The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (38 page)

Christine Dolen:
There are different models that can be experimented with and created, but I think it has to be through a foundation. For instance, the Knight Foundation, which is based in Florida, has a program to hire dance critics to review things.

David Cote:
My dream is to come up with a model to subsidize theater criticism. Who will subsidize it? Will theaters want to put money into a company for people to review their shows? I don’t know. Theater critics face the same problems as theater companies: a shrinking audience, people who are less and less willing to spend $50 to $60 on a play by a new playwright. Likewise, critics have to find a way to develop an audience to read our stuff. There is also an increasing cultural illiteracy of the media itself, and editors and media owners who don’t give a damn about theater. We need to keep fighting for visibility.

Frank Rizzo:
If nonprofit theaters support the critics, what happens when those theaters don’t like what certain critics are writing? Will they apply pressure to get rid of a reviewer? I’ve always liked the for-profit model because at the end of the day, quality wins out, and not the pressure of individual theaters. There could be a business model based on readership metrics. If you can prove that you’re attracting the readership of a certain type of audience, maybe you can get advertisers, but that’s not my specialty. I’m a writer, not a marketer or a business executive.

Thom Geier:
I really don’t know how that would work. Would the critics be sponsored by an institute for criticism? I’m all in favor of finding as many ways as possible to have writers, journalists, and critics make a living for themselves in this new media culture. More power to anyone who can find a way to make it work.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I think the nonprofit model is potentially workable. A dream scenario would be to have a nonprofit foundation that would fund critics in New York and other cities. I’m sure there’s some billionaire somewhere with deep pockets who would be willing to do that.

Helen Shaw:
I don’t know what happens when you divorce arts criticism from newspapers, magazines, and cross-interest publications. That’s when you start segregating your audience really intensely. That’s when you view your metric and see that only 15 people read your review, which you took 15 hours to write, and that’s depressing. Publicly subsidizing a news organization is a good first step. There is some great arts coverage through the BBC.

Howard Shapiro:
There is a new economic model being set up for the theater criticism that I’m currently doing, which is underwriting for public media. I’m talking about memberships, donations, and private foundations, which are the very same things that support the arts. While that may not be a new model for public media in general, it’s a fairly new model for criticism.

Eric Grode:
If you’re looking at economic models, you’d have to make sure that whoever is subsidizing the critics doesn’t color or affect their opinions. It would be great if we can find people with deep pockets who just want theater criticism to be written.

Richard Ouzounian:
Universities could be a salvation to a certain degree, but who’s going to monitor it? Who’s going to be the conduit? Is it going to come through the English department? Is it going to come through the creative writing department? Is it going to come through the journalism department? It’s tough to figure that out.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
The people who’d be most interested in there continuing to be theater coverage and theater criticism are the theater makers. But if they were to fund theater criticism, there would be an issue of independence. The White House wouldn’t fund an independent journalist to investigate what it’s doing.

You’d need to have people behind it who are interested in either the art form or disinterested criticism. A lot of the foundations that could fund things like that tend to be about supporting theaters, productions, and writers, but that shouldn’t be at odds with criticism. Theater makers, when you talk to them, recognize the value and role of critics in the abstract, but they’ve always taken it for granted that the critics are paid by someone else. If you came to them with a bill and said, “Would you like to pay and support theater criticism?” I don’t know what would happen.

The economic model that has worked for newspapers is selling ads, and that supports whatever they want to do with that money. There isn’t a direct return for international investigative reporting, and there isn’t a one-to-one return for every ad dollar for theater criticism. The papers have always covered what they think is best, but that has changed now with the online culture of something being clickable.

I feel like theater writers can still be part of a larger entity. We don’t have to go off and just write about theater for theater fans. There is a model directed specifically at theater fans, but you’ll find that in a lot of markets, people who are into theater also go to the symphony, the opera, and the movies. They’re patrons of the arts. So to have something only be about theater is kind of self-defeating. Maybe we could have something that bands together all of the arts and culture. If theater critics could band together with other critics, maybe something could come of that. You think theater critics have it hard? What about dance critics? What about fine art critics?

Adam Feldman:
I think that some kind of independently subsidized theater criticism, separate from newspaper or magazine criticism, could actually change criticism for the better. Compared to the thumbs-up, thumbs-down type of criticism, where you are just doing drive-by evaluations, those reviews could be a little more considered and evenly balanced. But who would want to read them? If reviews were never cheap and shallow, or even a little nasty or crazy, would people enjoy them as much?

Matthew Murray:
I’m not sure what the value of theater criticism would be from a nonprofit standpoint, unless you mean actual criticism of the kind that would typically occur at the journal or university level. As far as reviewing, I don’t think that can be justified at all. There’s a way to make money doing anything if you want it badly enough. If you want to review plays for a living, no one’s stopping you from figuring out a way to make it pay. But I have no idea why there would ever be a nonprofit component to it. As much as I love theater and writing about it, I can’t see why anyone should consider it that important.

MATT WINDMAN
: How has the Internet changed theater criticism?

Ben Brantley:
In some ways, it’s made theater criticism looser, jazzier, more gossipy, and more conversational. Online, a review can have embedded video of the show. You can have a link to buy tickets to the show. It’s a one-stop-shop to get an opinion and also get tickets. The Internet has also allowed some publications to have longer criticism online. I can tell people in print to read an extended version of the review online. Those are all positive aspects.

