Arts Journalism, Say Arts Journalists, Isn't Dying -- It's a Poltergeist

This post is cross-posted at the new Clyde Fitch Report, which is in beta. Do check it out and send comments.

Tom Jacobs, who wrote for me at Back Stage until a combination of things -- mostly the ill-advised elimination of a freelance budget -- made that an impossibility, has a fascinating story up on Miller-McCune.com called "Will Critique Work for Food." The website is the digital platform of the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, and the piece is on arts journalism and what has happened and is still happening to it. But the story isn't about the writing itself so much as those who put their fingers to keyboard and type away:

The situation is most dire for the journalists themselves, who find themselves no longer able to make a living pursuing their passion. But it is also of great concern to arts administrators, who are just now coming to grips with the impending cutoff of one of their strongest lines of communication with the community. After complaining for years of unfair or insensitive reviews, they have come to the realization that the only thing worse than getting criticized is being ignored.

Arts journalism in the United States will surely survive — but in what form? To explore that question, Miller-McCune.com spoke with number of people in the arts, journalism and academia, including Doug McLennan, the founder and editor of artsjournal.com. That site, which celebrates its 10th anniversary in September, aggregates arts stories from newspapers around the world. It also provides a forum for a variety of bloggers who write with intelligence and style on different disciplines.

A former staff writer with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (the industry's most recent print casualty, which became an online-only product as of March 17) and Seattle Weekly, McLennan also heads the scaled-back National Arts Journalism Program, and in that capacity he has been tracking some disturbing figures. He estimates that in 2005, there were approximately 5,000 staff positions on American newspapers that involved writing about the arts. These include critics, feature writers, reporters who cover cultural news — and the many journalists who juggle all three of those roles.

Today, he estimates that due to layoffs, cutbacks and the closure of several prominent papers (including, another recent victim, Denver's Rocky Mountain News), that number is down to 2,500. That's a 50 percent decline in only four years — a disproportionate loss even for an industry in decline. (Advertising Age recently
estimated that one newspaper job in four has been lost since 1990.) Sean Means, film critic of the Salt Lake City Tribune, is independently keeping a running tally of colleagues who have been laid off over the past three years. The total is up to 49.

This raises the question that I and others have asking for some time: What will happen to arts journalism and what will become of the arts journalists? Will new generations of arts journalists have a shot at making any kind of real living? These are questions that the following answers jointly:

Arts journalism has traditionally performed a variety of functions. It heightens awareness of the arts and the role they play within a community. It provides a consumer guide by critiquing individual exhibits, productions and performances.

It educates readers by analyzing current offerings in terms of their social or historical context. It serves as a watchdog by chronicling how cultural institutions spend public money, and it entertains by introducing readers to artists of all sorts through personality profiles that help demystify the creative process.

It seems likely that, in a post-newspaper society, some of those tasks will be split off and accomplished in different ways. Community awareness is increasingly falling to the arts groups themselves (as we'll discuss later). Reviews and analysis are rapidly migrating to niche Web sites, such as Lawrence A. Johnson's South Florida Classical Review.

"I'm doing this because I think newspapers are on their way out, and something has to take their place," Johnson explains. "The music deserves a certain sounding board. In cities where they don't have a regular critic, mediocrity tends to be the rule."

A former music critic for the Miami Herald, Johnson launched the site last June, "during that awkward period between the announcement of layoffs and the day I got the official word I was getting the heave-ho." On his site, he does pretty much everything he used to do for the Herald, only with no restrictions on length. He then sells some of his reviews back to the Herald and other area papers at a freelance rate.

"I think that's the future," he says. "I think you're going to see more sites like this that serve as the origination point of the coverage."

So, in other words, there will still be arts journalism, but people won't make a living at it, most likely. (I also happen to believe that the consumer will be somewhat confused in terms of who to believe, who to listen to, who to read and what criticism to ingest more seriously than others. This is great if the goal, say, here in New York is to diminish the all-powerful New York Times, but that, my friends, has already occurred.) This is how Johnson does it:

After some internal debate, Johnson decided to make his site a for-profit operation; he decided whatever funds he could get from foundations wouldn't be worth the headache of completing grant applications. His income is from sales back to newspapers and banner ads on his site, which so far have been purchased primarily by smaller and (to his mind) more forward-thinking music organizations.

His site also includes contributions from a couple of colleagues around the state; he doesn't pay them at the moment, but plans to do so eventually. "My overhead is relatively low," he notes. "I don't have levels and levels of editors. I just need a little slice of advertising to keep it going. I live pretty frugally."

That's admirable, if sad, if inspiring. Jacobs also talks to my friend and colleague, Martin Denton:

Johnson need only look north to find a similar site that has been self-sustaining for more than a decade. Martin Denton started nytheatre.com in 1996 as a hobby. He quit his day job and turned it into a full-time endeavor in 1999.

Last year he had an impressive 3.4 million visitors — many of which, he admits, were merely looking for a theater's address or checking the time their show began. But he also has a "core readership" of several hundred thousand people who appreciate the fact his site reviews virtually every show in town — even those in small, out-of-the-way venues.

