer who believed that every detail added to a certain sense of verisimilitude, the sense that it is real, that it is truthful. Bradley shares, “So every afternoon, he would bring in real shanks of meat to hang on the stage, and they would ripen, so to speak, under the lights during the productions.”

Kaplan says, “Another date I’d point to is 1879, [when] a playwright named Henrik Ibsen wrote a play about a woman named Nora who is in an unhappy marriage.” As viewers watch the play, they discover that Nora has a secret. They also learn that there’s not really a bad guy; there’s not really a villain.

He continues, “And in the end, she walks out — spoiler alert, I’m sorry — but she walks out [on] her family on Christmas at night in Norway without a coat, and she slams the door. And it was the door; it was the door slam heard around the world. Women just didn’t do that.”

With that, theater had spoken truth to power forever. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says that theater is a mirror held up to nature. That’s the beginning of theater’s relationship with modern identity politics. Ever since, plays have really gone where things are sticky.

Take Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” for example. It’s about the American dream. “After World War II, who can dream?” Kaplan asks. “Does that include an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago who wants to buy a house in the suburbs? Are they allowed to dream?”

And so, ever since then, performing arts has addressed key issues that confront us to this day and, in fact, right now.

By opening night of a performing arts piece, the producer’s job is still not done. Instead of thinking about closing night, you’re now thinking about how to make sure that the run is productive and that you’re able to get people to come see the show. That’s where the second and third phases of marketing will come into play. You’re now thinking about how to fill these seats.

You should always aim to try to get the first two shows sold out because a sold-out show is a great marketing plan. That is the first and foremost goal you should learn as a producer in performing arts education or online performing arts education.

Producer Malini Singh McDonald has worked on a few shows like that. Once those first two shows are sold out, they were able to then shift to marketing and use some other posters that had been included in the marketing plan. On that note, it may be a good idea to have a few different posters that you can use at different times, so it’s not just one graphic. They use that in addition to seat fillers. There’s a lot of programs out there that you can use to help fill seats.

Surprisingly, what inspired a very young August Wilson as a high school student was not theater, not Black theater, but Black poetry. When August Wilson was in high school, he went to his teacher one day and said, “Here’s my latest project. Here’s my assignment.” It was the original poems he’d been writing.

They were so good that the teacher refused to believe that this biracial, self-identifying African-American teenager could have written this thing. He accused August Wilson of plagiarism. August Wilson said, “No, I wrote it myself.”

The teacher didn’t believe him, so August Wilson refused to go back. August Wilson dropped out of high school, never returned, and went to his mother and told her what happened.

His mother tried to make him go back, but August stood firm. He dropped out and never returned again. Instead, August Wilson spent his late high school age years committed to studying Black poetry and the Black arts movement of African-American theater.

He eventually packed up and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he partnered with the folks who founded the Penumbra Theatre Company. Then he sort of sat there, and watched, and saw performing arts theater occur. That’s where he cultivated his voice.

By the end of his career, he was celebrated for having bridged this decade cycle of one play per decade that captured the history of Black life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He’s now the savior of American theater. He created a huge sensation in the performing arts world, and people still fawn over him and his accomplishments.

He stood before a crowd of those who praised him for saving theater, but who themselves may not have been as actively championing Black theater as they could have been, to say no more needs to be done. He told his story, which helped to pass the torch to the next generation. His story inspired and continues to inspire those wanting to pursue a performing arts education or online performing arts education.