At a time when theater is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority, the theater company Working Theater partners with labor unions to recreate a working-class theater for the 21st century.

In 2023, a friend took me to a night of off-Broadway theater in downtown Manhattan. A small audience gathered in a black box performance space to watch a series of tenderly performed short plays — about high school gun violence, empty nesting, heartbreak. It was much like any other night of Manhattan theater — except the tickets were sliding scale and all the playwrights and some of the actors were members of 32BJ, a large Service Employees International Union (SEIU) union local for building-maintenance workers like janitors and window cleaners.

The organization that transformed these workers into

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