The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (7 page)

John Simon:
If you like to write (which I obviously do), and if you like theater (which I obviously do), and if you put those two things together, they spell theater critic. I was taken to the theater when I was a very small boy, and I fell in love with it. At any rate, I fell in fondness for it. So given my critical nature and my wanting to be closer to the theater, this is what came out of it.

The first publication I wrote for—if you can call it that—was a little pamphlet called
Audience
, which a young graduate student at Harvard started. It was a nice little giveaway. The first major publication I worked for was the
Hudson Review
. Robert Brustein, who was moving from the
Hudson Review
to the
New Republic
, recommended me. There are other things I did which I can barely recall. After all, I’m now 90 years old, and my memory isn’t what it used to be.

Clay Felker, who was the editor at
New York
magazine, noticed something I had written for the
Herald Tribune
. It was a humorous piece about a supposed writing school sponsored by
Reader’s Digest
. So when the
Tribune
died and Clay Felker went on to become the editor-in-chief at
New York
magazine, he took me on because Harold Clurman, who had been the drama critic, was not, in his opinion, a very interesting writer (which I concurred with). It worked out well. It worked out for 36 and two-thirds years.

John Lahr:
I don’t think anyone grows up thinking, I want to be a theater critic—or at least they didn’t when I began doing this, which was around 1965. It wasn’t taught at university. You couldn’t take a course in it. You can now take a course in drama criticism, which is ironic since there’s hardly any work anymore.

I had just come back from Oxford and was writing a biography of my father. At the time, I happened to have something I wanted to say about
Marat/Sade
, which I had just seen in England. I wrote an essay about it and sent it to
Manhattan East
, a local giveaway paper. It had a circulation of 50,000 because they gave it out in the lobbies of Park Avenue apartments. The editor then asked if I’d be interested in being the theater critic. I’d get free tickets and $10 for each review. Since I had no money, I thought that was great. I didn’t know anything about drama criticism, but I had spent two years writing critical essays with Christopher Ricks, one of the great English literary critics.

From the outset, I wanted to do something different with my drama criticism. My idea was to invite the artists into the article and let them speak. I really wanted to create a sense of the life of the theater. Within about a year, I was hearing from people who I never thought I’d get a response from, like Harold Pinter and Jules Feiffer, and I realized that this was something I could do. I progressed to writing for an underground paper called the
New York Free Press
. When Grove Press bought it, they agreed to pay me the astronomical fee of $250 apiece. Grove then made me its theater editor, which meant I could get plays published. By 1971, I was also the lead critic for the
Village Voice
and the literary manager of Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, which meant that I could put on a play, review a play, and publish a play.

When the book about my father came out, it was reviewed on the front page of the
Times
. Then I left town. I had to get vaccinated from ambition or else I’d explode. I lived in England for seven years and worked on what became
Prick Up Your Ears
, my book about the playwright Joe Orton. That led to writing for a wonderful magazine called
New Society
, which all the major English critics worked for.

I was tapped for the
New Yorker
job in 1992. I told Tina Brown, the editor at the time, that I wanted to write a new kind of drama criticism—more of a discursive encounter that both described the play and informed the reader about theater culture. I also wanted to keep theater professionals in the discussion. I wanted to change how theater was reported, and Tina agreed with that. She was bored by conventional theater criticism.

For instance, when I went out to cover
Angels in America
at the Mark Taper Forum, I talked to Tony Kushner before the show and went backstage afterwards and described what was going on. I quoted a gorgeous letter that Tony had written to the cast. Anyone who wants to know what it was like to be in that theater at that great moment in our theater history will find it in my review. I was discussing the play, making connections to society, and getting all these voices into the piece.

Linda Winer:
Everybody comes in through a different backdoor. I was a classical music major, with no thought about what I was going to do with it. I read about a two-year program that the Rockefeller Foundation had set up for the training of classical music critics. The first year, we were out in California, around the University of Southern California and the
Los Angeles Times
. We spent the whole year writing practice reviews. Critics from all over the country and England came and spent time with us. Virgil Thomson spent a week with us. They would tear at our stuff and help us understand what went into a review. The great thing about it was that there was no party line. The more people we talked to, the more we realized that everyone went about it in a different way, and that we were going to have to find our own way. But at least we learned what the basic standards were.

During the second year of the program, I was an apprentice at the
Chicago Tribune
. I grew up in Chicago. After the apprenticeship year, they kept me on as an assistant music critic. Then I got more and more interested in dance. It was right around the time of the so-called “Dance Boom,” so the
Tribune
sent me to a program for the training of dance critics at Connecticut College. Martha Graham would sit there with her turban in the cafeteria. Again, we wrote reviews, and all these different critics would come in and tear our reviews apart.

At the time, the theater critic at the
Tribune
was an old pro named William Leonard, who reviewed touring companies and dinner theaters. That’s pretty much all there was in Chicago at the time. But what we now know as the Chicago Theater Movement then began. There were all these people who lived in my neighborhood and were putting on plays in little storefronts. We were all the same age and seemed to have the same interests. The
Tribune
wasn’t covering them, so I said, “I’ll do it.” I had taken a lot of theater courses in college, but I was not a trained theater professional. The first play I reviewed was
The Duck Variations
, David Mamet’s first play in Chicago. I started at the
Tribune
in 1969, and I left in 1980. During my last seven years there, I was the chief theater and dance critic.

I really wanted to move to New York. The repetition in Chicago was getting to me. I couldn’t review
Warp!
, this sci-fi storefront extravaganza, one more time. The
Daily News
was starting a separate afternoon edition of the paper. They were trying to reach the readers who read the
Times
on their way to work. They hired about 300 really good people, and they brought me to New York. I was called a cultural affairs specialist, which was a kind of critic-at-large. The afternoon edition only lasted about 10 months, but fortunately, the
Daily News
kept me on as the dance critic at the regular part of the paper.

