The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (12 page)

Michael Musto:
Being funny is very important because people have this idea that theater is dry and boring. That’s what scared me as a kid when they took us on class trips to see shows. There’s a place for dry, intellectual theater critics, but there’s also a place for me, who’s kind of on the outskirts, looking in, and making my caustic little one-liners.

Alexis Soloski:
If there is an opportunity to be funny, I can be shameless. I’ve written some terrible puns, and I enjoy them very much.

David Cote:
It’s important for a critic to have a good sense of humor because the majority of what we see is rather crappy, or just numbingly mediocre. Also, there is an assumption that the critic is a witty person, and who doesn’t want to be witty? You need a certain arrogance and wit, so humor works.

Ben Brantley:
Your wit should never get in the way. I’ve recently been reading old Dorothy Parker reviews. They’re extremely funny, but they’re more about showcasing her wit. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of transparency with her. With some critics, you feel like you’re looking at the show through their words. With Dorothy Parker, all you see is her wit.

Michael Dale:
No matter what the play, Dorothy Parker’s reviews are all about her. I wouldn’t call it responsible criticism.

Michael Schulman:
Some are better at humor than others. I like to think I have a droll sense of humor. There’s a kind of
New Yorker
sensibility that I’ve internalized. A lot of people who go into writing enjoy using their voice on the page, and humor is a part of that.

Charles Isherwood:
I’m a big fan of humor in virtually all walks of life. At the same time, you don’t want to be cruel and mocking. There have been times when I’ve been accused of stepping over the line, but I can honestly say I’ve never written a line with the intention of hurting anyone’s feelings. It simply doesn’t enter into my thinking. I get a lot of flak from people objecting to the fact that I sometimes use humor in my reviews. Artists are deluding themselves if they think a sober, boring pan is going to be more comforting than a pan that tries to entertain the reader.

Howard Shapiro:
It’s especially important to be funny when you’re panning something. Elton John’s vampire musical
Lestat
comes to mind. I had a lot of fun with that one.

Don Aucoin:
Wit is a blessing in every form of writing. Even if you’re writing about something tremendously bleak like
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
, you can still insert some levity into the review. My reviews are the closest that most of my readers are going to get to a production, so I try to make the review not an approximation of the theater experience, but an enjoyable experience in and of itself, and wit is definitely a part of that. Of course, you don’t want to take cheap shots at the good-faith efforts of people making pennies for their work.

Elysa Gardner:
Critics, like playwrights, should be cautious of falling in love with their own sense of humor, and of saying things just to be cute or clever. I’m not out there doing shtick just to make a name for myself. Some movie critics do that.

Jesse Green:
I am a writer, and humor is a part of the arsenal. When I’m writing reviews, I apply all of the traits I would apply to anything else I write, be it a book, a novel, a memoir, or an essay. You’re instructing and entertaining the readers, just as you hope playwrights are. Even if it’s very serious, I like a play that has humor in it.

John Lahr:
Critics shouldn’t be funny at the expense of the performers. But if they’re amusing (and very few critics are), it’s a wonderful gift. I’m envious of Anthony Lane, who can be hilarious in print and still be so penetrating. Kenneth Tynan could also be hilarious and brilliant at the same time.

Peter Marks:
Being entertaining is vital. No one’s going to read your shit if it’s just a beautifully-crafted assessment. It’s also a great way to bond with a reader. When you can make them laugh, they’re going to want to read more of you. But there’s a difference between being funny and
trying
to be funny. Some of my
Times
reviews were uproariously nasty.

Matthew Murray:
Nice? Yes. Important? No. The most important thing is to accurately express and back up your opinion, so that the reader will have the most information you can possibly give them. Humor must come afterwards. In a lot of the current reviews I read, it seems like the writers twist and turn and waste dozens (if not hundreds) of words to get to places where they can be funny, and that I have no patience for. I want to know why a show is good or bad first. And if the review does that well, then it can be as funny as the writer can make it—but not before.

