Mention American theatre and everyone thinks of Broadway: the razzle-dazzle of the Great White Way. British critics, in particular, seem to think that a few blocks in mid-town Manhattan contain the nation’s creative heart. But I’ve got news for them, and everyone else: there is a world elsewhere. The more I’ve visited America, the more I’ve become convinced there is a vibrant, continent-wide, non-profit theatre that expresses the national mood.

The dream of a network of regional theatres is an old one. I’ve just been dipping into Volume Two of the Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, to be published shortly by Oberon Books. In 1945 you find Williams writing to a New York critic of his vision of a chain of subsidised theatres that would offer artists “attention in place of neglect, fellowship in place of embittering loneliness and isolation”. Williams goes on to say that “if there were such theatres as commonly as there are state universities and civic orchestras, think what a happy difference it would make for all of us and what we might be inspired to do and be!”

To some extent, Williams’ hopes have been realised. Even if federal subsidy is still pathetically small, most major cities now contain their own non-profit playhouse. Three years ago, I visited the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for the premiere of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues.

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