The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (4 page)

Andy Propst:
In the ideal world, a critic is someone who is at one corner of a triangle. From that corner, there are the two lines that go out. On one line, there’s the critic speaking to the potential audience member about why he or she should go to a show, and hopefully telling the audience member a little bit more than he or she would have known about the piece, its style, and all that. The other line goes out to the artist, and the critic is saying to the artist, “This is what I saw. This is what I liked and why. This is what I didn’t like and why. This is how I think you achieved your goals.” Then a line forms between the audience and the artist because of those two dialogues that have happened.

The classic example I use is Richard Christiansen of the
Chicago Tribune
. At the beginning of the Chicago Theater Movement, Christiansen went to some tiny theater and saw a play by a writer no one had ever heard of. A few days later, he wrote that he’d seen this play, that he didn’t think it was a terribly good play, but that audiences should see it because this playwright needed support and would be someone someday. That playwright was David Mamet. That kind of support of an artist at an early juncture is incredibly important.

Robert Faires:
I like to refer to a celestial metaphor, where the artistic experience is the sun and the audience is the Earth. Sometimes the audience isn’t facing the sun directly. It’s turned around, and maybe it’s not receiving the light. A theater critic can be the moon, reflecting that experience onto the dark side of the Earth, and giving the audience a sense of what that light was like coming from the artists. I feel like I am at my most valuable when I’m providing that function—when I can reflect as powerfully as possible my experience at the theater and what I think it meant.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
We all have a critical impulse: we see a show and then we want to talk about it. We want to supplement the experience of seeing theater by arguing about it and reading about it, and we turn that over to people we think are really interesting, authoritative, or funny. I’m not saying that we need theater critics to tell us what to go see. I really believe that theater criticism is only going to survive if it’s seen as part of the theater experience, and not just as something you read before you go to a show. In my idealized world, people would be seeing a lot of shows, and criticism would be in the mix of that. It would be the icing on the cake, something to help people think about what they already saw.

Theater also needs to be recorded. It’s the same with dance. It needs reporters. It needs someone to say, “This is what happened. This is what we saw.” I can’t go back and look at old plays. I can look at old films, but I can’t see the original production of
Oklahoma!
It’s lost to history. All we have is the review, and that’s an awesome responsibility.

Jason Zinoman:
I see theater criticism as a branch of reporting. Going to see a production is like going to see a presidential debate. If some new, really interesting actress has a great role, that’s important to mention. If the play contains an idea that’s in the zeitgeist, you want to talk about that. It’s also an act of translation. It makes connections and puts the show in a context that makes it more meaningful than whether it’s just good or bad. It could be a historical context, a political context, the context of the playwright’s work, or the director’s work.

Linda Winer:
I love reading critics. I love newspapers. I still get four newspapers delivered to my door. I love picking up the paper and reading what my colleagues said about something, and how often it sounds as if all of us have been to totally different events. The lesson there is not that critics are stupid, but that human beings are complicated, and the arts are complicated.

MATT WINDMAN:
Who is your favorite theater critic of the past or present?

Terry Teachout:
The critics who have meant the most to me wrote in other fields: Fairfield Porter and Clement Greenberg in the visual arts, Arlene Croce and Edwin Denby in dance, Edmund Wilson in literature, and Virgil Thomson in music.

Ben Brantley:
The critics I’ve been most influenced by are probably film critics—certainly Pauline Kael and James Agee.

Adam Feldman:
I love reading Pauline Kael on movies. Her passion for the art form is exciting, even when—or especially when—I disagree with her.

Michael Sommers:
I certainly enjoy reading criticism, all the way to James Gibbons Huneker, the great progenitor of the American theater critics. He was a music and theater critic for various publications in New York at the turn of the last century. He had an urbane, modern style. I also admire the
New Yorker
style that Robert Benchley had in the 1930s and the amiable persona that he put out.