MATT WINDMAN
: To what extent does a critic’s personal background affect his or her writing?

Michael Dale:
To the same extent a playwright’s personal background affects his or her writing.

John Lahr:
You are what you write. You are a compendium of all your influences. Who you are as a person, your humanity, your ability to understand your life and yourself—all of that affects how you write and how you respond to a play.

Hilton Als:
All writing is personal. You are giving the world an idea of your own sensibilities.

Michael Portantiere:
People talk about objectivity on the part of a critic, but I don’t know how realistic a goal that is.

Chris Jones:
I’m a 50-year-old man, originally of British origin, who’s lived in Chicago for 30 years, but I try mightily not to reflect any particular worldview. I don’t think many critics will answer the question that way. They’ll say, “I am who I am, and my readers know who I am,” but I don’t think that way. There’s only one review that I write for this newspaper, and I try to make it as if I had no particular identity beyond than the search for excellence. I don’t write as who I am. For me, the goal is to not be of a particular group.

I don’t think it’s impossible for a male critic to review a play by a woman. I don’t think it’s impossible for a white critic to go to an African-American theater. If you continue down that road and under that line of thinking, you end up with an absurd bifurcation of the whole reviewing process. The critic’s job is to be an impartial expert on everything, and I try mightily to achieve that. Maybe it’s impossible to achieve, but that’s my aim.

Jesse Green:
I’m in favor of gender. I’m in favor of sexuality. I’m in favor of politics. I’m in favor of critics having different varieties of all of those, and of all that informing their writing and opinions. It’s healthy when there are different kinds of people seeing plays. Obviously, you can fight over it. You can say, “He’s a well-known conservative, and his paper is a well-known conservative paper, and that’s why he didn’t like the show that I liked.” That makes for good discussion, but you have to accept the fact that people don’t like the same things, and that’s true among the critics, too.

Richard Ouzounian:
How you grew up, and the environment you grew up in, affects you very strongly. I grew up in a rough neighborhood in Queens. Then I went to an integrated university, rode the subway every day, and lived through the race riots in New York. I grew up with a much broader ethnic and social palate than a lot of my colleagues, who grew up in small towns where everything was incredibly white and proper and benign.

Robert Faires:
There are parts of my background I can’t escape, and there are also parts of my background that I treasure. I grew up in Texas, far from New York. That’s going to have an influence on the way I perceive shows that come from New York to this part of the country, and it affects how I perceive shows that are homegrown here, too. Also, I’m a male who grew up in an era when males were running the theater and shaping what the conversation in the theater was about. That’s still a part of who I am, although I feel lucky to have also experienced the tremendous expansion of the theater to cover so many more voices.

Leonard Jacobs:
It’s strange that the
New York Times
is comfortable having two middle-aged gay men as their top two critics. Its readership is not just middle-aged gay men. Its readership is middle-aged gay men and everybody else. A lot of people had a problem with Margo Jefferson when she was the number two theater critic at the
Times
, but at least you had another point of view with her. It was interesting to have an African-American woman step up and say whatever. There should be more female critics. There should be more critics of color. There should be younger critics and older critics.

Michael Musto:
Depending on their gender and age, certain critics will get crushes on certain actors. A lot of times, the political leaning of the critic will make a difference in whether they like or loath the newest political drama. The more you acknowledge about yourself, the more open you are to review other people’s work. From the beginning, I was out about myself. That kind of frees me from any hypocrisy in writing about other people.

Don Aucoin:
When I see a play like David Lindsay-Abaire’s
Good People
, I immediately pick up on the fact that it has characters that you don’t see enough on contemporary stages: people on the economic margins. That resonates with me in a way that I think has something to do with the blue-collar jobs I had earlier in my life. I spent two years working on the General Motors assembly line, which is not the usual path for a college graduate, but it was an endlessly important experience for me, and one that still reverberates in my writing.