It's a tiny operation: Denton runs it out of his home and his mother oversees the business side. Unlike Johnson, he opted to file for nonprofit status, which gives him access to grant money. About one-third of his $100,000 annual budget comes from government sources (both the state and city of New York contribute).

He also sells banner ads, and like Johnson, he reports no problems with advertisers demanding a positive review as a quid pro quo. "They're paying for a certain number of eyeballs on the ad," he says. "If they get that, they don't care what our review says."

Those reviews are written by theater professionals who do not get paid for their work. Denton admits that keeping the quality high with volunteer labor is a challenge, but he has managed to avoid the potential pitfalls of peer-to-peer criticism, such as reviews tinged by personal or professional grudges. "Everybody's grown up," he insists. "They understand constructive criticism is valuable."

Of course, constructive criticism is always valuable. The whole history of 20th century theatre criticism is filled with stories along the lines of Sylvia Miles dumping a plate of spaghetti on top of John Simon's head as opposed to the way Elliot Norton helped Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein turn a mediocre musical called Away We Go into one far more memorable called Oklahoma!

But let's remember, the initial pretext for Jacobs' article was not whether criticism as an organism would survive, or survive insofar as superlative writing quality goes, but whether the situation for arts journalist may, in the final analysis, be anything but -- to reuse Jacobs' term -- "dire." And here's the problem: Denton may even offer superior criticism on his site, and his business model may be predicated entirely on volunteer reviewing, but isn't it volunteer reviewing that devalues the very idea of the arts journalist? In simplest terms, by not paying the arts journalist, does the arts journalist have intrinsic -- by that I mean measurable -- value? What is wrong with making a living as an arts journalist? What's so grand, so admirable, so pride-inducing, so inexhaustibly unassailable, about not paying arts journalists? This doesn't just apply to Denton's site -- far from it. Lots of bloggers out there write for nothing. More and more, let's of journalists that still have staff positions at established publications are being asked to do more and more, like blogging, for no additional compensation. And in terms of those who aren't with a staff position at a major publication, let's not debate what does and does constitute an arts journalist, for I believe that if you're writing about the arts and you're having what you write about the arts published and consumers are reading and consuming that coverage, you're an arts journalist. Period. (Yes, that includes bloggers.) After all:

...As Denton notes, ["an aura of authoritativeness"] works well if you're buying a computer component, but it's not all that helpful when it comes to evaluating a CD or theatrical production. For that kind of advice, you want someone with knowledge and experience who can judge a work of art thoughtfully and write about it in an interesting way — in other words, a critic.

I just feel that if "you want someone with knowledge and experience who can judge a work of art thoughtfully and write about it in an interesting way," such knowledge and experience ought to have a monetary value. Only in something like arts journalism would it be assumed ok to pay not one dime for such skills.

Meanwhile, Jacobs goes to a great source for yet another perspective: Sasha Anawalt, director of the Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program at the University of Southern California:

Anawalt also can imagine the day when major arts organizations, or perhaps consortia of such groups, may hire established arts journalists and give them a prominent online forum. After all, many companies stepped up their education component when arts-appreciation courses were dropped from school-district curricula. Similarly, they may decide that supporting arts journalism is well worth the relatively small expense.

"I don't think arts organizations should pay critics to review their wares, but I'm old school — the conflict of interest stops me dead," says Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett, who has announced plans to write a blog for artsjournal.com. "But a group of arts organizations in a city can support the right kind of arts blogger or arts news site."

But even a high-quality, well-read Web site has a limited reach. Newspapers, at least in their heyday, were read by nearly every member of a given community (or at least everyone with a certain level of income and education). Few may have devoured the review of the new exhibit at the art museum, but casual readers very likely glanced at the photos and received — at least subliminally — the impression that something interesting was going on there.

"Web sites tend to be very focused," notes Gil Cates, managing director of the Geffen Playhouse in West Los Angeles (and producer of the annual Academy Awards broadcast). "It's that general audience that is the hardest to reach. I want to attract the crowd that looks at a newspaper on a Saturday and asks, 'What do you want to do tonight?'

"The audience has to know about what's going on in the theater in order to decide whether they are going to come," he reasons. "It's true there is the Internet, including things like Facebook. But the majority of theatergoers tend to be over 40, and they're not as new-media-inclined as the younger generation. They get most of their information from television, radio and newspapers. So when you start cutting
people who write about what we do, it's serious."

That last line is very powerful, you know. Because the situation really is serious. And websites have a fast-growing, but still (for now) limited, reach. It's a generational thing, a consumer-behavior thing, and I think arts organizations have a responsibility to not stand on the sidelines in this moment, as some (not those cited in the article) seem to be doing. Truthfully, I wouldn't trust a nonprofit arts group, "or perhaps consortia of such groups," to "hire established arts journalists and give them a prominent online forum." It wouldn't be in their interest to allow arts journalists to truly write freely. My God, look at all the nonprofit institutional theaters in New York getting on the bandwagon of inviting bloggers to super-early previews of their shows. They're banking on the idea that those bloggers will create buzz, which is their motivation for calling these invitations a "marketing initiative." These groups do not have the balls or the brains to actually consider these bloggers what they are -- legitimate critics, real honest-to-God critics and arts journalists; people who in any other time, in any other era, would have had real job at real publications and would have made real salaries -- and thus invite them to critics' performances. No, what they've done is create a Jim Crow era for arts journalism. That, too, devalues arts journalists and arts journalism.

