This Q&A is part of Lessons from the Field, Next City’s new series of interviews with anti-displacement practitioners across the country.

When Colm Summers stepped into the role of artistic director at New York City’s Working Theater in 2023, he inherited a legacy nearly four decades in the making. Founded in 1985 by actors from working-class backgrounds, the company was the first in the city to introduce sliding-scale ticketing — starting at zero dollars — and to bring professional theater directly into neighborhoods through mobile productions.

Today, Summers’ team is focused on creating “non-extractive art” that furthers the city’s social movements. This year, their Stage Left festival presented six plays based on experiences from the frontlines of progressive movements; each developed alongside a community partner, including REI Soho Union, Workers’ Justice Project and Releasing Aging People in Prison.

One of those plays was “La Dureza,” which explored a day in the lives of the delivery cyclists across New York City. It was created with Los Deliveristas Unidos, a grassroots initiative organizing to demand better working conditions for delivery app workers who are underpaid, exposed to dangerous working conditions and excluded from fundamental labor protections. That leaves this workforce, made up of 61,000 predominantly immigrant workers of color, particularly vulnerable to displacement.

Summers sat down with Next City to speak about why the arts belong at the center of anti-displacement work and what “access” really means. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your organization and your model.

The Working Theater is the country’s oldest and only theater company committed to work by working-class people for working-class people. That means on our stages, working-class stories happen. A working-class person or a person affected by the machinery of capitalism is always at the center of our work, narratively speaking.

It also means this work is available at prices that working-class people can afford. Every single program — whether it’s our access initiatives, our training programs, the ways we create access to other theater companies’ work in the city, our main stage productions, our commission — all that stuff is available starting at zero cost. We were the first company to implement sliding scale ticketing in New York City, all the way from $0 and up.

Working Theater started in 1985 when a group of actors [from working-class backgrounds] came together. The transformation of the company began when Bill Mitchelson took the reins. He was a union guy and he advocated for growing the board members and support staff to include folks who were active in the union movement, who were organizers or shop stewards. Over time, the theater company became uniquely involved in the capital-L labor movement.

Later Bill’s protege, Mark Plesent, would go on to create most of the access initiatives at the company, which have set industry standards and been embraced across the U.S. An example is our sliding ticket scale and our mobile units of theater — taking your theater out of traditional, conventional theater spaces off Broadway and into communities across New York City.

I took over [as artistic director] in 2023. We’ve been asking ourselves, what has been the synthesis of the work over these last two generations, and what is the string that we add to that bow?

I think we add cultural organizing. We see the company as a way to fill the cup of our fellow organizers. How can we support what’s happening downtown at REI on the shop floor, where they’re striking? What’s the work at the Amazon warehouse that we can support with the work of the company? How do we add to existing artistic integrity and access initiatives, but more importantly, what can we bring politically? What heft can we bring to the movement? We try to be an honest and frank colleague and co-conspirator to social movements throughout the city.

Why are the arts important in effectively combating displacement? Why do the arts matter to the conversation of displacement?

In communities across New York City that are rapidly being gentrified, the cultures of those communities are being stripped away really, really quickly. The storefronts, the local art, the local cultural sites are being replaced by f—king weed shops.

How do we answer that issue, if not with culture and culture makers? How do we make sure that the right folks are being resourced to remake that culture? I think the people best positioned to support that work are the folks in the communities that are affected.

There is a prevailing perception that art is supplementary, that it’s the pastime of the privileged. That is an inherently classist idea. Much of the innovation, the avant-garde, the experimental disruption in the field of arts and culture is led by working-class people, or emerges from communities affected by industrialization or by changing access to materials.

The idea that the arts and the working class are mutually exclusive is an idea of protectionist gatekeeping that comes from the upper-middle and elite classes.

The theater is a special case in which access to training has been gatekept. Expensive ticket prices have gatekept access to it as entertainment. Last year, Othello played on Broadway and tickets were about $800 each. This cost contributes to a sense that the arts and culture are the domain of a few, and that’s just not the case. It never has been. I hope that the company can be a form of redress for that.

How did you come into the arts, and how has your lived experience affected your decision to specifically work in New York City at The Working Theater?

