The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (15 page)

Andy Propst:
Let’s say you’re a critic in a theater community where there are only seven professional theaters, and you’re also a dramaturg at one of those theaters. If you’re reviewing shows at the other six theaters and dismissing everything, it will look like you have an agenda. No critic should have a hidden agenda. Their writing should never be suspect.

Christine Dolen:
I know that a lot of critics do both. But because of my background in daily newspaper journalism, I’m quite opposed to it. You walk on one side of the line or the other. You don’t straddle. Whether or not there’s anything questionable about doing both, it certainly looks questionable.

Leonard Jacobs:
I think a critic can and should do professional work in the theater—even if they aren’t very good at it. Peter Brook said in
The Empty Space
that a critic should try “putting his hands on the medium and attempting to work it himself.” If you’ve never acted, what right do you have to talk about someone else’s acting? Have you ever tried to write dialogue and create a character? Do you know what it’s like to direct and move actors around a stage? If you’ve never done any of that, you can still render a judgment. You can still say whether you liked something. You can even try to say why. But to me, that makes the critic less educated and less legitimate.

Howard Shapiro:
I understand why other critics might want to, but I couldn’t do it. I want to be an audience member, like the people sitting right beside me. I think being an audience member is the way for me to give the most honest viewpoints. I even have trouble being on panels. If I’m reviewing something and they want me to do a talkback, I say no because that’s getting too close.

Scott Brown:
Not only is it possible, it can work out quite well. I don’t think it’s a requirement for being a critic, but it does produce a different kind of criticism that is based on a different perspective. Those critics have a more process-based approach to what they’re seeing. It’s not that they’re going to be categorically easier on a performance, but there’s perhaps more of an understanding of how the performance arrived there—that what we’re seeing is not just something that just strangely formed in the head of Zeus.

Some of the harshest critics are other performers, who can be absolutely brutal. Part of that is because they understand the process. It produces a certain kind of insight that is useful. That’s not to say you need to know exactly how something was made. In the end, it’s a critic’s responsibility to evaluate the final product, and it doesn’t matter if the critic is familiar with the production process or not.

Michael Portantiere:
If a theater critic writes a play and a specific actor stars in it, it would be a little dicey if the theater critic later reviewed another play with the same actor in it.

Linda Winer:
I can’t do both. I have emotional conflicts of interest. I don’t really have friends in the theater. For me, there is a drawbridge up over the moat. I learned this about myself in Chicago, back when I was a baby critic. I was writing about people I knew. We all lived in the same neighborhood and went to similar schools. I found that if I can see the face of the artist I’m writing about over the keyboard, I’m in trouble. I would second guess myself. I’d wonder, Am I being nicer to this person because I like him? Am I being tougher on this person than is fair because I want to prove to myself that it’s not because I like him? There are layers and layers of that. Because there are so many intangibles, I prefer to simplify the situation as much as I can.

There are people who need to work in the theater—not just financially, but emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually. That’s great if they can do it, but I can’t. It may have something to do with being a woman who was, you know, raised to please. I struggle with writing about people that I care about. What we say is not polite to society. We’re writing things that affect livelihoods and senses of security and senses of self.

John Lahr:
Doing professional work in the theater makes you completely different as a critic. If you have actually written a play or a joke, if you’ve had that experience, it changes the language that you use. It changes how you deal with artistic events because then you understand how much is invested in an endeavor and what it means. A lot of the people dishing it out haven’t done it. The critics who are absolutely, outrageously mean are anorexic critics. They can eat, but they can’t swallow. Those critics have never made anything. They couldn’t make anything and still write that way.

Marilyn Stasio:
If a critic wants to write a play in his or her spare time, good luck with that. But if you’re a paid reviewer writing for a commercial publication, you cannot pursue producers in order to get your play produced. It’s not ethical. You really can’t participate in the creative process if it means collaborating with people whose work you might review. My work as a dramaturg was different. It was done more in a teaching capacity. For the most part, I advised young writers. I had no trouble with that.

Hilton Als:
It’s important to take risks of your own. Write your own plays. Dramaturg some productions.

Jason Zinoman:
To be honest, it’s a bad idea. I have a stronger position on this than most people. Critical independence is tremendously important, and we shouldn’t lose sight of it. The argument for doing work in the theater is that you can gain knowledge about the artistic process. I would argue that you can gain some of that knowledge without sacrificing your independence by being a reporter. Theater criticism is hard. It’s like how being an actor or a director is hard. And if you want to be good at it, you need to give it your full attention. It’s not as easy as just giving your opinion on a few things. A lot of people in the theater don’t realize that.

David Cote:
I’m working on a play right now, as well as several opera libretti. It’s delicate because it’s not like I’m asking New York producers to put on my play. I have a producer, the Gingold Theatrical Group, which commissioned the play and is developing it for a production someday. Still, I don’t want to be put in a situation where I owe something to producers. Luckily, there’s no money to be made from it. How many American playwrights are living off their playwriting? I’m simply hoping that someday somebody will want to produce it.

Helen Shaw:
I stumbled into dramaturgy. My first job in New York was working on a production of Brecht’s
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
with Al Pacino, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, and Paul Giamatti. More recently, I was the dramaturg on the production of
The Tempest
that was done by the Public Theater in Central Park with 200 people. I’ll never be able to review anything directed by Lear deBessonet because I worked with her on
The Tempest
. I also feel very uncomfortable reviewing anything at the Public Theater. I think I have to let the statute of limitations expire before I can start writing about the Public Theater critically again. That’s the cost of doing business.

