Are Theater Critics…Critical?

“I believe the trade of critic, in literature, music, and drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and has no real value. However, let it go,” Mark Twain wrote in an autobiography that is only now about to be published a century after his death. “It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and Congressmen and humorists. We must bear the burden.”

Must we bear it much longer? As Chris Rawson, the theater critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, put it last weekend, “what is the future of theater criticism – IS there a future of theater criticism?” And (something he did not ask), should anybody care?

Rawson, the chairman of the American Theatre Critics Association, or ATCA, was introducing a discussion of the subject by a panel of playwrights, producers, actors and other theater people gathered at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. The O’Neill Center, which won its second Tony Award this year as the best regional theater in America, is a good place to contemplate these questions. It was where ATCA was born in 1974, and it is the site as well each year of the National Critics Institute.

But the future of theater critics and theater criticism seems to have become a popular subject of panels, think pieces, blog posts, and conversations on Twitter.

The question of whether theater critics are critical is really at least three questions:
Is theater criticism necessary for anybody or anything – like, say, for the theater?
Are theater critics too negative?
Is the field dying out?

WHAT — AND WHO — IS A THEATER CRITIC (Are bloggers vermin)?

From “The Man Who Came To Dinner” to “The Worst Show in the Fringe” (in which one is kidnapped), theater critics have been depicted as intimidating, pompous and unpleasant – yes, cultured and erudite, but also condescending and out-of-touch…and sometimes (“All About Eve”?) villainous. Of course the image applies to critics of many stripes: A vivid recent exemplar is the food critic in the animated film “Ratatouille.” But at least he clearly loves food; in “Ruthless The Musical,” the daughter of a character named Lita Encore says: Oh mother hates anything to do with show business; she’s a theater critic.

But if the image of the theater critic is more or less fixed in people’s minds thanks to these works, the definition of a critic is now in flux. This is due to many factors, including the tough economy, the convulsive changes in journalism, and the rise of the Internet. It has been estimated that there are some 300,000 arts-related bloggers. Can any of them be considered theater critics?

“I don’t see anything in the blogosphere that has the gravitas and the reach of the newspaper journalistic establishment,” said Stephen Hendel, the lead producer of “Fela!”

John Simon goes (much) further. “No matter how wrongheaded a critic may be,” he said recently, “he or she’s always better than the bloggers. The bloggers are the vermin of this society.” (And this is a mellowed John Simon, now 85, and the critic at Bloomberg News. Actors still quote his acerbic personal attacks on them while he was a critic for New York Magazine as evidence they had arrived.)

Others are less dismissive. Howard Sherman, the executive director of the American Theatre Wing, sees the Internet as potentially an “enormous opportunity for established, disenfranchised and aspiring critics and the artists they write about” to expand and deepen coverage. However, he personally has not seen it reach its potential yet.

ATCA, the only national organization of American theater critics (most of whom work outside New York), has formed a committee to figure out new criteria for membership. Right now they admit people who, as they put it, write professionally, regularly and with substance about the theater. But what does professional mean at a time when only a handful of critics derive all their income from their reviews? Even newspaper staff critics are often expected to write various kinds of feature stories. And has the Web (with its hyperlinks and reader interaction, etc.) changed the definition of substantive?

The International Association of Theatre Critics, or IATC, recently came up with a 10-point “Code of Practice.” Examples (put more succinctly than they do): 4. Be open-minded. 6. Be alert during a performance. 7. Use concrete examples to back up your evaluations. The Canadian Theatre Critics Association has a “code of ethics” which is also something of a code of practice. (“The critic should, whenever possible, prepare in advance of a performance” — by reading the hand-outs and if possible the script.)

I believe that a good critic needs three basic qualities: 1. Independent judgment rooted in education and experience. 2. An ability to articulate one’s views with clarity, backing them up with accurate and concrete examples. 3. Taste generally shared with the intended audience.

