The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (31 page)

What’s very important are pure aesthetics. A show has to look good. I like directors who are aware of the spatial relationship on the stage and play with that. Very often, American directors are terrible at that, and have no eye for spatial composition. That’s very important because the director controls the audience’s attention. They have to direct us. We have to be total puppets in the director’s hands. It’s not just about putting a bunch of people onstage and blocking them. They have to completely control us. The directors that I admire are the ones that completely control both our gaze and our thought process.

When Ingmar Bergman did a show, he never wanted to have surtitles. He insisted on having simultaneous translations into English. You’d get those headphones with a person speaking the translation in your ear from the Swedish in monotone, without any inflections. Bergman didn’t want us to look at surtitles. He wanted to control the audience’s gaze the entire time, so the lesser evil for him was the headphones.

Howard Shapiro:
Pacing is important. I think of a director as the conductor of a train. The director is moving something at the speed that he sees fit. The director also holds the keys to interpretation. A performance may be wonderful, but the interpretation, the way the story’s going to be told, has to be approved by the director.

John Simon:
What you want is for the play come as alive as it possibly can, by whatever means. In some cases, it means enabling the actors to come across as human beings. In other cases, when it’s something like
Macbeth
, it’s getting the best kind of diction out of the actors, the best kind of movement, the most elevated style. In comedy, it can mean helping the actors get the most possible laughs. In tragedy, it might be getting the most possible tears—not actual tears, but a kind of mental tears. It’s doing the utmost for to keep the play alive.

It also means not losing the sympathy of the actors whom you’re directing. The demanding, arrogant, dictatorial director doesn’t really care about how the actors feel about him or her. That’s not a good thing. Alfred Hitchcock didn’t give a damn about what actors thought of him, but it truly works better if it’s a happy family.

Michael Musto:
I look for the vision of the director, and whether it’s an appropriate way to interpret the material, like if some new light was brought to familiar material, but not in a way that just arbitrarily reimagines it. I feel like too many critics automatically applaud anything that’s reimagined.

Michael Schulman:
Critics often say things like “ably-directed” or “well-directed” or “capably-directed,” but what does that mean? Sometimes direction is an invisible art. I would say that the way to analyze whether a director is successful is to determine whether something coheres—whether there is stylistic coherence. Are all of the actors in the same play?

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
The director has the job of keeping and guiding our attention. I feel like the director is directing the audience. They’re directing where our attention goes, like whether our attention should be on the set, or the performances, or something outside the theater that we need to be thinking about.

Roma Torre:
Did I notice the direction? If I noticed the direction, then it didn’t work. As soon as I start fidgeting in my seat, I’m aware of the direction. If I can sit through a play without looking at my watch, looking around, thinking about where I am, or losing interest in the thing, then I know the direction worked. But there’s a caveat to all that. Some shows feature bravura direction that does stand out, but in a way that enhances the experience. I’m thinking of shows like
Once
,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
and
Peter and the Starcatcher
.

Steven Suskin:
I don’t look for anything from direction. I think that a good director is invisible. If you’re paying attention to what the director does, you’re missing the show. If all the elements—the text, the performances, the design—work exceptionally well, then credit the director.

Adam Feldman:
I look for smart choices. It’s certainly easier when you’re watching a revival because you have something to compare the production to, so the director’s choices—in the physical staging, the character relationships, and the dynamics and shape of the play—are easier to evaluate. In comparing the roles of the director and actor, I have a rule of thumb: If the actor’s choice is wrong (if the actor is doing a good job in communicating an interpretation, but the interpretation itself is misguided), then it’s the director’s fault. On the other hand, if the choice or interpretation is right but the actor isn’t pulling it off, then it’s the actor’s fault.

John Lahr:
What you’re looking for is innovation, energy, and critical intelligence. There’s such a difference when you see a play directed by someone like Mike Nichols. Whether it’s a comedy or a drama, there’s a sharpness to the decisions that the actors make moment to moment, and in the way they interact. You know you’re in the presence of a very intelligent guy. The same goes for someone like Michael Mayer or George C. Wolfe. You can see it. You’re looking at a kind of geometry.

Matthew Murray:
What is the relationship of the staging to the script? Is it in harmony with it, or is something off? Does it seem like the director is trying to fix the script or make the director the star, or is the director truly trying to tell the story of the script in the best way possible? Are all the various elements of the show of a single, cohesive piece? Are the actors all doing the same show? If not, why aren’t they? It’s almost never because there’s something wrong with the actors.

In some cases, it’s really easy to see what the director imposes on the piece. Take a look at the musical stagings of John Doyle, and you’ll see a director who is dictatorial in assuring that everything molds to his vision—regardless of whether or not it’s appropriate for the score and libretto. Almost no one else working today is that easy. But with time, experience, and exposure to lots of work, you can get to the point where you can generally discern where the director’s responsibility ends and the other contributors’ responsibility begins.

Marilyn Stasio:
The director has so many things to do. They’re responsible for everything. For example, the Broadway production of the musical
Violet
had a terrible set. You can blame the set designer for that, but I blame the director because the director let that happen. Everything is the director’s job. It’s a hell of a job.

Peter Marks:
First of all, I look at the visual sense. Some directors are very good visually. When I see a production of theirs, I know they’re going to have a really interesting visual concept.