Peter Filichia:
Years ago, I was asked to play the Narrator and the Mysterious Man in a benefit reading of
Into the Woods
for a theater company. I thought we’d just rehearse the day before, but we ended up rehearsing for a month. I was in way over my head. In any event, it turned out to be a way of seeing how much time, energy, and talent goes into these things, all of which we blithely don’t take into consideration.

Robert Faires:
Since I started writing theater criticism, I’ve walked the line of being a theater critic while remaining a practicing theater artist. At the beginning, I wrote for an alternative paper that was fine with me continuing to act and direct at the same time. Then I married an actress, so I am deeply inside of the community that I cover as a critic. Every day, I face the question of whether my criticism is on a solid ethical ground. Are my friendships and relationships with the people I’ve worked with affecting what I have to say as a critic? I take that very seriously. It’s something that I wrestle with and never take for granted. When I, as an editor, bring on a new writer, the first conversation we have is about the ethics of this profession, particularly in a city where the lines between the artists and the people who write about the artists are very porous.

Jesse Green:
I personally have to figure out how to deal with the fact that I was involved in the theater at a professional level at the beginning of my career. I have lots of friends in the theater, some of whom are now very prominent, and that’s an issue. But all things considered, I would rather see critics have experience in their field to at least some extent than sit above it all in a tower, not really knowing anything about the work they cover, or the lives of the people who make it.

If (God forbid) my spouse was an actor and got cast in a show, I would not write about that show. But if a friendly acquaintance of mine was in a show, unless I felt that the acquaintanceship prohibited me from being honest, I’d still write about it. I once heard from somebody at the
Times
that to determine whether a relationship is too close and would create (or give the appearance of creating) a conflict of interest, you should use this test: Do you know the names of the person’s children? If you do, then the relationship is too close. I think that notion can be debated, especially since a lot of people in the theater don’t have children.

Peter Marks:
It’s a tough thing to navigate, but I see no reason why a critic can’t write a play. I’ve tried my hand at playwriting, and I still have plays in my head that I’d like to work on.

Terry Teachout:
Working as a playwright has made me a better theater critic. It has taught me things I couldn’t learn any other way. If you’re asking whether it’s getting in the way of doing my job as a critic, the answer is no. Occasionally, there are shows that I can’t cover because I’ve worked with someone, but that’s only happened four or five times. Beyond that, it hasn’t made any difference. When it became clear I that my writing was going to be produced professionally, I had to sit down with my editors to figure out how to approach this in terms of a conflicts policy. Because I’m straight with them, we haven’t run into any problems, and I don’t think that we will.

MATT WINDMAN
: Is the critic part of the theater community?

John Simon:
This question comes up fairly often. Frankly, it means nothing to me. It’s as if you were to ask me whether it makes a difference if a critic takes a daily aspirin or not. Community is a rather suspect term. People who have the same kind of profession, or who live in the same part of town, may be part of a community. I guess anyone who belongs to the Tea Party—God help them, or God help us—may be part of a ghastly community. The term community may apply to theater in some sense. But in terms of thinking about the theater, it has nothing to do with it.

Matthew Murray:
Theater is typically centered around the community in which it’s created—whether that’s New York, Chicago, Seattle, or any other place—and the critic is a part of that community in a way that film critics aren’t necessarily.

Michael Dale:
I think that’s a question for actors, playwrights, directors, and other theater artists to answer.

Ben Brantley:
I can only speak for myself, but I’m very much outside of it. I don’t hang out with theater people. It’s just not my world.

Alexis Soloski:
I like to think we’re all part of the same community and working towards the same goals. I don’t think of myself as an artist, and I leave the art up to them. But during awards season, I do feel like we can be part of the larger community. The
Village Voice
sponsors the Obie Awards, and that’s what they are meant to celebrate: the surprising and confounding Off-Broadway and Off Off Broadway theater. I also find it nice to put on a dress and heels and lipstick once a year.

Chris Jones:
Outside of it. The theater critic’s primary responsibility is to the paying customer and the future of the art.

Christine Dolen:
The critic should never be part of the theater community. Once a critic starts forming friendships, whether or not they genuinely compromise his or her ability to be effective, it certainly looks that way. That being said, somebody like myself who’s worked in a region for a long time gets to know people. That can be productive because it helps with reporting. Still, it’s a slippery slope when critics socialize with the people they’re writing about.

Frank Rizzo:
I think the critic is—and should be—part of the theater community. I just attended a fiftieth-anniversary gala at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. The first thing they created after the National Playwrights Conference was the National Critics Institute. They believed that the critic is part of the artistic process, and that there’s a contribution from theater criticism. I grew up outside of Boston, and I couldn’t wait to read the reviews of the latest out-of-town tryout from Elliot Norton, the “Dean of American Theatre Critics,” and Kevin Kelly, who was acerbic and kind of mean but very smart. They were part of the process. They didn’t just give a thumbs up-thumbs down review. They wrote as if they were part of the process of shaping the show as it moved forward to Broadway.

David Cote:
They are outside of it. They are not involved in the creative process—actively at least. They are on the periphery of it. They are lay people who drop in for a short period of time. They are like unexpected guests who have very little idea how the party came together.

Helen Shaw:
I think they are part of the theater community. You would have to be very naïve to believe that the things you write won’t hurt people, and that they won’t be mad at you. They will be. They will be legitimately mad at you—and that’s profoundly their right. You’re like the friend who tells everybody that their haircut looks bad. That friend is not too popular. Whether we like it or not, there is some kind of circulatory link. When the criticism is better, the theater is better. And when the theater is better, the criticism is better. Being part of the theater community does not mean blind boosterism, but it does mean thinking about and acknowledging everything that goes into making the work that we are seeing.