Then I got a call from some people I had never heard of. They took me out to lunch at the Oyster Bar, and they said, “We’re starting a national newspaper. Would you like to join us?” And I thought, This is only going to last six months, but at least it’ll be something else. And that was
USA Today
. I offered to be the theater, dance, and music critic of the country. I was there for five years. At the beginning, it was really fun because they didn’t have the form set in stone yet. There was more of an opportunity to have an individual voice. By the time I left, it was this big, established national newspaper.

Meanwhile, editors from
Newsday
called and said, “We’re going to start a New York edition of the paper.” They hired about 400 people. It was going to be an upscale New York edition called
New York Newsday
, completely separate from the Long Island edition. Allan Wallach was already the theater critic, but they asked if there was something else I wanted to do there. I said, “I would like to write a twice weekly column about the politics of the arts.” They said, “Great, come over,” and that’s how I joined. I had all this writer energy that had been building up because
USA Today
was not a writers’ newspaper.
Newsday
had these wonderful editors, and they let us write the hell out of everything.

New York Newsday
lasted seven or eight years. They killed it, but not because it deserved to die. It was actually starting to pay for itself. But the
Los Angeles Times
, which owned us, got a new head of the board who wanted to show that he could save a lot of money quickly, so he folded
New York Newsday
. It was the last real chance of having a daily newspaper in New York that could compete with the
Times
. Eventually, I became the theater critic of the Long Island edition of
Newsday
.

Michael Riedel:
It was really just a fluke. I had no ambition to be a journalist or to do anything in the theater. I went to college at Columbia, planned on going to law school, and was hanging out with a bunch of people who were involved in the theater, including a guy who became the editor of
TheaterWeek
magazine, who asked if I wanted to become the managing editor. I thought I would do it just for the summer, but it turned out to be a career.

I was at
TheaterWeek
for three years. Then I got friendly with a lot of gossip columnists, like George Rush and a woman named Charlotte Hays, because I had pretty good theater stories that I would give to them. Then Hays got a column at the
Daily News
. I figured she would need an assistant or leg man, so I applied for the job and got it. She was a bit of a disaster and got fired, but they kept me on. I worked for George Rush for a few months, and then they made me a feature writer. Then they gave me a regular weekly theater column. A year later, the
New York Post
lured me away and gave me a twice-a-week column, and I’ve been there ever since.

Ben Brantley:
It was a long, circuitous route. It was the job I always wanted. It combined the two passions in my life: theater and writing. Journalism is a trade in my family that goes back a few generations. First, I was an intern at the
Village Voice
. After college, I worked for
Women’s Wear Daily
and
W
as a reporter, editor, and fashion critic, first in New York and later in Paris. It was the best graduate school I could have gone to. Then I was a writer for
Vanity Fair
and then the
New Yorker
. I also wrote movie reviews for
Elle
. My first editor at
Elle
was Alex Witchel, who at that point was dating Frank Rich, whom she subsequently married. The
Times
had been looking for a second-string theater critic for a long time. I met Frank through Alex, and we bonded over our love of theater. He called me at one point and said, “You know, we’re looking for someone. Would you mind if I threw your name into the hat?” I had to do some audition pieces, but it happened very quickly.

Charles Isherwood:
I didn’t aim to be a theater critic. It really wasn’t a lifelong dream. I didn’t study criticism or journalism. But in a way, it’s something that drew on all of the various interests I’d been cultivating for years. I grew up in Northern California in the suburbs. I didn’t go to the theater very often, but I think my critical instincts were there from a very early age. I was a huge movie fan as a kid. I was completely obsessed with Pauline Kael. I wrote movie reviews just for fun. After college, I graduated and moved to Los Angeles, thinking I was going to either work in the movie industry or in magazines, and I ended up getting a job at a magazine.

I started going to the theater a lot when I was in Los Angeles. It was the late 1980s, when movies had started getting really bad. When the magazine I worked for folded, I ended up at
Variety
as an editor. At the same time, a friend of mine became the editor of
Backstage West
, and I volunteered to write reviews for five dollars each. A couple of years into that,
Variety
was very unhappy with its L.A. theater critic, so I went to the editors and said, “I’ve been doing these reviews. Why don’t you let me do it?” And that’s how it started.

Terry Teachout:
I come from a small town in Southeast Missouri. When I was in junior high school, I saw a couple of college productions and became fascinated. I did theater in high school and college. I played the Noël Coward character in
The Man Who Came to Dinner
. I was the Artful Dodger in
Oliver!
, and my voice changed midway through the run. I was the fiddler in
Fiddler on the Roof
, and I fell off the roof on the last night as the curtain came down. (I held the violin over my head, and nothing got broken.)

I’ve been writing for publications since I was in high school. I was the
Kansas City Star
’s jazz critic and second-string classical critic while I was still an undergrad. I was also a working musician. Although I decided to concentrate on being a writer, I’ve always thought of myself as a musician first because that’s what my training is in.

I remained interested in theater. I wrote about it quite a bit when I had a
Washington Post
column about the arts in New York. I wasn’t new to it by any means when Paul Gigot of the
Wall Street Journal
asked me to lunch to discuss the paper’s arts coverage. A half hour into the lunch, he said, “We’d like to start a drama column. Would you like to write it?” I was completely blindsided. I said, “Let’s try it as an experiment.” We started running columns every other week, and it very quickly became weekly. It then became a permanent arrangement, and I’ve been doing it ever since.