Smartly, Jacobs ends his story with some hope:

"It's an incredibly exciting time to be an arts journalist. We're in a sort of Wild West of invention. I think what comes out eventually will be far superior to what we have had."

But will an economic model be found to support all this innovation? McLennan — who recently hired two assistants to help him edit artsjournal.com — is an optimist. His operation makes a decent profit thanks in part to subscribers who pay him to have information get e-mailed directly to their inbox. It's the same stuff they can find on his Web site, but they're willing to pay for the convenience of direct delivery.

McLennan compares standalone niche Web sites to small literary magazines, which seldom make money and usually fold when their founder burns out. "It's very hard selling an ad on a blog that gets 1,000 hits a day," he admits. "But if you band together with 10 other blogs — say a theater blog bands together with a music blog and a visual arts blog — your universe of potential advertisers grows enormously.

"Historically it has been true that if you could put together an audience for something that you did, there was a way to make money at it. I refuse to believe the laws of human nature are going to be suspended because of the Internet."

Of course, forging a career without the safety net provided by a large employer is not for the timid. To pursue their calling, arts journalists will need to be both dedicated and imaginative. In other words, their lives will resemble those of another group of highly committed, risk-taking professionals ... artists.

And I agree: the laws of human nature will not be suspended because of the Web. Indeed, the business model that allowed arts journalists to make a living have alreadybeen suspended, hence the move toward entrepreneurial models. The question is how to reinvent the form without devaluing not just the work, again, but the idea of simply making a living. Let's hope the reinvention is here sooner, not later.

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What Is a Critic? The Daily Gorilla Goes Ape

Lord knows I'm not the first to bloviate on how the definition of the critic is changing. Recently, I came across a Daily Gorilla essay, Demise of the Critic, that gave me pause. It is written by one of the site's primary primates, Thomas Garry, and his thesis is that the blogosphere, owing to the print media death-spiral, is not changing the idea of what a critic is so much as diluting it, and that quality standards, always a subjective measure, are falling in the process. "As newspapers and magazines lay off professional critics and young twentysomethings anoint themselves experts," Garry writes, "the review has fallen on hard times. As critics shift from being the sole educated authorities into a percentage point on review-aggregating websites, some fear the nuance they once brought has fallen victim to the nagging blogger."

Note the assumptions in Garry's statement: that critics can and, in fact, must exist in traditional media only; that all blogger-critics are self-anointed and therefore, by definition, are untrained, unscrupulous, unwashed; that no blogger-critic can possess the credentials, the education, the wherewithal intellectually to write criticism worthy of the term.

As someone who has worked in print and Web journalism extensively, and as someone who is a committed blogger-critic and whose writing, I think, meets any fair standard of good or great criticism, I feel that Garry is rather obviously neglecting to acknowledge the long tradition of mediocre, willfully ignorant critics in print; that so many of them have lacked and continue to lack the academic background or the training as a practitioner to develop and deliver criticism that is both informed and constructive to the artists and audience. There is a difference between criticism that artists may disagree with, due to varying aesthetic judgments, and criticism that is inadequate because the critic possesses only some of the tools necessary to do the job effectively.

To buttress his assumptions and burnish his thesis, Garry opens his essay by raising the specter of Tom Moon, a music critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 20 years. The "biggest difference between old reviews and reviews now is that in the past," Moon moans, "the critic’s job was to give readers a deeper sense of the work." Now, he says, critical standards are cratering because bloggers represent a "megaphone" culture that values amplification of bloggers' own views over any further investigation of the work itself.

Perhaps this is the case in music criticism -- it isn't an area of the practice I am well-versed in. But I do, however, resent how Garry uses Moon's view to imply that all criticism is wounded by the rise of the blogger-critic. My sense of the theatrosphere is the opposite: As so many theater critics in print are preoccupied with crafting phrases useful in posters and ads, and attempting to outdo each other with a consumer-is-king mindset, the theatrosphere's benefit is that it's critics do focus on the work critically. Dance-oriented blogger-critics may be fewer in number but their presence, no doubt due to the aforementioned death-spiral, is even more essential currently and thereby more beneficial. Art criticism, architecture criticism, even literary criticism are all vastly improved, I would argue, because print will no longer permit young talent to get their feet wet, to generate the storehouse of cultural memory that makes a promising critic into a good critic into a great critic over the course of a professional lifetime.

Indeed, Moon's issue, sadly, is age -- or as Garry phrases it, the issue is that as "wannabe critics turn to online publication, they no longer have to be deemed knowledgeable enough by an editor." Here's another assumption: editors are knowledgeable. In my experience as writer for more than 20 publications theater-related and otherwise through the years as a freelancer and a staffer, decision-making editors only know enough about various art forms and genres about 50 percent of the time. Meaning no disrespect, for example, to The New York Times, but when was the last time a decision-making arts editor came at their position after a period of immersion -- either as a journalist-critic or as a practitioner? Moon finally articulates the generational crux of the matter when he expresses resentment that "some 20-year-old trust-fund kid thinks that TV on the Radio sucks.”

