For 50 years I’ve paid my rent by getting people into the theater. There are several strategies for doing so, but from the first I’ve relied on the most effective I know: Be good.

If the play is provocative, interesting, funny, sad, or diverting, it is possible that the people will come. It helps to have a notable cast, and it helps to have, if not the actual endorsement of a friendly, the inattention of a hostile press. But, finally, my party-turn was “being good.”

It was not an infallible technique, and frequently the audience and I differed in defining “good.” I did, however, know one certain way to keep an audience away: Tell ’em the play was good for them. No one, however gay, will happily attend a wretched play merely because it is about being gay. Gay people don’t need anyone to explain to them what it is to be gay; and blacks, being human, will not likely go to a bad play merely because it is about being black, or written by an African American. Who might attend these hectorings-called-dramas?

Some, of course, have long attended the theater as once folks, as a duty, agreed to be bored by religious sermons. Even today there are probably, in various cities, as in the onetime Capital of the World, those who might drag themselves or others to a pediatric lecture on diversity.

The young and productive, the vital, in short, may still inhabit SoHo or Echo Park, but they do not go to the theater. Why would they? For a “rollicking frolicking evening of Diversity Humor”?

Just as the surest way to drive a potential audience away is to invite them to take their medicine, the most effective way to get the asses in the seats is their understanding that “you can’t get a ticket.”

Seventy-five percent of the pre-hysteria Broadway audience were tourists. Out-of-towners traveled to see Hamilton because “you couldn’t get a ticket”; but, Hamilton aside, who would spend a vacation and (ten? twenty?) thousand dollars on a New York theatrical trip where the only fare on offer was but an endorsement of right-thinking? Tourists will come to New York to see musicals and enjoy the pageant. But who would happily devote his vacation to sermons — that is, to the current spate of pseudo-religious drama?

The most ancient theatrical adage is: “Don’t sell cancer.” “Issue” plays (and what is a less interesting issue than Diversity?) can only attract those on a pilgrimage. Idiot Caucasians may attend such plays as devoted Catholics once journeyed to Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, in Quebec, to knee-walk up the myriad steps in an act of penance and propitiation.

Those who rose from those prayers re­freshed, their prayers were answered. But what is the prayer of those torturing themselves with the fatuity of Issue plays? They may have enjoyed an evening of rati­fied arrogance, but they did not rise from their seats in increased understanding; or (as is the real purpose of the drama) in gratitude for a two-hour reprieve from their wretched self-absorption. They left the theater exhausted; and, unable to assert it, devoted to a joyless and hypocritical self-congratulation.

Theatrical pedants once devoted their lives to pointless exegesis. E.g.:

Hamlet: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.

A pastime for 400 years of scholarship: Did he mean “solid,” or “sullied”? Q: What difference does it make? It makes none, to the audience (who could not even hear the difference); but such concerns were the rice bowl of talentless and tone-deaf pedants, letting them, to their minds, sit at the head of the same table as Shakespeare.

Today, one after one, beloved classics of Western thought are trash-canned because of the race, sex, or purported sexual preference of their creator.

This brings to mind the British laws against homosexuality. These were not repealed until 1967 and were known as the “Blackmailer’s Charter.” Today’s Diversity Police, similarly enfranchised brigands, are levying tribute on a different populace, that of the theatergoer. To the unconvinced I suggest a test. Ask one just returned from, and praising, a celebration of Diversity: “Quote me a line.”

American culture is now dominated by envenomed prigs.

Mass media sell subscriptions, which is to say “content,” which is to say “sausages.” The subscriber, having purchased a package, is, now, deprived of further choice.

But that is not how human beings, given a choice, elect our entertainments.

For though it is incontrovertible that cold broccoli is better for one than hot chocolate mousse, where is the restaurateur fool enough to advertise the former in the hope of attracting customers?

Drama on Broadway will reemerge as morality plays — audience choice, in effect, banished; for all classics will have been expunged, and current offerings will, finally, be only “content,” just like television.

The content of television shows is essentially undifferentiated. Not only are all the cop shows interchangeable, they are interchangeable with the medical shows. (Swap out the shoot-outs and the ER scenes — the action sequences — and they are all just bad narration about off-screen characters.)

As invention and insight are banned, only those individuals (a) on the Approved List and (b) content to write propaganda need apply.

Now, with the straight play dead, and tourist audiences skipping the sermon, producers will observe that only musicals and pageants can “rope in the rubes.”

Broadway, then, will have become an amusement park, drama and comedy superseded by content, which has then given place to drivel; and tourists, should they choose, may come to be force-fed entertainment just as they travel to Mount Rushmore, another once-sacred place desecrated by political wickedness.