As the 1950s came to a close the American theatre was in a crisis. After a period that had seen a series of outstanding plays from Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, along with the last, great, plays of Eugene O'Neill, Broadway seemed to have little to offer. The mining of O'Neill was over, Miller was silent and Williams faltering. Broadway itself faced escalating costs and competition from television. On the other hand change was in the air, in terms both of culture and politics. Eisenhower, a president who represented the values of the past, had gone, to be replaced by a president who traded on his youth and sought to address a new generation. While embracing a familiar Cold War rhetoric, he sought to kindle a new idealism with the Peace Corps and, somewhat grudgingly, acknowledged that the supposed homogeneity of American society had been a sham. Civil Rights was now securely on the agenda. The streets were turning into theatre: a crude melodrama in the South, a carnival in the North.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eisenhower's favourite reading had been westerns. Now there was a man in the White House who frequented opera, apparently read books and invited their authors to dinner, and went to the theatre. And for the first time private foundations began to fund theatre, not, of course, Broadway, in some ways the epitome of the capitalist enterprise, but that theatre which had begun to spring up first in small, unfashionable venues far from 42nd and 43rd Streets, and then in cafés, lofts, church halls, anywhere that a sometimes non-paying audience could assemble.