The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (28 page)

Christine Dolen:
It’s exciting if a piece is having its world premiere at a theater in your area. If the show lives on, your work will become part of the archives. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to see. It can be great, or it can be awful, and that’s exciting. New plays and musicals still have room for improvement when they get their first productions. You can be a little more pointed in your comments about what works and what doesn’t work because that can help the creators. If it’s premiering as part of the National New Play Network, that can factor into what the creators do during the show’s second or third production. It’s not my function to be a dramaturg, but I think I can make some helpful observations.

Frank Rizzo:
There’s a difference between covering the world premiere of a brand-new show and the umpteenth revival of
Hedda Gabler
. I’m blessed to be able to cover so much new work in Connecticut and New England. The greatest joy of my life is to be among the first to write about something that is terrific. One of the first reviews I wrote for
Variety
was the world premiere of
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
in the Berkshires. It was done in a junior high school gym, and I just let loose with a rave. It was a very thoughtful rave, but a rave nonetheless, essentially saying, “This is terrific, and here is why it’s terrific.” It’s great to be part of the process of discovering new work and feel like you’re helping to build and shape a show. Whether they take your advice or not is up to whoever is producing or writing the show.

Charles Isherwood:
New plays can be very hard to judge. Some plays reveal themselves over time and ferment in your mind. They offer more food for thought than you might think at first blush. When I saw Suzan-Lori Parks’s drama
Topdog/Underdog
Off Broadway, I found serious fault with it. I felt like it was overwritten and didn’t really work well onstage. But when it moved to Broadway, I saw a lot more in the play. Sometimes you’re a little bit chagrined that you didn’t find that the first time. Everyone will have that experience sometime in their career. Critics will respond strongly, whether in a negative or positive way, to a play, and they’ll come back to it later on and think, Oh boy, I got that one wrong. I remember a critic admitting he called a Sarah Kane play wrong way back, when he was repulsed by it, and now he sees that it has serious integrity.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you go about evaluating a new play or musical?

John Simon:
I respond as much as I possibly can intellectually and emotionally. I pay as much attention as I can. And then I write.

Charles Isherwood:
You respond to the work onstage. I don’t think it’s fair to include any sort of prejudgment based on a writer’s prior work in your assessment of the new work. It’s inevitable that you’re going to, and sometimes that works in a playwright’s favor. If you don’t happen to have liked a playwright’s previous work, and you finally come upon a play that you do like, you might be more enthusiastic.

Ben Brantley:
Is it consistent on its own terms? You first judge a play by what it aspires to do, and how much it adheres to its own aspirations and follows them through. That’s rarer than you think. I give anything points for doing what it sets out to do with some clarity and accessibility. Then you start to measure by degree of ambition. How high has the creator set the bar?

David Sheward:
I look for credibility on the piece’s own terms. In other words, it can be fantastic and absurd, but it has to be consistent within itself and in its own world.

John Lahr:
Anyone who talks about standards is a fool. There is no agreed-upon standard. A standard is an aesthetic or a taste that has evolved over time. That’s all it is. John Simon is always going on about his standards. But if you look at the shows he liked and those he didn’t like, you’ll find that his standards tend to overlook major work and praise a lot of terrible shows. Such are his standards.

Adam Feldman:
I don’t have a checklist. I don’t believe in that kind of approach. If I bring in a set of criteria, I’m not doing my job. I try to look at what is being done in the show and how well it’s being done. It’s very different from show to show. A big, glitzy, come-have-a-good-time kind of show is trying to do something very different from a nonlinear, downtown, experimental, brainy, Off Off Broadway show.

Alexis Soloski:
I like the words to sound like words that the people in the play could indeed speak.