Garry laments the passing of an era in which "a single critic, like New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, could deliver a positive review and instantly propel a film into the general public’s consciousness." But I would argue that concentrating power in the hands of a few critics tends to encourage art-makers to cater to the known aesthetics of those critics, and that such slavishness tends to inhibit innovation and creativity. All critics have their likes and dislikes, of course, but when you focus power tightly, you can choke the air in the room where art wants to breathe.

And why doesn't Garry include theater criticism in his piece? Or do the monkeys of the Daily Gorilla prefer their second bananas simply on the boob tube?

Or the silver screen: Garry begins to bring his piece to a conclusion by writing about how "users are more likely to turn to websites like Rotten Tomatoes, a popular film-review aggregating website, and the Internet Movie Database, where movies are ranked out of 10 stars and all reviews are user-generated." Then he reinforces my earlier point: "If people can turn to the consensus of dozens of critics, why should they depend on only one?" Precisely.

As for Garry quoting J.D. Hoffman, the film critic -- “Internet users are more likely to check out Rotten Tomatoes than to read an actual review from a newspaper.... It’s so much easier for people to read the one pull quote they provide than to read an entire review" -- I'm not at all sure that's so. I think, more accurately, people aren't reading print as a whole the way they used to. And that's a bigger issue than what it is that we call a critic.

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Mark Shenton Makes Me Hunger for London Theatre and Spotted Dick

All right, all right, I could live without spotted dick. But who can live without London theatre? I can, apparently, because I've gone 10 years -- this is horribly embarrassing -- without a visit to one of my favorite cities on the planet.

From 1990 to 1998 I visited London a bunch of times and I always saw shows while there. (An afternoon of Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins in A Delicate Balance left me limp with ecstasy.) Since then, well, not so much. Sometimes it was a financial decision, sometimes it was a matter of Ken and I wanting to take holidays that were real holidays -- meaning no theatre for me, given that I see 150-200 shows a year.

But then, I read my friend Mark Shenton's piece in The Stage. It covers a lot of ground insofar as being a critic and what it means -- and what it doesn't mean. I recommend that everybody read this. It's very insightful and awfully well put together. Here's a sample:

One of the special privileges of being a critic, and one I try not to take for granted, is that while the rest of the public scrambles for impossible-to-get tickets, we’re actually invited to be there. And last week, even as David Tennant’s late return to Hamlet put an even greater premium on those seats, we were invited to see it again last Wednesday, even though most of us had seen the production twice already - once at Stratford last August, then again at the London opening, when Tennant’s understudy Edward Bennett had to stand in for him.

But one of the special problems of being a critic, and one that I know most of my friends try not to take me for granted over, is that sometimes it is thought that we have special access for others, too.

One friend who has been away in Australia for the last few months sent me an e-mail last week: “Can you a get me a comp for August: Osage County at the National. I hear from friends it’s a fab piece of theatre and I’d love to see it.”

Yes, it is, I replied - but the entire run is sold out, too. Meanwhile, another veteran theatregoer friend also wrote last week: “I saw Hamlet last week. Fine production (but I wouldn’t expect anything less from Greg Doran) and I was very impressed by Edward Bennett - he was my 61st Hamlet!! But I really would like to make Mr Tennant my 62nd.” And he begged my help to try to make it happen.

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Kudos to American Theatre Web

The ever-industrious and intrepid Andy Propst, guru of American Theatre Web (and with whom I was privileged to teach at the O'Neill this past weekend), pointed me to two articles concerned with the state and the future of arts criticism, which was a big topic over the weekend, as one might expect. It was also a huge topic when I attended the national conference of the American Theatre Critics Association in DC a few weeks ago.

So first, if you're not acquainted with ATW, get thee there immediately.

And specifically, get thee to the page with links to the two articles. And discuss.

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A Novel Way to Rate Critics

I came across this courtesy of my blogging colleague Tom Garvey in Boston. This is hysterical. Can you imagine what the New York graph would look like?

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You Want to Worship at the Shrine of Repertory Companies? Read This Article

I just came across Louise Kennedy's fascinating piece in today's Boston Globe. While the people in the blogosphere have been talking about change and new models and revolution and whatever else they think is going to transform the American theatre into something they can't articulate in a single sentence, one model that still seems to get a decent reception (or less antipathy) is the repertory theatre model.

Kennedy's piece, about ART in Boston, should thus be required reading. Read this paragraph:

....ART is at a critical juncture in its decades-long history as a Harvard affiliate, with a university search committee apparently stalled in its quest for an artistic director to replace Robert Woodruff, whose contract wasn't renewed by the university last year. I know nothing about how that process is going, beyond that Anna D. Shapiro, a respected director from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company whose "August: Osage County" is now on Broadway, turned the job down, and that the search is continuing. But I do know that the committee has no hope of finding the right artistic director if it doesn't have a very, very clear sense of the artistic direction it wants the ART to take.

Now, this raises the question: If the blogosphere still feels the repertory theatre model might be desirable, what is its point? What are its goals? Or what should they be? Is it, as some have said, to create new work? Does everyone feel ART and similar groups need resident playwrights? Or are there other aesthetic goals that may be desirable as well?

