Mayor Mamdani: Who built the Empire State Building?
Crowd: Union workers!
Mayor Mamdani: Who keeps the magic alive on Broadway?
Crowd: Union workers!
Mayor Mamdani: Who drives our buses and cleans our streets?
Crowd: Union workers!
This was the call and response that Mayor Zohran Mamdani led during his speech at a May Day rally. His sandwiching theater between construction, transportation and sanitation was not meant to downgrade it, but to reframe the public’s understanding.
This leads to a question that feels apt for Labor Day, which is a legal holiday first proposed by a labor union official and created by Congress in 1884 to celebrate the American labor union movement: How has Mayor Zohran Mamdani changed theater in New York?
The mayor once took an improv class at Magnet Theater and assisted his filmmaker mother Mira Nair at staged readings when she was developing her movie “Monsoon Wedding” into a musical, but he is of course known far more for his socialist, pro-labor politics than his interest in theater. There are several moves he has made that merge the two. These are primarily rhetorical, but also involve mass ticket giveaways, a couple of crucial appointments, and most concretely an innovative arts-friendly budget.
Has he made a difference? There is some small evidence of a subtle cultural shift. Some of it is happening on stage. Whether the mayor has affected it, or simply reflected it, is — like the shift itself — up for debate.
People come to New York City from all over the world to experience Broadway. The kids who grow up here should be able to do the same.
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) August 13, 2026
We’re partnering with @TDFNYC to give away over 2,000 free Broadway tickets to NYC High School students through a free-to-enter lottery.
Break a… pic.twitter.com/JBIaWUDOxf
A week after his inauguration in early January, Mamdani said at a press conference announcing the distribution of 1,500 free tickets to the Under the Radar Festival: “This is just one example of an agenda and an approach that we are going to take to ensure that arts are not simply thought of as a luxury for the wealthy or a treat for the tourists. Arts have to be something that are infused in the lives of everyday New Yorkers. We know that for too long it has felt as if a world away. There are people just a few blocks away for whom this festival was something they hadn’t heard of until this announcement was made. And so we are going to spend our time, our agenda, and the time that we have in office in doing everything we can to bring arts back to New Yorkers all across the five boroughs.”
A few days later, he appointed Rafael Espinal as the new commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Much was made of Espinal having once been a councilman and assemblyman from Brooklyn, with relatively little experience in creating media or entertainment. Less emphasized was his immediate background as a labor organizer; he was hired away from his position as executive director of the Freelancers Union. Many people who work in the theater are freelancers.
In February, he appointed Diya Vij as the new Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs , a curator at Creative Time who previously had worked at the agency in the DeBlasio Administration, with the promise “we will fight to keep New York a city where artists can afford to live and create — and where every New Yorker, in every borough, can experience the energy and inspiration that art makes possible.” In July, the mayor and the City Council budgeted $323.8 million to the agency, the largest ever, a seven percent increase from last year. This includes the establishment of a Cultural Stability Fund that makes a $10 million pool available each year for the next three years to struggling cultural organizations each year facing an emergency.
In August, he announced (in English and Mandarin) a new lottery to give 2,000 Broadway tickets for free to New York City high school students, saying “People come to New York City from all over the world to experience Broadway. The kids who grow up here should be able to do the same.” The lottery was in partnership with the Theater Development Fund. Every student who entered the lottery, even those who lost, received a free two-month TDF membership
Besides these explicit steps on behalf of the theater, Mamdani has claimed from the get-go that his basic campaign pledges designed to make New York more affordable – rent freeze, universal free childcare, fare-free and fast buses, city-run grocery stores, increased taxes on the wealth and corporations – directly benefit creative workers. “When I speak about the importance of making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, that is a commitment to artists.”
About a decade ago, after I saw a revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1936 play “Days to Come,” which is set during a strike at a brush factory in Ohio. I was struck by how unusual it was to see such a play about a union, or workers, or even a set of a workplace.. The 1930s were full of these. Why so few now? Every Labor Day since then, I’ve asked that question, and taken something of an annual inventory in New York. Every year, there is at least one fine drama specifically about the taxing conditions of workers in various workplaces, most of them Off-Broadway. In 2014, To The Bone, a play by Lisa Ramirez about Latina workers in an upstate chicken slaughterhouse and My Manana Comes, Elizabeth Irwin’s play about the kitchen staff in a fancy Manhattan restaurant; in 2015, Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins took place in the offices of a publication similar to the New Yorker magazine (which is where Jacobs-Jenkins once worked.) In 2016, there was “Sweat,” by Lynn Nottage, about the social and economic breakdown of a group of friends of varying ethnicities in Reading, Pennsylvania with the decline of the local factory. It moved to Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize. There have been other more recent plays on Broadway that more or less fit the bill: In 2023, Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, “ a play set among the workers in a hair salon in Harlem; in 2024, I suppose you could argue David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic,” the workplace being a record studio; in 2025, “Real Women Have Curves”, which was a musical about mostly undocumented immigrant women working in an L.A dress factory; it ran only two months.
But in 2026, a classic play about a working man was the most Tony-awarded hit on Broadway, Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman.” There were two shows Off-Broadway about the workers at one famous and one infamous New York City landmark: “Brooklyn’s Bridge” and “The Vessel.” Even Xhloe and Natasha’s popular surreal comedy “And Then The Rodeo Burned Down” was about two workers at a rodeo.
None of these are explicitly about unions, but there is one spectacular example of that in the Stage Left Festival, organized by the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and Working Theater, a company that was founded in 1985 with an explicit mission “to create theater specifically for, about and with working people.” For the second year in a row, the festival paired five newly written plays with community partners (often unions) organiizing around the issues explored in each play.
Mamdani has been in office nine months. Is it just a coincidence that the new Broadway season features three play about stressed workers? The first Broadway production of Jacobs-Jenkins’ workplace play “Gloria.” A revival of “The Full Monty,” a musical comedy about the lengths that unemployed former steelworkers will undertake to survive. A revival of “Awake and Sing,” a domestic drama set in the Great Depression whose plot revolves around a fight over the labor movement; it was written by Clifford Odets, whose “Waiting for Lefty” was the quintessential pro-union play of the 1930s and forevermore.