David Cote:
The language is the first thing I notice. If it’s a strongly visual play or a sound-intensive play, I might notice that first. But generally, you are listening to the dialogue. You are listening to how people speak and who these people are. In terms of standards, you have to see what world it’s trying to build around you. Is it realistic? Are they sitting in a coffee shop, speaking lines you can imagine people say to each other? If it’s more stylized, if they use highly poetic language, that’s exciting. You see how it plays out. Even if a play is dealing with family secrets in a realistic setting, that can still be incredibly gripping and revelatory. On the other hand, there are countless other dysfunctional family dramas that are boring, and I hate watching them.

Steven Suskin:
I want to be excited by the material. When I go to the theater, there’s nothing I like more than to be surprised and delighted by something unexpected.

Don Aucoin:
First and foremost, I look for quality. Second, I look for originality. Related to that, I ask whether it expands any boundaries. I also look for evidence of good faith or bad faith. I recently wrote a scathing review of the Queen jukebox musical
We Will Rock You
because it seemed like its only intent was to make the cash register ring. That sort of thing angers me because it’s taking up cultural space that could be devoted to other work.

Zachary Stewart:
I begin every review by asking myself two questions: (1) What did I see/hear/smell/touch/taste? (2) How does it make me feel? Then I attempt to go about answering how the artist did that and why it is significant (if it is at all). This last part is the most challenging, but also the most important part. No one cares about your feelings, so you have to wrap them in bacon to make them interesting for the readers.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
It’s not like I have a laundry list of things I’m looking for, but it has to say something in a way that keeps me engaged and surprises me. It has to have a point of view. And there has to be a certain kind of urgency. There’s got to be something that the playwright is dying to say. I have very little patience with all those super nice and safe plays. I call them “couch plays” because there’s always a couch in the middle of the stage.

Frank Rizzo:
I’m a blank slate. I want the playwright to take me where he or she wants to go.

Elysa Gardner:
There are plays I’ve been impressed with but didn’t love. There have also been plays I loved where I was willing to overlook a lot of flaws. That goes for musicals as well. It can be greater than or less than the sum of its parts. It is the sum, the feeling, the impression that you walk away with. I look for a visceral connection. If something is trying really hard to impress me, I get a little put off by that. In fact, that’s my biggest problem with a lot of shows: this self-conscious cleverness, where you feel like the writer is saying, “Get it?” And I just want to say, “I get it. Stop! Engage me emotionally.” That’s what I look for because that’s the hardest thing to do: risk sentimentality and achieve something that transcends it. That, to me, is the highest achievement for an artist.

Helen Shaw:
I look for effectiveness, truthfulness, ambition, ferocity, technique, lyricism, control of image, avoidance of cliché, complexity of thinking—but you don’t walk in with a set of criteria. You walk in with an alert, rested, open brain. In your criticism, you’re just reflecting on what you saw.

Howard Shapiro:
The standards have to change depending on the show. I expect one thing on Broadway, and I expect a completely different thing from a theater company with a budget of $40,000, but I expect them both to work within the confines of what they’re doing. If I go to the Fringe Festival, I don’t expect the kind of production that I’m going to get from Scott Rudin on Broadway. On the other hand, if I go to a Scott Rudin production, I expect it to be really polished. Whatever it is, I expect it to work, and I should be able to point out why it does or doesn’t work.

Michael Portantiere:
There is good storytelling, and there is bad storytelling. There are certain things that go into that, but it’s hard to pinpoint by just making general statements. I can see a specific show and then tell you why I think the storytelling is good or not. Consistency of the characters, consistency of tone, avoidance of vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake: those all make for good theater.

Michael Schulman:
Everything belongs to a genre. I try to determine what genre a playwright is working in, or responding to, or trying to transcend or undermine. Subversiveness always appeals to me, whether it’s aesthetic or political subversiveness. What bothers me most is laziness and using clichés.

Richard Ouzounian:
I try to determine what the play is trying to do, and whether it succeeds at what it’s trying to do on its own terms. I don’t ask, “Is this the kind of play I would have written?” or “Is it the kind of play I enjoy?” Instead, I ask, “What is it trying to do, and how well does it do that?”