I grew up in Waterford in the South of Ireland, in a small rural town just outside of this Gaelic-speaking neighborhood. In my county many people were employed by a glass factory where they made the renowned Waterford Crystal, which you’ll see in any upper-middle-class home in the world.

In 2008, when the Wall Street crash happened, [Ireland was] among the countries hit very hard in Europe by austerity measures put in place by the International Monetary Fund. That glass factory closed. One in four families had a person out of work, and the suicide rate soared. We had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, and I remember vividly going to school every day and hearing the announcements that somebody had passed.

I was deeply, deeply affected by that context and the influence of my mother, who is a journalist and an avowed Marxist. She gave me a copy of the manifesto when I was 13. She said, “Read this, that’s enough of Harry Potter or whatever you’re reading.”

And I did, and that was around the time that I was getting interested in theater. I would commute past the shuttered glass factory to go to a community hall in the city to take part in the first play that I was ever in. The two experiences were inseparable. I don’t think it is possible for me to think about theater arts where we get together and tell a story in conversation with our audience without thinking about it politically.

What is your definition of displacement?

The whole project of gentrification is supported by an idea that talent doesn’t exist locally, that you have to helicopter in experts into communities about which you know nothing — without experimenting with the idea that those skills, assets and histories might exist already there.

At Working Theater, we want to be co-conspirators for artists who already exist in local communities that we work with. We want to create longevity from this work so that our relationship to a locale isn’t extractive. There’s an enormous amount of extractive art being made by completely well-intentioned people, by people who believe that what they are doing is creating a platform for local voices.

You have to ask yourself, what is the local impact? If you are putting local faces on your public-facing marketing, then you disappear from that community after a month of rehearsal, then it’s quite possible you’re making extractive work and your integration of your artists in that community led to nothing for that community. So how can we be better than that?

How do you measure your anti-displacement success?

The way we measure the success of our work in the community is to distinguish between work that is being made ‘about’ versus ‘for.’ For example, I love to go and see a show at insert big theater about insert thing here. But too often, that work is an appropriation of stories that exist in Flatbush or Brighton Beach or the Bronx, and no one from that neighborhood will ever see it.

We’ve been working on a piece called “The Blue Parts,” which takes place in Brighton Beach. Liba Vaynberg and Dina Vovsi, the team working on the piece, have been very careful to develop the story in conversation with folks in Brighton Beach by what they call story circles, a devising method they use to build the piece. A majority of the piece is in Russian, which is a common language for folks living in Brighton Beach.

If you claim to be doing restorative work, you need to ask yourself: Is there language justice? Are you addressing the access needs of a given community? If it’s happening in a working-class community, can someone pay in cash to see the show? Are you working in a transit desert? If somebody can’t get to the show, if they can only pay with a credit card, that’s not access.

If you are not willing to think about those infrastructural parts of your arts and culture project, then you’re probably contributing to displacement, rather than actively fighting against it.

What has been Working Theater’s greatest accomplishment?

We just wrapped up a theater festival called Stage Left, where Pedro Rosario, one of our playwrights who is currently unjustly incarcerated, called in from prison after presenting his play, “The Hero U Took.”

His correctional officer put him through, and the audience was on their feet applauding what they had just seen. There was a full house, 100 people at least. People were waiting outside for a seat. We let people from the waitlist in the room and they were standing in the pews.

Pedro got on the line and said, “This is as happy as I will be until the day that I walk free.”

What guidance would you give to organizations starting this type of work?

I would have liked to learn to listen earlier. Listen to the voices of folks who are deeply invested in this work. In the last two or three years, there has been a growth in interest in the labor movement. The writers’ strike in L.A. is an example. There’s been an increased interest from private philanthropy, from the nonprofit sector, in social movement work.

Meanwhile, there are folks who’ve been doing social movement work for years, who have the expertise and the network to take you and your dream further, faster than you trying to be an island and do this thing on your own.

The advice I would give comes from this sort of mantra I have. I Enjoy Capitalist Grief, which stands for infrastructure, economics, culture and governance – it’s this joke so I remember what I’m talking about when making a pitch donation or presenting. Are you creating an infrastructure, economics, culture and governance at your company that prioritizes working-class people? If you aren’t, then there is low-hanging fruit available to you.

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.