The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (32 page)

Michael Portantiere:
I think that I can, to a large degree, separate the text from the direction while the play is happening. Separating the direction from the acting can be much more difficult. But overall, if a show doesn’t seem to be well-directed in terms of blocking or focus, or if the performances are widely variable in quality, those would seem to be faults of the director.

Elysa Gardner:
When considering acting and directing separately, it’s a big challenge to determine where the director came into it. In the last production of
Gypsy
, you very clearly felt the presence of Arthur Laurents as the director. It was impossible not to talk about him. That was very much his vision and his production.

John Lahr:
In the
New York Times
, you’ll see a scenic designer get criticized for a set, but the critic doesn’t understand that the set that they’re criticizing is an agreement between the director and the set designer. The set designer doesn’t go off and say, “Here’s your set. Stuff it.” They don’t know how the things that they’re writing about were arrived at.

Peter Marks:
I think that we underestimate the contributions of the director and overstress the writer, especially with new plays. It’s almost an unfair pressure we put on writers because directors can ruin a new play. Very often, we get it wrong. As writers, our default is to blame the writer. Writing is the easiest for us to understand. It’s the process that is the most like our own.

Sometimes we miss what the director is doing. It takes a lot of analysis. Sometimes you just don’t have the time to figure out where the gap is between what the words are and how they were expressed. If you talk to directors, they’ll say that 90 percent of their job is in the casting. If you take them at their word, you could say that part of the reason a play didn’t work is because there was no chemistry between the actors.

There’s a lot of guesswork involved. I’ve had situations where I’ve praised the choreography of a show, and then the director will then write to me and say, “I did that.” And I’ll say, “Well, how am I supposed to know that if there’s a choreographer? They were dancing. Why did you have a choreographer then?”

Howard Shapiro:
That’s very hard to do, though I think that there are ways to finesse it. For instance, I didn’t like Jude Law’s interpretation of Hamlet. I thought his Hamlet was more of a high school boy than a college boy, but he followed that interpretation through the whole production. He gave a really good performance within that interpretation. For me, that was a problem of direction, but I wouldn’t call up the director to ask where the interpretation came from, as much as I might want to out of curiosity. That’s not what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to say how it seemed to me. I think it’s enough to say that without pointing at someone and saying, “It was that person’s idea.”

Michael Dale:
It’s easier when an actor simply doesn’t display mastery of the craft, which is often evident when you see a celebrity with limited stage acting experience. I tend to give actors the benefit of the doubt as far as interpretations go. If I’m seeing a cast full of professionals who are giving questionable performances, I will blame the director for that.

Leonard Jacobs:
You can never truly know whether a bit of staging or an actor’s choice came from the director’s instruction or suggestion, or if it originated with the actor. Criticism is, at best, an educated guess as to what went on prior to the performance. Hopefully, that educated guess is informed by perception, observation, and previous experience.

Roma Torre:
People often ask me how I separate direction from playwriting. It’s very hard to do that. My husband is a playwright, and he did a play Off Broadway a few years ago. There was a review—I think it was in the
Daily News
—that praised the director for something that really was attributable to the playwright, and I was really annoyed by that.

Adam Feldman:
It’s easier to evaluate the direction of a movie because the director has such a permanent presence. Literally everything that you see in a movie was the director’s choice. You have no agency as an audience member to look elsewhere. You’re only seeing what the director wants you to see. You’re seeing the version that he or she has chosen from available options. It’s different with theater. The actors have more agency onstage. The writer has more power behind the scenes. The director has much less power over what the audience actually sees.

You don’t want to say it’s a great play if it’s actually an ordinary play that happens to be lifted by a tremendously gifted cast or director, nor do you want to blame the writing for the failures of the production, but they can be very hard to separate. Sometimes you can have a perfectly good line that ends up sounding terrible because it’s badly delivered. Or, you can have a line that is not particularly interesting that an actor makes fascinating. Sometimes it’s useful to just look at the play on the page and imagine how else it might have been done, for better or worse.

Terry Teachout:
Understanding what a director does is a critic’s hardest job. Direction is the thing you don’t see onstage. When you go to the New York Philharmonic, you see the conductor up there waiving his hands. But when you see a play, you don’t see the director up there directing. If you’ve been doing this for a long time, and if you know previous work by the director or the playwright or the actors, you may be able to make educated guesses. But when you talk to actors and directors, you find out how wrong you can be. That’s just the way it is. You do the best you can, and you should not be presumptuous about your knowledge.

MATT WINDMAN
: Is theater criticism currently in a state of crisis?

Ben Brantley:
I think theater critics could vanish altogether, at least as we know them now. What still makes a theater critic special? It’s now so easy to go online and log into a forum or a chat room, where everyone’s giving their opinions.

Michael Musto:
Everyone today is a critic. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a venue where they can send out to the world their own opinion on a Broadway show. Everyone can get an audience.

Steven Suskin:
Nobody seems to want to pay for theater criticism anymore.

Jason Zinoman:
The biggest obstacle is the business model of theater criticism. If you look over the last hundred years, people have always said, “Theater criticism is dying.” And 99 percent of the time, it was just the usual kind of delightful hyperbole of the theater world, but this time is different for structural reasons.

Theater criticism doesn’t seem like a blue-collar profession. The public image of the theater critic remains someone who’s dapper and well-dressed, right out of
All About Eve
. But in reality, the profession has been completely wiped out for the people who have lost work, and the people who are working can barely make a living. I know critics who are homeless, who have to sell their furniture to get by. It’s become a brutal job. It’s no longer a sustainable profession even though, ironically, more people are viewing cultural things online than ever before.