Meantime, there's another part of Kennedy's piece that I have a problem with -- the two graphs preceding the one cited above:

My frustration, I think, has some of the same roots as my admiration. Before becoming the Globe's theater critic, I spent nearly five years as an arts reporter, often writing preview features in advance of a show's opening. As it happened, many of these previews concerned the ART, so I've spent a lot of hours in the company's basement rehearsal space at Zero Church Street, in its offices at the Loeb Drama Center, and in conversation with many of its staff members, directors, and actors, as well as in the audience at the Loeb and the new theater space at Zero Arrow.

Some might argue that that's too much inside information for a critic to have, and I'll admit that it's sometimes challenging for me to write a strong critique of work by people I have come to like as well as respect. (Of course, since becoming the critic I have no longer attended any rehearsals or other "backstage" events.) But I also know that having observed the process, not just the productions, at the ART has given me a deep appreciation of the company's passions, its vision, and its creative ferment. And that's why I know it could be better than it often is.

Well, perhaps some might argue "that that's too much inside information for a critic to have," but I'd argue that Kennedy is doing ART, as well as her own profession, a disservice by refusing to continue attending such events. By erecting a wholly artificial wall between critics and artists, Kennedy neither helps her readers, nor helps ART, nor helps herself as a critic.

To be clear, I have no problem with Kennedy airing her concerns about ART within the public sphere. In fact, as a nonprofit that likely receives one or more forms of public subsidy (from the city of Boston, state of Massachusetts, or the federal government), one could easily argue that it's a matter of the public's right to know.

But Kennedy, like it or not, I believe has a moral responsibility to act like the member of the theatrical community that the Boston Globe theatre critic must must must -- she is, indeed, an essential and irrevocable part of that community. By separating herself from artists, she loses the valuable insight she had gained as a result of her earlier interactions. That helps no one.

Now, perhaps the Boston Globe's policy prevents Kennedy, at the mouth of a gun or whatever, from consorting with those horrid artists, lest it give the appearance of corruption or otherwise taints her objectivity. If so, it's theatre artists who ought to be outraged by this. Of course, they won't express that outrage -- artists are just as guilty as critics for the adversarial relationship between the two.

By the way, I know several editors who disagree with me, and that's their issue -- or bias, or lack of vision, or insecurity, or terror, or whatever it is. I believe that to support the separation of critics and artists is to drive a stake into the heart of the art form. Period.

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The Casual Casuistry of George Hunka (Updated)

(NOTE I: There were some horrid typos and grammatical mistakes and just plain sloppiness in the original version of this post, so I have fixed those. I also removed a pair of passages that one person felt was somehow getting in the mud. I disagree, but as the offending passage wasn't all that germane, out it went.)

(NOTE II: The current count on this post is four private emails thanking me for writing this and one suggesting otherwise.)

(NOTE III: I fully expect certain people to rush to the defense of the person I'm discussing in this post. That's fine. Those who hate me will hate me anyway.)

My colleague Mark Shenton from London -- who I ran into at the Lincoln Center Cymbeline -- alerted me to a post from George Hunka on the Guardian's arts blog in which he gleefully draws and quarters American theatre critics, bemoaning the perceived lack of fine contemporary criticism. Oh, for the days when Bentley and Brustein were young! Oh, for the days when Gilman and Esslin were the it! Hunka's nose, I should note, must be profoundly brown from kissing the ass of critic Michael Billington of The Guardian, of whom he speaks in his post in worshipping terms. Funny thing, praising the critic of the paper paying you to post. Or pillar to post. Anyway...

Here's a quote from Hunka's piece:

When, as a teenager thinking about making a career as a dramatist, I read this criticism, I found critics who believed in a theatre and drama of profound significance to contemporary culture and society; at the same time, they considered 3,000 years of an art form that had over its history touched the deepest wellsprings of human fear and desire. These critics knew that history intimately, too, and engaged with it critically and with enthusiasm. They were as educative, and as inspiring, as reading the plays and playwrights they most carefully and brilliantly considered.

Theatre critics of yore "considered 3,000 years of an art form that had over its history touched the deepest wellsprings of human fear of desire" and now they do not? Really? Is that not a tad hyperbolic? Hunka decries -- as if the world is really desperate for more people to ascribe more power to the New York Times, so as to attack it -- the fact that Brantley has edited only one book and Isherwood written only one book (about a gay porn star). As if they're all we have to talk about in the realm of contemporary theatre criticism.

Hunka's sense of history has more holes in it than Gary Gilmore post-execution. First, let's be clear: there are a lot of critics beyond the Times' terrible twosome. He might have written, for example, about Michael Feingold, who hasn't written any book-length criticism that I know of (book-length criticism is apparently the sole standard of excellence), but does anyone question that Feingold has written more intelligently, thoroughly, and exquisitely on the theatre over the last 35 years than anyone else? Does Hunka believe Feingold does not, in his criticism, consider "3,000 years of an art form that had over its history touched the deepest wellsprings of human fear of desire"?