Aside from Brooks Atkinson and George Jean Nathan, if you look at many of the New York critics, their careers didn’t last more than 10 or 20 years. They went off and wrote about something else, or they died. I guess there’s some burnout, too. I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to do this for so long—and I still love it. You should give it up once you don’t love it anymore. John Simon’s going to go out of the theater feet first. I think that’s how all drama critics want to go. When drama critics retire, they usually die. Look at what happened to poor Jacques le Sourd. Howard Kissel didn’t last that long after he stopped writing. We have to go forward like sharks or else we die.

Alexis Soloski:
The golden age critics of the 1920s are my heroes: Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, and Dorothy Parker. They have a sense of play and delight that’s informed by a pretty staggering intelligence.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I just bought a collection of Mary McCarthy’s theater reviews. I wouldn’t say she’s my favorite, but her reviews are wonderful. It’s like opening a packet of bonbons.

John Lahr:
Mary McCarthy is hilarious. She’s always wrong, but she’s quite stimulating, and she can make an absolutely great argument.

Ben Brantley:
I was recently reading Mary McCarthy’s theater criticism. She’s interesting in the sense of someone whose judgment doesn’t reflect what would be considered good by posterity. She dismissed pretty much everyone, including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but she’s great fun to read because of the intellectual energy that she brings.

Steven Suskin:
George Jean Nathan, who worked from 1910 into the 1950s, was good at citing past shows to help put things in perspective.

Linda Winer:
Claudia Cassidy was the music, theater, and dance critic of the
Chicago Tribune
for maybe 25 years. She was famous and infamous and extremely tough. She was the closest thing I had to a mentor. By the time I got to the
Tribune
, she was semi-retired. But of all the people who could have patronized me, she always said, “Just call me Claudia.” She would go to a theater, dance, or music event, go back to the paper, pound out a review on her manual typewriter, and then go out dancing with her husband. She had long red hair that, as the mythology goes, Brenda Starr was modeled after. Tennessee Williams said that he owed his career to her because they opened
The Glass Menagerie
in Chicago, and he was an unknown. Claudia Cassidy went to see it and loved it. She reviewed it and reviewed it and reviewed it until the New York producers had to go and see it. Her name is now connected to Tennessee Williams forever.

Chris Jones:
For me, it would be Claudia Cassidy, who had my job, and in whose footsteps I am proud to follow in. She was an incredible critic, but she is not as well-known in New York as she should be because she wrote in Chicago. If people do know her, they know her as “Acidy Cassidy,” as a hatchet woman known for trashing second-rate touring shows and irritating New York producers—which is certainly true. Nobody could write a more vicious pan than her. But when she loved something, she could write about it with astonishing passion and eloquence.

She understood Tennessee Williams better than anybody. I think it’s fair to say that without her, Williams would not have become the writer he became. Williams was writing ahead of his time. If you look at the recent Broadway revival of
The Glass Menagerie
, what you’re seeing is people finally understanding his brilliance. The play was too soon for a lot of people, but Claudia caught it in the moment.

David Cote:
Kenneth Tynan is the top. His writing is concise, witty, and explosive. He didn’t hide his political convictions or his passion. Besides Tynan: William Hazlitt for perspective, Stanley Kauffmann for intellectual rigor, Walter Kerr for bedside manner, Robert Brustein for balls, and George Jean Nathan for arrogant bitchery. There aren’t many living theater critics that I admire.

Richard Ouzounian:
I love Kenneth Tynan, but I don’t think he can be your model if you write in North America. You can love his style and prose, but he did say that the job of the theater critic is “to make way for the good by demolishing the bad.” I don’t know if it’s quite that draconian anymore. I may be an incredibly negative critic when I hate a show, but I am also the most incredibly positive critic when I love a show. You have to be able to give as well as take away. You have to bring people into the theater as well as keep them out.

Jeremy Gerard:
In terms of knowledge and insight, I would say Walter Kerr in his prime—which was not his time at the
New York Times
, but before that at the
Herald Tribune
.

