The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (10 page)

I wrote reviews for the
Times
for three and a half years. Then the
Times
thought it would be fun for a theater critic to cover the 2000 presidential election. After I did that, Bruce Weber had become the second-string theater critic, so there really wasn’t a job for me anymore. Then the
Washington Post
called me in 2002 and offered me the theater critic job.

Robert Hurwitt:
I wrote my first piece of criticism without actually meaning to become a critic. I was an undergraduate at NYU, where I was active in theater. Most of us in the theater community were very scornful of the reviews being printed in the campus paper, so I walked into the paper’s office one day and said, “I’d like to write the next theater review,” without actually having the forethought that it would be of a play that I wanted to audition for. That review is something I hold on to. It’s a total embarrassment. It’s full of inside-baseball jargon and is probably incomprehensible to anyone outside of the theater.

After I graduated from NYU and got a master’s degree from Berkeley in English Literature, I got back into acting and worked in the San Francisco area. This was in the 1960s, when the underground newspapers were starting up, which led to the alternative press of today. A friend of mine who started one of those papers in Washington, D.C., asked if I would be his West Coast correspondent. After I started writing for him, other papers began picking up my stories. Because I knew a lot about theater, that quickly became one of my beats. I then became the theater critic of the
San Francisco Examiner.
And when the Hearst Corporation bought the
San Francisco Chronicle
in 2000, they merged the staffs, and I’ve been at the
Chronicle
ever since.

Matthew Murray:
I studied acting and playwriting in college, and worked as an actor briefly after school until deciding that I liked eating and getting paid regularly. Not long after moving to New York for a non-theater job, I got involved with the
All That Chat
discussion board on the website
TalkinBroadway.com
and my writing attracted the attention of the people who ran the site. They had just lost their Off-Broadway reviewer and wanted someone to take over that role. They asked me, and I said yes. Within a year or so, they lost their Broadway reviewer, and so I ended up doing that, too.

Jason Zinoman:
It was partly an accident, and partly something I was of born with. I grew up around the theater world. My mom founded the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., the year I was born, so I grew up around productions. I didn’t want to act, but I did like to write, and I really wanted to be a journalist. The magazine I was really obsessed with as a teenager was the
New Republic
. Journalism and writing about the arts seemed very exciting and high-stakes.

When I got out of school, I moved to New York. I freelanced a lot around that time. Then a deputy theater critic job opened up at
Time Out New York
. I don’t know how I got the job. I was not qualified, but I knew a lot more about theater than the ordinary 24-year-old because it was all around me growing up. We sat at the dinner table talking about scenes from an August Wilson play. I worked under Sam Whitehead at
Time Out
. After he left, I took over at the age of 25. From there, I got the Friday theater column at the
New York Times
, which included news and gossip. Writing the column was tremendously valuable because I got to meet all the producers, but the position was becoming obsolete because of the Internet. Then I had nothing to do, so I did freelance theater reviewing. Three years ago, I became the
Times
’ first comedy columnist.

MATT WINDMAN
: What kind of education should a theater critic have?

Adam Feldman:
There are so many different kinds of critics, from so many different backgrounds, that I don’t know if there is one set of educational prerequisites for the job.

John Simon:
It’s assumed that anybody can write film or drama criticism. It’s based on the know-nothingism of too many editors, too many publishers, and too many publications that simply don’t understand what theater is and what demands it makes on the person writing about it. I was once on an episode of
The Odd Couple
where I played a demanding theater critic. On the episode, the character of Oscar has to take over as a drama critic. Oscar is a sports writer, but his editor thinks that anybody can write drama criticism. Then there’s a symposium at which he appears with some real drama critics, and he makes an ass of himself. That’s what really happens.

Jeremy Gerard:
I have tremendous respect for academics that have doctorates, but I don’t. I wasn’t interested. Plus, most academics are terrible writers.

Zachary Stewart:
Theater critics should have an ever-expanding knowledge of art, culture, and current affairs, and should be able to draw upon that knowledge in reviews. That might require a high school diploma and a lot of independent study for some, a PhD for others.

Ben Brantley:
I don’t think going to graduate school for journalism is going to do a whole lot of good in the long run. People either can write or they can’t write. Some of the smartest writers I know never got college degrees.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
There are now degrees in arts journalism. I’m sure they have value, but I don’t think it’s a prerequisite to being a good critic.

Eric Grode:
I teach at Syracuse University as part of a one-year master’s program in cultural journalism. A lot of the students there are just out of college. That generation has no compunction about voicing its opinions thanks to social media. It’s a pre-professional program, and many of the skills we teach involved getting noticed and navigating the working world. I also try to instill in the students a sense of history and context, to give more depth to their opinions. We go over how important it is to back up your opinions. It’s not sufficient to just say that something’s great or that it sucks—the way it would be in a tweet. You need to point to concrete examples of how you came to that conclusion.

Linda Winer:
I don’t think you need academic training in the theater—although it certainly doesn’t hurt. I also don’t think you need to have worked in the theater—although that doesn’t hurt either. I know brilliant critics who have not been involved in the theater, and I know brilliant critics who have been involved in the theater. Likewise, I know dull critics who have been involved in the theater, and I know dull critics who have not been involved in the theater.

Peter Marks:
There is something essential about being a critic that has more to do with taste and an ability to communicate an experience in the theater. It goes beyond a knowledge base. I find that the people who are most useful to me as critics are the ones who can couch their experience in a lively, entertaining, and informed way.