Hunka ignores the work of Julius Novick (active until recently), and reaching back a little bit, Walter Kerr, Harold Clurman, and Mel Gussow, all of whom, I think, wrote quite eloquently and often on the post-1945 American theatre. Ignoring Kerr is weirdly tragic: he wrote How Not to Write a Play (1955), Criticism and Censorship (1957), Pieces at Eight (1958), The Decline of Pleasure (1962), The Theatre in Spite of Itself (1963), Tragedy and Comedy (1967), Thirty Plays Hath November (1969), God on the Gymnasium Floor (1971), and The Silent Clowns (1975) all while at the old Herald-Tribune and, later, the Times (links courtesy of the dreaded Wikipedia).

Hunka ignores the work of Stanley Kauffman, and John Simon.

Hunka ignores the work of John Heilpern of the New York Observer, whose Conference of the Birds is an unquestionably important work, and whose recent biography of John Osbourne has been widely acclaimed.

(It also occurs to me that while Hunka decries the lack of book-length critical studies that are not from the academic marketplace (what an absurd measurement for what is acceptable criticism), we have, perhaps, some of the finest critic-biographers we've ever had. Anyway...)

Hunka ignores the pioneering criticism of Edith Oliver, who wrote for The New Yorker for 40 years -- no, she didn't publish a full-length book of criticism, but does any publication give its critics the latitude of The New Yorker, and did she not take advantage of it? Is Hunka unfamiliar with John Lahr, the current theatre critic at The New Yorker? People may cavil at his insistence upon revealing essential plot details, but his biographical profiles are essential reading for theater lovers -- and Lahr's book on Coward is exceptionally good. People may cavil with the opinions of Lahr's second string, Hilton Als, but not only is Als exceptionally perceptive and often persuasive, he's the only major critic of color in New York City -- and the fact that most people are unaware of it is a tribute to his skills as a critic and writer generally. Like John Lahr, Als won the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism. Here are some more George Jean Nathan winner Hunka ignores:

2005-2006
Charles Isherwood
2004-2005
Raymond Knapp
2003-2004
Trey Graham
2002-2003
Hilton Als
2001-2002
Daniel Mendelsohn
2000-2001
Laurence Senelick
1999-2000
Albert Williams
1998-99
Michael Goldman
1997-98
Alisa Solomon
1996-97
Ben Brantley, Elinor Fuchs, and Todd London
1995-96
Michael Feingold
1994-95
Robert Hurwitt
1993-94
Marvin Carlson and John Lahr
1992-93
David Cole
1991-92
Kevin Kelly
1990-91
Jonathan Kalb
1989-90
Steven Mikulan
1988-89
Eileen Blumenthal
1987-88
Scott Rosenberg
1986-87
Robert Brustein
1985-86
Gordon Rogoff
1984-85
Jan Kott
1983-84
Bonnie Marranca
1982-83
Herbert Blau
1981-82
Julius Novick
1980-81
Carolyn Clay and Sylviane Gold
1979-80
Sean Mitchell
1978-79
Jack Kroll
1977-78
Mel Gussow
1976-77
Bernard Knox
1975-76
Michael Goldman
1974-75
No Award Made
1973-74
Albert Bermel
1972-73
Stanley Kauffmann
1971-72
Jay Carr
1970-71
Richard Gilman
1969-70
John Simon
1968-69
John Lahr

Well, let me correct that -- he does not ignore Jonathan Kalb. Good thing, that.

Meanwhile, please notice that many of these critics are outside of New York. Surely Hunka realizes there are, in fact, critics elsewhere, yes? Why does he ignore Charles McNulty, formerly the theatre editor of the Voice, now the theatre critic for the L.A. Times? Or Gordon Rogoff (the link is to a list of books)? Or, back at home, some other NYC heavyweights: Alisa Solomon and Erika Munk?

Why does Hunka cast such a narrow net? Could it be to service his point, to position himself as some kind of cultural arbiter? Could it be that his hope is make the Guardian buy into it?

Hunka writes:

Theatre in America now doesn't produce such critics. When one reads most American drama criticism in newspapers and magazines these days, you realise that the reason for this lack isn't that these critics don't want to write books like Billington's. It's that they can't, even if they wanted to. And that says more about the health of American theatrical and dramatic criticism than it says about the health of theatre and drama in America.

..."because they can't"? Oh, rubbish. As evidenced by the links to the names of these critics, they can and do write books -- and for Hunka to suggest that "books about theatre right now are relegated to university or small presses" demeans the academy -- it demeans anyone publishing books about theater anywhere.

Perhaps the Guardian needs to know what else Hunka believes, a la the 100 Saints disaster.

Hunka writes, in his easily assailable and highly selective "State of the Union," as if it is he who decides what the state of the theatre blogosphere is. Or, to put it in Project Runway terms, if you're in, you're in, if you're out, you're out.

(NOTE: How curious that comments for Hunka's post in the Guardian are turned off.)

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The Death of the Critic, Updated

Lots of discussion lately about criticism, and the death thereof. For one thing, there's a Matt Eagan piece in the Hartford Courant that loudly, quite rightly bemoans that "Daily newspapers are trimming full-time critics faster than they can grow back." But why does he omit any real discussion of theater critics? He talks about film critics left and right, but let's be honest: If you were a publisher of a chain of papers and all you cared about was the bottom line, you could get away with one film critic because it's the same product, no matter where you are. You can't do that with theater, which is why the lack of interest in theater criticism is such a problem.