Ronni Reich:
I pay attention to the overall effectiveness of a production: whether the pacing feels right, whether the characterizations are convincing, whether the styles in which the actors portray the characters are a part of a cohesive whole. If it’s a revival, I consider whether the liberties that have been taken make sense or add something fresh or vital to the production. What kind of creativity or imagination are we seeing from this director? Do the performers seem inspired?

Terry Teachout:
If the work itself is good, I want the director to serve the work and not get in the way of it. There are a lot of different ways to serve the work. I think that David Cromer’s great genius—and I use that word very deliberately—is that his productions are transparent. They come through clearly, yet they have a poetic and personal stamp that’s very unusual. Interventional directors can be exciting, and I’m always willing to like the show that I’m seeing rather than see another show. But all things being equal, I prefer the transparent director to the interventional director.

Thom Geier:
Bad direction stands out more easily. But if you are enjoying something and loving the pace of it, you can assume that the director had a hand in honing it into a clockwork production. If something is lethargic and slow, and if all the actors are lined up like elementary school children at a pageant and being shuffled about in the most awkward way, you can probably assume that the director did not effectively block it.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you evaluate design elements like scenery, costumes, and lighting?

Alexis Soloski:
It’s all about achieving the world that the playwright and the director dream up.

Michael Dale:
I’ll almost always give a description of the set because the visual usually gives the quickest indication of what the playwright and director have in mind. The other design elements (and I’d include orchestrations here) get a mention if they stand out in a way that interprets the material.

Zachary Stewart:
Every design element is a deliberate choice. Does it further the story the playwright is telling? Does it add to the mood the director is fostering? Unlike acting, this can be achieved through tangible examples of physical craft.

Charles Isherwood:
I don’t write a lot about the technical aspects of a show. You try to describe the lighting, the sets, and the costumes in pretty straightforward terms. Hopefully, you can make an intelligent comment on how they add to the effectiveness of the play.

Chris Jones:
Design is very interesting because it varies more than anything else. It’s the most driven by budgetary concerns and physical concerns. I look for revealing, multilayered designs that keep revealing more over the course of the evening. I was at a play the other day that had a simple design. It was set in an elementary school classroom. At the end of the show I didn’t leave. I just looked again at the set because I was seeing things in the design that were explications of things in the play that I missed. You know the Rococo idea of a painting that’s in motion constantly? I think the best designs, even the ones that don’t move at all, are constantly in motion and revealing things about the play. They can be very simple and still do that.

Elysa Gardner:
If you’re reviewing a show that is essentially a spectacle, you have to talk about the sets and costumes. But if you’re reviewing a production of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and you only have 450 words, you’re not going to want to spend an awful lot of time talking about the costumes and scenery, although they could be relevant.

Frank Scheck:
If something strikes you in a particular way, you should acknowledge it, but you shouldn’t pretend to be an expert either. My knowledge of design is essentially that of a layperson. I don’t have technical knowledge in any of those fields.

Terry Teachout:
They’re relevant when they’re salient. They should be mentioned when they stand out, but there are productions in which everything comes together into such an organic whole that you really can’t tease the elements apart, especially with lighting. This is particularly true of naturalistic drama. I find that most critics don’t write often enough, or well enough, about incidental music. They tend not to notice how lighting contributes to the effect of a performance. Scenery is the easiest to write about, though critics often make the mistake of assuming that the responsibilities of the director and the set designer are separate. That’s usually not the way it works.

Thom Geier:
If the design calls attention to itself, it had better serve the overall function and message of the production. It does not need to call attention to itself in order to be effective.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you determine who from a production deserves praise or blame?

Chris Jones:
One of the hardest critical jobs is the correct appropriation of praise and blame. Did this actor do this? Was it a directing choice? Did this flow from the play? Was the director absolutely doing that? A critic does not see the production process. To some degree, the critic is trying to imbue the process. Experience helps because you get to know what people can do. If you’ve seen an actor do lousy work for the last five years, and suddenly he turns in a brilliant performance, the director probably had something to do with it. Similarly, if you see a very capable actor at sea, you can pretty much discern that he was misdirected. If you’ve seen a play five times before, and have seen it done brilliantly at least once, you know what the play can be. Experience and the ability to have comparatives are the only ways to really get at that, unless you follow gossip, which I mostly don’t, though occasionally some reaches my ears.

Helen Shaw:
As theater critics, we’ll be sitting there, looking at something, trying to figure out what the director did and what is on the page, and that’s really guesswork. However, the more experience you have watching shows being constructed, the more those guesses tend to land.

Don Aucoin:
If an actor does something that’s jarring and makes no sense, you find yourself thinking, Was that the director’s decision? Was the actor going rogue? What happened there? If I’m not sure, I’ll write in my review that “an actor has either chosen or been directed to do such-and-such.” In the interest of fairness, you have to air on the side of caution. You might blame the director for a certain bit of business and later learn that the script has stage directions that called for it.

Zachary Stewart:
It’s usually easy to tell which element of a production is jumping out and demanding attention. Whether or not that attention is adding or detracting from a production is also fairly obvious.

David Cote:
Critics see a show one night. They have no knowledge of the chain of events leading up to that one night. We don’t know who made what decision. You don’t know who had the “muscle” in the rehearsal room. When I see a critic try to mind-read while reviewing a show, I think it’s overreaching. Assigning motives is really tricky stuff. It helps to read the script. That way, you can see if they followed it. If you feel the director fumbled the play, you need to explain why they fumbled it in an articulate way. If you make an argument, you have to get to the bottom of it. A good review always has an argument behind it.