Brian Lipton:
You can quickly post things on the Internet, which means you don’t have to worry about deadlines in the same way that you do with print, where you have to get it in 24 hours in advance. I can literally send something in to an editor at 9:30 p.m., and it can be up at 10 p.m. or even 9:35 p.m. The Internet is also positive in that, depending on the site, you don’t have the same constraints with word count as you sometimes do with print. When I wrote for the
New York Post,
I think my word count was 250 words. Now I can write 500 or 600 words when I feel like it.

Andy Propst:
I started the website
American Theater Web
around the same time that Elyse Sommer started
Curtain Up
. I don’t think Martin Denton had started
NYTheatre.com
yet. I was breaking a lot of ground in terms of online criticism. I was the first Internet critic at the O’Neill, and the first one accepted into the American Theatre Critics Association. The Drama Desk had not yet formulated how it was going to deal with online critics. There are obviously a lot more online theater critics now.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
The weird thing about the Internet is that it hasn’t killed theater itself. There’s more theater than ever. The paradox is that the reporting on it and the reviewing of it are completely collapsing. It’s just nuts.

Steven Suskin:
In the old days, a newspaper was printed in the morning; and by the evening, the review was obsolete. You could see the quotes in advertisements, but the actual review was gone. On the Internet, that’s not the case. You can just type in the name of a show and the reviews will come up, even if the show opened years ago. That means theatergoers can read our opinions indefinitely. Before that, you had to go to the library to find the reviews.

Richard Ouzounian:
The bad thing about writing exclusively online is that it generates a lot of bad habits. You tend to run off at the mouth. I will occasionally say very cutting and scathing things, but I’ve also been trained in the art of what constitutes libel and character defamation.

I believe in the critic as a print writer. I worry very much about online writing. I make sure my reviews are online properly and promptly, and that they look good online, but I’m really writing for print. I still believe in the generation of people who leaf through the paper in the morning at the breakfast table, or on the subway, on the train, or wherever. My fantasy is that they flip by the entertainment section and a really attractive picture, or a really grabby headline, or four stars at the top of a review catches their eye and they read the review and say, “Let’s go see this.”

My colleague on the other major paper in Toronto, J. Kelly Nestruck of the
Globe and Mail
, has been known to say, “I do not care what my reviews look like in the tree edition of the newspaper.” He’s all about online,
Twitter, Facebook
. I think those things can be very important, especially in keeping a national profile and having people outside the city know what you’re writing, but I think in terms of the old era. How does it look on the page? How many inches of copy did you get?

Eric Grode:
People have gotten accustomed to getting their news for free. Not enough newspapers put up pay walls in the beginning. Now those newspapers have a lot less money and a lot less advertising. The pages are getting smaller, and there isn’t as much physical or financial room as there used to be to support writers.

Terry Teachout:
By and large, the Internet has been a net positive throughout the arts, even though one of its effects has been to dry up the market for newspapers. It’s opening up criticism to a much wider range of people, some of whom know more about it than the people who write about it professionally. It also gives the theater professional an opportunity to get into the conversation, which is something I feel is very important. I believe devoutly in what I call “practitioner critics,” insofar as artistic professionals feel comfortable writing criticism. Even if they don’t want to write about other people, they should be writing about themselves.

Charles Isherwood:
I’m troubled by the fact that a reader can go on a website, read a critic’s review, and then write his or her own review in the comment section. That doesn’t create an equation between the critic’s voice and the reader’s voice, but it says that the critic’s opinion isn’t the only one. The value of our work is being cheapened. Everything gets sort of equalized. I’m sure that sounds elitist, but I don’t really care. I guess I am an elitist, in the sense that I do think certain people are good at their jobs for a reason and should be rewarded for that.

MATT WINDMAN
: Are chat room and message board users usurping the theater critic’s role, especially since they can often attend an early preview and write a show before the critics get a chance?

Michael Musto:
One of the interesting twists of the new technology is that by the time a show has opened and the reviews have come in from the opening night critics, you’ve already read on the Broadway boards everything that’s right and wrong with the show. So by the time your own review comes out, it doesn’t seem quite as special as it used to be. Why are these people wasting their time posting on a website for no money? I’ll never figure it out. It’s scary that anonymous people out there in the dark are usurping our jobs.

John Lahr:
I don’t take all that in. One of the things you have to do as a critic is stay sane and keep your mind free of that nattering buzz, all of which means nothing.

Richard Zoglin:
When I review something, I’m not obsessively tracking the chat rooms or
All That Chat
. Let the people chat. I don’t pay attention to them.

Peter Marks:
There’s nothing like
All That Chat
in Washington, D.C. There’s no communal site where everyone writes about shows before the critics go to see them. Most of the shows in Washington have only two or three preview performances, so there’s no chance for other people to get ahead of the reviewers. Some shows here are starting to have longer preview periods, and that’s something I get complaints about.

Organizations should invest in branding their critics and making them stand out from everybody else. This is a big, tough job. It’s a burden. Not everyone can do it. I guess that’s why so many people fall by the wayside. You have to work your ass off at it. You have to establish a voice that rises above the conversation. It’s also about credibility. If people who write comments on the chat sites don’t put their own name on what they write, they don’t have any real investment in their credibility. It makes their judgment suspect.

Adam Feldman:
There has always been word of mouth about shows. People have always told their friends what they thought. Now it’s just being written down and shared in a more active way. The people who see things during previews represent a certain part of the community. There have been times when the wisdom of the chatterati turned out to be very different from the critical reaction or the audience reaction in the long term.