Slave Play playwright Jeremy O. Harris is executive producing American Theater, a new documentary about director Brian Clowdus, following his attempt at a theatrical comeback. Directed by Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick, the film begins a nationwide tour with live audience discussions October 25 in Los Angeles, with additional stops in Minneapolis, Brooklyn, Atlanta, and New Orleans, before cinematic releases in New York and Los Angeles through Antenna Releasing and a digital release on the Letterboxd Video Store.
Clowdus founded and led Serenbe Playhouse in Georgia, known in the late 2010s for large-scale immersive productions, including a staging of Titanic on a lake where the set itself sank. He stepped down as artistic director in 2019. Roughly six months later, in June 2020, multiple former performers, directors, and staff came forward with allegations spanning several productions, including claims that Clowdus inserted racist language into scripts where it wasn’t called for, restructured stories to center white characters’ perspectives over Black characters as written, used culturally insensitive costuming, and prioritized visual spectacle over performer safety. Director Tara Moses, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee Nation, publicly described racism she experienced directing The True Story of Pocahontas at Serenbe in 2019. Serenbe’s parent organization shut the playhouse down entirely that June, stating it would work to rebuild as a more equitable company; a later review of company records reportedly found no formal HR documentation of the complaints despite their volume.
By that October, Clowdus had begun publicly expressing support for Donald Trump, and in 2021 he ran for political office in Panama City, Florida, as a conservative. American Theater picks up from there, following his effort that same year to return to theater by staging The Salem Experience, an immersive retelling of the Salem witch trials performed in rural Georgia with a cast of conservative actors.
Co-director Dylan Frederick has said the film’s goal is to help audiences understand political division rather than deepen it, while creative producer Laura Hilliard has drawn a direct comparison between the dynamic of Clowdus and his cast and the relationship between Trump and his supporters. Clowdus’s own website no longer references The Salem Experience or his earlier theater work, now focusing on luxury real estate.
With the film framing Clowdus’s political radicalization as a lens for understanding broader authoritarian movements, the open question is how directly it engages with the specific artists who said they were harmed, and whether their accounts shape the story as much as Clowdus’s own.