Roma Torre:
I loved Walter Kerr. He was so measured. His criticism was never personal or snarky. He understood the nature, structure, and general elements that made for quality theater. His criticism was always constructive. There was a time when producers would look to certain critics to fix their shows. There aren’t too many critics who could serve in that function anymore—partly because of the current nature of criticism today. The emphasis on glibness, the reduced space, and economic pressures prevent us from being able to present the kind of consistently thoughtful, studied assessment that embodied Kerr’s writing.

Steven Suskin:
The best theater criticism creates an impression of what you’re seeing in words. Walter Kerr could describe an actor in two or three sentences and make you feel like you were experiencing the performance.

Linda Winer:
The person I read for wonderment—on how theater can be made alive through words that bounce off the page—is Walter Kerr. The
New York Times
used to have a daily theater critic and a Sunday theater critic. When I was in Chicago, I would wait for the Sunday
Times
to come out to read Walter Kerr. He was on the third page of the “Arts and Leisure” section above the fold. He would write essays about what he saw the week before, and he could contradict the daily critic. It was good to have two voices since the
Times
has so much power. Kerr had a rich, individual way of describing an event. He could zero in on the way a particular actor did a particular thing, and from there, open it up until you got a picture of the entire play. I thought it was magic. I miss having someone in that slot. But most of all, I miss Walter Kerr.

Richard Ouzounian:
I used to worship Walter Kerr as a kid. He was the great combination of the smart and populous, which is what I strive to be. Walter Kerr was the guy who said
Gypsy
was “the best damn musical I’ve seen in years.” On the other hand, he was a professor at Catholic University. He could write smart, but he could also write zippy. I also learned a couple of tropes from him. He used to begin with a telling scene or an image from a show. He also loved to wind up a review by making it very clear what he had said. There was never any doubt about what Walter Kerr said in a review.

John Lahr:
When I was young, the book I thought was the bee’s knees was
Seasons of Discontent
by Robert Brustein. I used to write out sentences from it just to feel the rhythm. Brustein’s style was a bit florid and dense when he wrote for the
New Republic
, but at least he was in the ballpark of wanting a discussion.

Helen Shaw:
I think of Robert Brustein as the ideal critic. One of the reasons I went to the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training was to be there before he left. Being taught by him, and looking at the naughtiness and the liveliness of his mind, was certainly my biggest influence.

John Simon:
I like Robert Brustein quite a bit, but we have significant differences. He claims that I don’t understand American humor.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
My favorite critic of theater of the past is Eric Bentley. He’s still alive. I think he’s 98 years old now. His books about theater are must-reads. Even though they’re dense, they’re really well-considered and substantive. He’s very hard on a lot of the great playwrights of the 20th century (his stuff about Eugene O’Neill is unforgiving), but they’re really valuable. He writes about big, important subjects that take in so much of the world.

Andy Propst:
I’ve always responded to Frank Rich. I will actually pull out
Hot Seat
, the collection of his
New York Times
reviews, and read it just for fun.

Matthew Murray:
Frank Rich fused the fan’s adoration with an unswerving critical eye in a way almost no one else has.

Charles Isherwood:
Frank Rich brought me to the paper. I go back to his reviews all the time. He’s an amazingly exciting theater writer.

Helen Shaw:
Scott Brown writes this kind of baroque, Joycean prose that is a gorgeous keyhole to go down.

Matthew Murray:
My favorite of the current crop is probably Jesse Green of
New York
magazine. Just like his predecessor, Scott Brown, he turns out intense, intricate, and insightful analyses of new shows that don’t seem to be matched anywhere else.

Jesse Oxfeld:
I do enjoy Jesse Green’s criticism in
New York
magazine. He’s so deeply enmeshed in the theater world of New York, and he has such an understanding of its history and people. He really brings a lot of insight that goes beyond, “This was a nice performance” or “The set was pretty but the lighting was ugly.”