Howard Shapiro:
The education that a theater critic should have is the education a person gets by sitting in an audience. I’m just an audience member with a great big mouth, but I’m an experienced audience member who can write well. I think I can put my great big mouth to sensible use.

Michael Dale:
Shortly after graduating college, I joined a papering organization that offered members free tickets to shows that needed to “dress the house.” You just paid a very cheap service charge. There was the occasional Broadway show, but it was mostly Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, mixed with classical concerts, dance events, opera, cabaret, jazz, performance art, or anything else that needed fannies in the seats. I would see shows three to five times a week, and made it a point to take a chance on things I knew nothing about. I was a member for about 15 years, and I think that kind of continual exposure to a variety of performing arts provided my education for being a critic.

Michael Musto:
I never went to journalism school. After sitting in on some graduate journalism classes at Columbia, I realized they were all about pretend press conferences and made-up articles. At that point, I had already been freelancing for real publications outside of campus, so I was one step ahead. After graduating from Columbia, there was no reason to pursue education anymore. I wanted to immerse myself in the real world and learn by doing. If a critic’s got a PhD and extraordinary intellect and 27 books under his or her belt, that’s fine, but it’s not necessary. There are probably some great critics in high school right now.

Alexis Soloski:
You need very little education if you have the talent. I’ve never read Tom Stoppard’s theater criticism, but I bet it was genius, and he didn’t go to college. What’s essential is having clear, intelligible, compelling prose. It’s helpful to be able to say whether a show melds two genres, or if it’s influenced by certain playwrights, but you can offer a very lively, sensitive, acute review that merely describes the work itself. I think I had the makings of a good critic when I was 19 years old, when I had read a lot less.

Helen Shaw:
We are locked into a kind of closed system—this industrial-educational complex. I don’t think I could point to a playwright working today who doesn’t have a college degree. But for years, the best playwrights didn’t have college degrees. The next theater critics might not have the education that I used to think of as being so crucial.

Robert Faires:
When somebody approaches me as an editor about writing theater reviews, I prefer it when that person has been exposed to a lot of different kinds of writing and thought, and has a natural curiosity based on those things. I’d like for that person to have spent a lot of time in the theater already, seeing not just the kind of shows that he or she personally enjoys, but all kinds of shows, because that’s how deep this person’s love of theater runs.

Robert Hurwitt:
Any theater critic who doesn’t know his or her Shakespeare is that much less of a critic. Same for the Greeks. Same for Molière. As rarely as the German or Italian classics are done in the United States, you should know them. You’ll want to know as much about American theater classics as you can. When you’re dealing with an experimental group, you’ll want to know the theory behind its practices.

Andy Propst:
At any given moment in time, a theater critic needs to become an expert on the subject at hand, on whatever a play may be about. In a realm in which physics can be used as a metaphor in an award-winning drama, you had better be able to wrap your head around what that piece of physics is.

David Rooney:
The key to being a readable critic is having a breadth of pop-cultural knowledge, and not being too head-in-the-sand about your specialized field. Of course, expertise in the area you’re covering is essential, but the reviews I really enjoy reading are by people who are able to tie what they’re reviewing into other things that are happening politically and socially—to television trends, movies, music, fashion, and all that.

Michael Riedel:
They need to read a lot, and I don’t mean just plays. I mean great books, great novels, great poems, great biographies, great history. I think it’s a mistake for a theater critic to be totally immersed in the theater—to only listen to show tunes and read plays.

John Simon:
You have to be a cultured person with many interests. You should know about the other arts because there is a relationship among the arts. If you know a lot about fiction, that could help your drama criticism. If you know a lot about music, that could help as far as musicals are concerned. If you know a lot of things generally, then you won’t be so easily impressed by certain things that are not very good. You’ll have higher expectations.

Gordon Cox:
It’s far more helpful to study theater than journalism. I didn’t go to school for journalism. I’ve never even taken a journalism class, but I did study theater and writing. I use that knowledge far more than the basics of journalism, which you can pick up as you go along.

David Cote:
You should have a general knowledge of theater history and practices—not just the history of the play and the musical and the development of Broadway, but of theater as an expressive form, and how it’s changed over the centuries. Most critics have a general knowledge of theater and of Shakespeare. But at the same time, you need to be versatile with your viewing apparatus. You should be able to shift from one genre to another—from big, dumb Broadway musicals to the avant-garde.

Robert Feldberg:
Theater is sort of an in-between. It’s not high art. It’s not low art. It’s in the middle. So the more you know about different stuff, the better prepared you are. I don’t think there’s one particular kind of background, or one major in college, that will set you up better than anything else.

Terry Teachout:
If you don’t know about more than just theater, everything you write will be provincial. It’s just going to be a fan’s notes, or the reactions of a knowledgeable professional who can’t connect to larger cross currents in culture.

Michael Schulman:
David Denby, who’s a film critic for the
New Yorker
, once said that his students often come in having a very strong sense of their critical axis (what kind of things they like and don’t like), but they haven’t studied language, which is the critic’s medium. You have to study writing. You have to know how to use words to describe what you’re seeing and what you’re reacting to.

MATT WINDMAN
: What kind of personality or attitude should a theater critic ideally have?

John Simon:
I don’t think there is a one-on-one relationship between what you are in life and what you are on the page. I wouldn’t be surprised if a very mild-mannered person was a very fierce critic, or if a very violent person was a weak critic.

Steven Suskin:
Whether you’re quiet and calm, or enthusiastic and excited, doesn’t matter. If you can write well, you can be a good critic.