Roma Torre:
My criteria for determining what’s good or not is basically four-fold. A: Did it accomplish what the creators set out to achieve? B: Did it make me feel something? C: Did it enlighten me at all? D: Was I entertained? If you have three out of those four, I would say it’s a successful piece of work.

Perez Hilton:
I like razzle-dazzle. That doesn’t always mean big sets and production values and all that jazz. A show like
Once
has lots of razzle-dazzle, though some could consider it intimate by Broadway standards.
Rocky
had a lot of razzle-dazzle. It entertained me, even if the music was uninspired. I love being excited. There is nothing worse than a by-the-books musical, like the most recent Broadway revival of
Annie
.

Marilyn Stasio:
What is it about? What is the playwright after? What is he trying to say? What are we supposed to see? What’s the theme? What’s the point? It’s important to this writer, so it’s important that I identify it and figure it out. I’m always hoping to find something of real value. I hope that the playwright is writing something of importance about a significant subject, and that he or she is doing it in an original way. Isn’t that what we hope every time we go to the theater?

Michael Riedel:
I like them to be good. You know: good score, good script, good acting. I don’t want them to be preachy, boring, or self-important. I shouldn’t fall asleep 10 minutes into it. Fundamentally, it has to be engaging. It can be an engaging drama, an engaging comedy, an engaging thriller. It’s got to create a world that you want to enter. It’s got to have characters you want to follow.

Peter Marks:
I look for interesting things I’ve never heard before. I’m looking for a unique way of telling a story. I’m looking for truth expressed in a novel way. I look at the theme of the play and whether it’s topical, or if it reveals a topic in a new way. I look at whether a character has been created that I identify with in some way. I look for freshness. Considering how so many plays are muddled, clarity, in and of itself, can be a tremendous selling point.

Ronni Reich:
The clarity of the story. The integrity of the structure. How things flow. How cohesive everything is. How well-drawn the characters are. The tone of the play. How the production fits with the text. How the language is used. Whether it makes for a compelling whole. I fully recognize that a lot of these areas, if not all of them, are subjective.

Terry Teachout:
I try to come clean when the lights go down. My head empties out, and I’m present for the next two and a half hours and completely receptive. I ask myself, What is the playwright trying to do? Then I ask, Why is the playwright doing this? Above all, I want to experience it in the same way the audience does. At some point in the evening, my feelings come into focus. Moss Hart said that during the first 15 minutes, an audience is receptive and open and expecting to have a good time. After that, the door closes, and they’re either with it or not. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times, where suddenly the door shuts and the audience decides it is not having a good time.

I seldom leave a show unsure of what I’ve seen. Generally, when I get home, I have a clear sense of how I felt about what I saw. But if I don’t have a clear sense of what I’ve seen, that too is a statement on the work. As far as standards go, the yard stick is whether I had a good time with the work—with good being defined very broadly. Was I never bored? Was I thrilled? Did I cry? Did I think about it after the fact? I can then start asking other questions and dissecting craft.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you evaluate a piece of avant-garde or experimental theater?

Charles Isherwood:
Some of the hardest theater to write about is non-narrative. You have to find other ways of approaching it. You can talk about it more as an experience. It’s good for a writer to have to stretch and see different kinds of theater. Certain critics respond to certain artists more than others. Ben Brantley is a huge fan of Richard Foreman. It’s probably better to read Ben’s review of a Richard Foreman show than to actually see it.

Note: Avant-garde writer-director-auteur Richard Foreman founded and ran the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village from 1968 to 2010. I attended about a dozen of his chaotic, performance art-style productions—none of which I understood or enjoyed. However, I am especially thankful to Mr. Foreman because one day in 2004, having just seen a show of his the night before, I pitched an interview with him to an editor I had just met—and that turned out to be my very first article in
amNewYork
. A few months later, I called up that same editor and inquired about becoming a summer intern at the paper.