I post a comment at the end of his article, also, because everybody complains but no one ever does anything to address the problem -- such as flexing economic muscle.

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Mark Ravenhill's Prescription for Theatre Criticism

I had an initial reaction after I read Mark Ravenhill's pseudo-bloggy-op-ed today, and I thought about writing a response that would have demonstrated that writing a book this past summer has not dimmed my affection for fire and brimstone. But for some reason -- inertia? the meds kicking in? -- I decided to wait and re-read the piece tonight. Mr. Clyde is watching the news in the bedroom and I'm here at my desk enjoying the quiet and reflecting on what Ravenhill wrote, and I think I have some non-brimstone thoughts that might be useful for discussion.

Because it's probably not politically intelligent of me to write too much about the inner workings and doings of Back Stage, I'm going to disclose the following in the name of furthering Ravenhill's discussion -- also, the following isn't all that proprietary. When we were overhauling the east and west coast print products and the website, one of the things we looked at was our theatre coverage. We asked and attempted to answer a lot of questions: How much theatre should we cover (thus: what should our budget be and what can we afford)? How much space, in print or on line, should be alloted to our theatre reviews? Should they be of standard length or should they vary? If they vary in length, who decides? What are the determinants? Are there new determinants, new methodologies, new approaches that are worth investigating (sorry if this seems like academese)? Is there recourse for critics, higher-up editors, and companies and productions that disagree with the editorial decisions reached -- or should there be? What is Back Stage's obligation (or any publication's obligation) to the artist? I'll touch on some of these in a moment.

Let me say that I think Ravenhill's point is well-taken: it's ridiculous to argue that the revival of Grease on Broadway, just to take a local example, is worth as much real/virtual ink as Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of the Magical Thinking. However, let's equally acknowledge that there's something uncomfortably highbrow about the argument. Who is to say that the performers and technicians and designers of Grease -- people who see themselves as artists just as Redgrave, Hare and Didion do -- are not artists at all? To what degree should assigning editors be in the business of playing the tastemaker: "that musical is a piece of middlebrow, mainstream, over-revived crap, so let's give it 200 words by a mediocre writer" vs. "that play is a piece of highbrow, elitist refinement, and it's a new play so let's give it 600 words"? These are rhetorical questions, of course, that are important to ask, debate and discuss.

Now, if my job involved assigning theatre reviews at Back Stage (it isn't), I personally would not have a problem playing the tastemaker -- I rather think that what Ravenhill is getting at actually harkens back to a more old-fashioned ethos of journalism that is out of favor. Like Ravenhill, I don't think all theatre is created equal; even if you had an environment in which an editor could leverage unlimited resources (budgets, time, writers, space), that still doesn't mean all theatre intrinsically demands the same attention.

At the same time, there's something to be said for diversifying coverage, and I'll explain what I mean by this in a moment. Before I do, let's note that Ravenhill is not a critic or an editor or an assigning editor and I think it shows in his argument: it's very much "I'm a serious playwright and I deserve more column inches than that crappy musical over there." Not to beat the proverbial horse, but Ravenhill doesn't consider that all those people involved in that crappy musical think they're artists -- and since it is likely that it'll be their show running for years and years, not his; that it'll be their show generating advance sales of millions of dollars, not his, it's all the more reason why the crappy show should (perhaps must) be covered. News is news, and ignoring the elephant in the room doesn't mean it isn't there.

Ravenhill also need to distinguish between types of publications. If you're The New Yorker, for example, you can argue it's much better to have Hilton Als or John Lahr devoting more column inches to richer fare than Grease -- if you count up the column inches those men devote to the gloss and the dross, I think you'll find that to be the case. But Ravenhill isn't prattling on about magazines so much as major dailies, and here you're back to the whole question of how these publications are going to survive in this media-rich environment. The New York Times has to appeal to those readers who want their highbrow reviews of Broadway, their review of the art at the Metropolitan Museum, their reviews of the ballet and the symphony at Carnegie Hall, but they have little choice to appeal to those who want headbanging and poetry slams and Britney's new album and Grey's Anatomy and Taylor Mac.

Hence the argument that word counts should be (relatively) standardized, that the goal is to provide the most broad-based, diverse, anti-tastemaking-oriented coverage possible. Now, I'm quite aware that the Times is totally a tastemaker in NYC, and that has as much to do with perception as anything else. That's a debate for another post.

The real question to me is not whether coverage should ditch covering cheesy musicals so that we may cover edgy plays -- editorially robbing Peter to pacify Paul. Rather, there should be a larger conversation involving critics and artists (and editors) that begins addressing the same questions we found ourselves debating at Back Stage. This is hard stuff; I'm not suggesting we were especially successful. But at least the conversation happened.

Let me go back for a moment, since I implied there would be titillating Back Stage dish with this post. Basically it was me and a few others saying, once again, not all theatre is created equal, and therefore someone must decide what's worth 100, 300, 500, 700 words -- or no words. There was resistance to this, however -- resistance to the idea of playing editorial God. I understand the reasons for this -- one good one is a critic doesn't know the value of something until he or she sees it. And even then, of course, this is only one person's opinion -- is it really efficient or sensible to talk on the telephone after every critic sees every production in order to debate the merits of adding or removing 100 words? Seriously: no critic is going to write shorter reviews voluntarily so longer reviews can run elsewhere. That's just human nature.