ARE THEATER CRITICS CRUCIAL?

In his provocative way, Kristoffer Diaz, the playwright of the Pulitzer finalist drama, “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” who earlier had sparked a conversation on Twitter by calling for a moratorium on productions of Shakespeare, recently tweeted that he would prefer the work of playwrights be reviewed by other playwrights, and for them to judge the work “on its own term, not so much for the benefit of the artist, but for audiences, funders, and producers.” Few theater people would go so far as to call for the elimination of theater critics, and when I followed up with Diaz, he said that what he wanted was “a more diverse group of critics (age/race/ethnicity/aesthetic).”

I waded into a Twitter gripefest about reviews of “Neighbors” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and coverage of his subsequent play, “The Octoroon: An Adaptation of the Octoroon Based on the Octoroon.” The conversation became a more general discussion of the damage that a critic can do. But even here, when I contacted the tweeters directly, nobody inveighed against the existence of critics. “Reviews are absolutely needed, they are a critical part of the process,” said Vickie Ramirez, a playwright and founding member of Amerinda Theater. The problem, she said, was when a single review “can stop a writer from ever working again.” The issue is not the criticism per se, but the choice of targets and the timing. “Nobody’s saying don’t review,” Ramirez said. “Time it well, and maybe bring out the big guns just for bigger productions.”

Several of the panelists at the O’Neill gave the exact opposite examples — of how a review early in their career gave them a crucial lift.
“I was in a very low place, and it told me to keep going,” playwright Adam Rapp told of such a review when he was 29. “It’s such an interesting, complicated relationship between artists and critics.There are peaks and valleys: You read them, you don’t read them, you read them obsessively.”

Theater critics can lift careers, boost morale, even help a creative team refashion a show. But they do not exist just to inspire and enrage theater people. Their purpose is to guide audiences. As Pauline Kael liked to say: “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

And, says Howard Sherman, critics not only guide audiences but help create and maintain them:

“Without critics and arts reporters on staff, there would be no one in media advocating for coverage of theater,” said Sherman, who pointed out he is speaking for himself, not on behalf of his organization (which, among other things, organizes the Tony Awards). He sees the Internet as a new form of word-of-mouth, which represents a “democratization of the critical voice,” but he also sees the importance of the traditional critic. “The more people we have talking (writing) about theater, the greater opportunity we have to engage audiences, be it for a particular show or the form as a whole.”

Adam Rapp was typical in his belief that theater critics are important, and in his ambivalence about that importance. “I have great respect for what critics do,” he said. “I’d like to think they want to see plays, and they care about audiences and culture. Sometimes I don’t feel that way: It’s consumer advocacy in a thumbs-up/thumbs-down culture. Some critics are doing great things for theater… Some out there should be removed from the planet.”

ARE THEATER CRITICS TOO NEGATIVE?

Wendy Rosenfield, one of the three theater critics for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said that she gets one complaint above all others: “I hear the most that a review I’ve written will discourage people from seeing the show,” she told me. “But I’m in journalism, not public relations. It’s like saying covering political scandals will stop people from voting, or covering a team’s loss or a player’s errors will stop people from attending sporting events.”

That said, Rosenfield also relishes critics’ roles as “catalysts, not just judges. That can be really exciting.”

Some theater people do seem to have a different idea of the purpose of a review, something brought home to me after I pointed out in a review of a play in Soho that the lighting was so inept that the actors often performed in the dark while the lights trained on an empty corner of the stage. The artistic director wrote to my editor to complain, saying that they were an emerging company that needed nurturing; nobody made any money from the production; they all worked hard; and there were 131 lighting cues, a daunting task.

The problem with critics, as many theater people seem to see it, is in the glee with which they attack what they see as inadequate, the snarky put-downs, the effort to come off as witty at the expense of a show and the people who worked so hard to put it together. Chicago Tribune movie (and former theater) critic Michael Phillips likes to quote a line from Lorrie Moore’s “Anagrams” in which a character wonders whether “all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind.”

