Why We Need 'Sad' Plays: Reflecting on Samuel D. Hunter’s Defense of Darkness in Theater By Monumental Artists, Los Angeles Theater can make us laugh, cry, dream, and think—all in the span of an evening. But what happens when our stages shy away from the deep and the difficult? In his recent New York Times op-ed, playwright Samuel D. Hunter shone a spotlight on theater’s uneasy relationship with sadness, arguing that a refusal to embrace darker stories risks sanitizing the artform itself. The...