Being a theater critic is an incredible job, and people should be grateful to have a position like that. But at the same time, it is a job. Critics are workers. They need the dignity of a steady salary to do their jobs well. I can name the number of theater critics who have health care on one hand.

The first people that got hit by the thinning out of the journalistic ranks were the editors. When I started at the
Times
and
Time Out
, I had a lot of really smart editors who beat up my prose. I learned how to write through tough editors. There are still great editors out there, but not many of them. I would argue that there’s less room to fail now. As with artists, it’s important for critics to fail in order to learn how to succeed.

We now have a better sense than ever of what people are reading by measuring clicks—how often articles are viewed online. What we’ve learned is that theater criticism gets a lot less clicks than articles about television and movies. That seems obvious, but now we know it with more precision than before. There’s a lot of pressure on editors and publishers to focus on things that get read more often, and that’s never going to be an Off-Broadway play. We’re depending on editors to think there’s something about the cultural value of theater criticism that matters and merits support.

Michael Sommers:
We’re a passing breed. We’re passing right in front of your eyes. Everybody’s a drama critic now because everybody’s got a blog. Everybody’s on
Facebook
. Everybody’s on
All That Chat
. Paying jobs for drama critics don’t exist anymore because everybody’s giving it away for free. Traditional print journalism is not covering the arts anymore.
Backstage
doesn’t even carry reviews anymore. When times were good, I was making over $100,000. That’s a decent job. You can get by in New York on that. It wasn’t huge money, but it was good enough.

Terry Teachout:
The outlets for professional theater criticism are continuing to dry up, and I don’t see that trend reversing. When I was first going to the theater, every big-city newspaper had a full-time staff theater critic, often more than one. The major national news magazines all covered theater routinely. Beyond that, theater was something discussed on network television. It was much more a part of the national conversation that it is now.

The hardest thing for theater critics is finding a place to write that will pay, so it can be either a full-time job or a significant source of income. That problem is so overwhelming that it overshadows every other problem. The next generation of people who might have become drama critics won’t even consider it as a possible line of work. They’re perfectly aware that you can’t make a living doing it. It’s hard enough making a living as a writer in any capacity. The days of writing specifically about theater as a critic—which, in the old days meant you weren’t also writing features—are largely gone.

I am lucky that I write for the nation’s largest newspaper, and have been going about things in the way that critics were half a century ago. I have so far been insulated from the problems I’m describing. But outside of me, the people at the
New York Times
, and a very small number of other newspapers, everybody is in trouble.

I don’t know if there’s anything that theater critics can do. It doesn’t have anything to do with their work. It has to do with the institutions themselves. There are things that arts journalists can do to increase their value to their institutions. But if the institutions themselves don’t place too high a value on the arts, it really doesn’t matter how good the critics are. Eventually, those institutions will look at the critics and say, “You are superfluous.”

Chris Jones:
There are fewer and fewer outlets for serious arts criticism. There’s more pressure to write shorter, to write with video, to become partners with the people you review, and all this other bullshit. The great and noble tradition of the critic just showing up and writing his or her response is becoming rarer. It’s not just a problem. It’s a crisis. So much arts journalism has become an adjunct to the promotional campaigns of the people you’re writing about. Independence is becoming harder to preserve at many outlets across the country.

Peter Marks:
The challenges include the declining tolerance for nuanced points of view, the intense financial pressure on large news organizations, and a ratcheting up of theater marketing, which is diminishing the voices that are out there from having an impact. They tend to suggest that because there are so many voices out there to listen to, none can be listened to.

What’s not a problem—at least in Washington, D.C.—are the shows. They’re more challenging than ever. They’re not dumbed down in the way that Broadway shows so often feel. There’s a meaningful community of people who want to walk into a theater and be challenged, and that’s gratifying.

Layoffs are always a threat. I serve at the pleasure of the owner and the editor. Right now, the
Washington Post
is slightly unique in the sense that Jeff Bezos just bought it and is investing in it. The paper’s staff is actually growing. It’s a mini-golden age moment for the
Post
. He’s trying to support the enterprise and see what’s possible. And in a moment of possibility, you can breathe. I don’t feel like my job is under threat at the moment—though that might change tomorrow.

Charles Isherwood:
Theater criticism performs a valuable function that certain people will always value, but it’s hard to tell. The journalism world is shrinking by the minute, and arts coverage is getting drastically cut all over the place. There are fewer jobs, and there’s less space.

Michael Riedel:
Once upon a time, newspapers were licenses for printing money because they had a monopoly on advertising. If you wanted to sell anything—be it a used car, a house in the Hamptons, or a Broadway play—you could only do it in the newspaper. The
New York Times
could charge $150,000 for a one-page ad in the “Arts and Leisure” section. But nowadays, you can sell things on the Internet. You can do direct mail or e-mail blasts. You can go to
Broadway.com
, funnel all your tickets through them, and pay much less in advertising dollars than you used to at the newspapers when they were the only game in town.

There’s a feeling on the part of all the newspapers that Broadway is not as important to the culture as movies and television. And because of that, they don’t need to hire someone to cover it regularly. But at the same time, Broadway’s never been bigger. It’s a mega-multi-billion dollar global business and an enormous part of the New York City economy. I think you could make the case that now is the time for newspapers to have more Broadway coverage. More and more people are going to see the shows, which are full of big movie stars, but editors don’t see it that way. That’s why they’re doing away with theater critics and theater columnists.