Some theatergoers also get the sense that critics have become jaded, that all those nights of theater-going have taken away the enjoyment that regular people would experience. To quote from “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” by Jean Kerr: “In many ways, a drama critic leads an ideal existence, or would if he didn’t have to see so many plays.” (See Twitter conversation: Why is there this a disparity between what critics like and what the general public likes? Scroll to Wednesday)

Kris Vire, theater critic for Time Out Chicago, sees it differently: “We critics hope to like what we see—we do it out of passion.”

Some critics of critics question whether theater critics should review shows they know they are extremely unlikely to like. John Simon is not shy about his distaste for rock ‘n’ roll. So why should he review “Million Dollar Quartet”?
“Admittedly no fan of rock ‘n’ roll, I assume that only the most monomaniacal rocker could find the pseudo-musical Million Dollar Quartet anything more than a jam session periodically interrupted by desperate attempts to whip up some drama,” he wrote. “The amplification to arena volume shoehorned into a mere Broadway theater treats one’s eardrums as percussion instruments.”

New York Times critic Charles Isherwood (and many others) gave “Million Dollar Quartet” a positive review, as he did “American Idiot” and “Rock of Ages” etc.; it is obvious that he is a fan of rock music. However, one could make a similar case as the one concerning Simon and rock music with Isherwood and the librettist and lyricist Joe DiPietro.
“’Memphis’ is the Michael Bolton of Broadway musicals,” Isherwood wrote of DiPietro’s most successful musical to date. “’Falling for Eve’… makes for a numbingly bland 90 minutes of musical theater,” Isherwood wrote about DiPietro’s latest. “Sinning has rarely seemed so insipid.” Isherwood called DiPietro’s “Toxic Avenger” a “dopey, intermittently funny show,” whose “paucity of plot” is exceeded by “the monotony of the elbow-in-ribs handling.”

But Vire says that a critic’s taste should not be a problem, especially when it is so clear. “Find a critic whose opinion mirrors yours,” he advises, “and follow them.”

IS CRITICISM DYING?

It might have seemed easier in the past to find a critic in sync with your own views, when most cities had more than one newspaper and many newspapers had more than one critic. But A.O. Scott holds a “contrarian” position. After he learned that “At the Movies” was being killed, which came shortly after the news that Variety was firing its long-time film and theater critics (planning to use freelancers in their stead), he gave a talk on the future of criticism. “The future of criticism is the same as it ever was,” he wrote afterward. “Miserable, and full of possibility.”

It may seem as if there are fewer professional critics; many are certainly making less money and/or working much harder. After the sudden recent death of Mike Kuchwara, the Associated Press’ theater critic, and arguably the first or second most influential critic in the nation, there was some speculation that he might not even be replaced. But the A.P. is now advertising to hire “a theater critic and pop culture reporter” – that’s one person with two jobs.

But when I asked the critic in charge of membership at the theater critics association whether she has seen a decline in numbers, she said no. “It fluctuates, like the stock market,” said Pam Harbaugh, critic for Florida Today. (Membership hovers around 200). Long-time member Ira Bilowit wrote his first review in 1953, and worked for 26 years at Backstage. He is still writing reviews, but does so now for a couple of websites, and he is not alone in that transition.

It is tempting to conclude with a paragraph by A.O. Scott: “Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.”

A more satisfying end is a line from “La Bete,” coming to Broadway next season, by a character who is an actor: “I much prefer to any drooling fan/ A critic who will SLICE me into parts!/ God love the critics! Bless their picky hearts!”

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To follow news, views and debates about the theater, follow Jonathan Mandell on Twitter at New York Theater.
Disclosure: I attended the conference of ATCA (the American Theater Critics Association) as a new member. Some of the comments came from conversations there; most are from my Twitter feed or e-mail exchanges.