Theater: Theatre Vs. Theater: Does It Matter?

By Wendy Caster
arttimesjournal July 4, 2018

When I was in college, one of my fellow students was Broadway producer David Merrick’s assistant/gofer, which made him a big deal in the Queens College Drama Department. He and I were once discussing whether to use theater or theatre, and he said that we have to use the re version because it’s more special than er and we have to honor that theatre is more special than anything. I was 18 and I agreed with all my heart and I’ve been using theatre ever since.

But recently I’ve been wondering if theatre isn’t a uselessly snobby choice. I even decided to start using theater, but more often than not, my fingers outvoted me and wrote theatre. (For an earlier discussion of this topic in Art Times, by Robert W. Bethune, click here. He prefers theater and claims that theatre reeks of “phony elitism.”)

I decided to do some research on the variant spellings. I asked theatre professionals which they use and why, and got an interesting variety of answers:

Many people said that theatre is the art, the discipline, and/or the industry, while theater is a building.
Some use re for plays; er for movies.
One pointed out that theater is American and theatre is English, but that person uses theatre
Many people use re because that’s what their parent, mentor, teacher, and/or director used.

For the record, dictionaries simply say that theatre is a variant of theater, with no differentiation between the art and the building. The fact that they don’t say “chiefly British” for theatre, as they do for, eg, litre, reflects how the re ending in theatre has been embraced in the US.

But there certainly isn’t any consistency. While virtually all Broadway houses are theatres, Lincoln Center, the Public, and Second Stage are theaters. Outside of New York there is the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Grand Island Little Theatre in Nebraska. I didn’t find any examples of theatres or theatre groups using er, though I am sure they exist.

And, speaking of consistency, should the Center Theatre Group perhaps be the Centre Theatre Group? And what about an apostrophe after actors in the Actors Theatre of Louisville? Then there’s Steppenwolf, which is inconsistent on its website even within a single sentence “the Steppenwolf Theatre Company has become the nation’s premier ensemble theater…” Perhaps the La Jolla Playhouse has the right idea.

As for me, as you can tell from this essay, I’ve recommitted to theatre. Maybe it is snooty. I can live with that. Truth is, I still do believe that theatre is more special than anything.

( Wendy Caster is an award-winning writer living in New York City. Her reviews appear regularly on the blog Show Showdown. Her short plays You Look Just Like Him and The Morning After were performed as part of Estrogenius festivals. Her published works include short stories, essays, and one book. )