Frank Rizzo:
I would be eager to look at reviews from other perspectives, whether based on gender, race, or geography. There’s a play called
Sixteen Wounded
about a Palestinian-Israeli relationship, and I would have loved to have seen both an Israeli critic and a Palestinian critic review that show—as long as both are open, fair, and good writers.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
What we write reflects who we are, where we come from, our education, and our experiences. To me, that is reflected very obviously in how critics treat plays dealing with women-centric subject matter. I’m not saying there is some kind of systematized sexism, but it’s very obvious that there’s a kind of deafness to what some specific voices are saying.

Charles Isherwood:
Except in extraordinary circumstances, some particular experience from your past is not going to heavily affect your response to a play. Inevitably, on a subliminal level, I’m sure it does. But if you’re conscious of any potential dangers, you can guard yourself against that kind of thing. The
Times
is very vigilant about not allowing any political biases to inform your writing.

David Cote:
You need to be honest in terms of your humanity. You need to be aware that certain buttons—political, ideological, and emotional—will be pushed at certain plays. You need to be aware of all possible perspectives and put your perspective on hold, if you can, or at least wrestle with your perspective. For example, if you have a reaction to a play that stems from a political view. I think some of my colleagues are conservative. I can’t say I have political discussions with them, but I feel as though politics do color their reaction to certain things. If you see a play that is antiwar and you are conservative, and you think that war is not such a bad thing for big business or whatever, then I guess you might not like the play. As a liberal, I wish I saw more plays that expressed conservative views.

Michael Riedel:
I hate pious liberal plays. I find them tedious and predictable. By the same token, just because a play takes a right-wing point of view doesn’t mean I’m going to like it, especially if it’s badly written. On the whole, since the theater tends to be a very liberal place, everybody has the same opinion, and that’s not very interesting. It’s refreshing to see a writer like Jonathan Reynolds, who made you think another way about abortion in his play
Girls in Trouble
. It’s always about a woman’s right to choose. But from his character’s point of view, it was, “I’m a selfish, piggish man, and I knocked you up, and I want you to have an abortion because I don’t want to have any responsibility for you or the kid.”

Alexis Soloski:
How I respond to something is always through the filter of my knowledge and experience. I don’t think it’s possible to efface the personal from the work, and I don’t want to. When I started working at the
Voice
, I was a 21-year-old female from Southern California, and I’m pretty sure my writing suggested that. I feel like every play this season is about real estate, and that’s probably because I’m currently looking for a two-bedroom apartment. My preoccupations make their way into my writing. That doesn’t meant I’ll go see
Henry V
when I’m pregnant and think it’s all about pregnancy, but I am often conscious of seeing works of art through my very personal lens, and sometimes I indulge in that.

David Sheward:
I’m gay, but I’m not going to give every gay playwright a pass just because of that. For example, I was very disappointed with
Mothers and Sons
, Terrence McNally’s recent drama about an older woman meeting the former lover of her son, who had died of AIDS years earlier. I’m also left-leaning, but I think it’s important that a play isn’t just a news report, and that its point of view is fully fleshed out.

Elysa Gardner:
I don’t have to agree with every notion that’s being proposed or seems to inform a work in order to enjoy it. I’ve found myself attracted to things that are less than politically correct.

Helen Shaw:
Watching plays as a woman, I feel like I see things that someone who isn’t a woman, or who doesn’t identify as a woman, wouldn’t.

Jeremy Gerard:
I grew up in a liberal Jewish home. I know that affects my worldview, and to pretend otherwise is silly.

Peter Filichia:
At the risk of being offensive to a lot of people, I think it’s very important to have a heterosexual male critic representing the public. I’m not saying that someone has to be a heterosexual in order to be a good critic. However, I do think the impression of musical theater being a gay art form has been terribly injurious. It’s become something that husbands have been reluctant to go to because they don’t want to be associated with the gay element. Like it or not, there are plenty of husbands who feel that way. I’m 68 years old. And when I was a kid, all through high school, nobody ever accused me of being gay because I was interested in musicals. I was thought of as being very high class because I liked this adult art form.