To me, somebody's little known first-time-out-of-the-box revival of Marlowe should only get 200 words because, one presumes, they'll be back to offer another production; in the meantime, the 15th revival by the Keen Company, which has proven and time-tested its value, deserves 600 words; so does the new Stolen Chair show that everyone's talking about. To me, an editor ought to be able to make decisions based on instinct, on having been immersed in the field, on a sense of balancing coverage with the intention of being fair. Not everyone is comfortable with that, though, and I must say I do respect the opposing view. And that's the view that prevailed -- all our reviews are 300 words except for the first-string reviews (mine and David Sheward's), which can be 500-600. And yes, I see there's an inherent contradiction in that -- to Ravenhill's point. Absolutely, yes. I'm just shedding some light on how these things are dealt with.

So I guess I don't think the question is how and when and why we should penalize musicals in favor of Pinter (or Ravenhill). I think the question is to what degree major dailies (or trades) are willing to demonstrate the courage, the scope of vision, to look at the scene as a whole and pose creative questions regarding what they should cover and why. Sometimes, yes, that's going to mean covering Grease. Indeed, a decision not to cover Grease will never persuade people to see somebody's 16-hour Kabuki version of Mourning Becomes Electra. But smart editors will cover Mourning Becomes Electra in some way. Just not by punishing one genre to prop up another.

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Comments on "Some Thoughts on Theater Coverage"

As that great poet, Britney Spears, once sang, "Ooops, I did it again." Personally, I prefer that parody of a few years ago, but anyway, I have been amused and nearly amazed by the various comments posted in response to my "Some Thoughts on Theater Coverage" post. I guess my role in the blogosphere, as Jon Stancato told me the other week, is to play the provocateur. All anybody ever does is hate my guts anyway, so I might as well do something constructive with all that energy.

Here are the comments -- and I'm putting them in this post in the hope of spurring additional conversation. I should also note that Tim Errickson asked me if I could stop by and speak at the next Community Dish meeting, and I will be there.

Anonymous said...
Well... I run a pretty well-respected OOB theatre company and I can tell you: 1. I've spent the entire Spring listening to new board members and funding professionals talk about other OOB as "your competition" and 2. y'all media types can be very jealous of each other - I've been told to my face by a senior VV editor that I haven't gotten an Obie in my decades of work because the Village Voice doesn't like the fact that my company's so well-covered by the Times and usually favorably... he said we had become, after early interest from the Voice "too uptown." So, I wish it were as easy as banding together with my OOB sisters to take down The Man but... this is the Big City and we're... competitors? What would you have us do, Mr. J - multi-company subscriptions? What if my audience tells me they just don’t like some other perfectly valid OOB co.'s works? Shall I not… rejoice therefore? I’ll expect unified enlightenment from the OOB world when such wonders as spell-checking in a blog comment window occur…Yours, Lucretia

Leonard Jacobs said...
Thank you for your whiny post. The first thing you might do is stop hiding and quivering behind a cowardly pseudonym and state who you are. The second thing you might do is realize that the problem is that too many of you are hiding behind pseudonyms and whining about bullshit like not getting your Obie because someone at the Village Voice doesn't like the fact that you're covered in the Times. The third thing you might do is realize that, to some extent, I wasn't directing my comments toward you but toward OOB brethren who can't get the Times to even recognize their existence. The fourth thing you might do is understand that the problem is one of groaning self-interest -- everyone talks a good game about OOB as a community, but when push comes to shove, everyone is really out for themselves, and anyone with a leg up on anyone else can just go to hell, and the result of that is that it only perpetuates the problem of media outlets going out of their way to ignore OOB as a whole, and increasingly so, in favor of huge Voice stories about films from 30 years ago. Waaaaaaa, you didn't get your Obie, waaaaaa. Your poor dear. Either acknowledge that you have it better than a lot of people or shut up.

Anonymous said...
True, I do have it much better than most. But, I got it largely by fending off the bullshit of my so-called OOB sisters. Can't tell you how many of them still owe me money for one thing or another or have stabbed me in the back when my back started to peek just a little above the horizon. More to the point, you seem to be pretending to have forgotten that OOB was always a place of artists striving for something more, some step up the food chain. We all want to be Torchsong Trilogy and start out as three small plays in a basement somewhere (OOB), consolidate into a an OB, pick up and Obie, and then move on to B'way. It is the dream that fuels our spirit. If we acknowledge each other as a community, we'll be forced to admit the truth: New York City just has more community theater than most places, and we're it. Mr. J, who in God's dear name would use their own real name in the "blogosphere" as you call it? Blogosphere? Looks like a kind of nasty, petty thunderdome to me. You people don't know how to just talk politely about anything. And with that I'll head on back to reality and talking to people face to face about things. My experiment is done here.Lucretia

Leonard Jacobs said...
I'm glad your experiment is done. Perhaps now you can go off and get an education, and learn how to properly spell Torch Song Trilogy. I haven't in the least forgotten, by the by, that OOB is place for some to graduate from, but your Pollyannish vision of doing plays in a basement, "consolidation" into OB (what does that mean?), winning an Obie, and then "moving on" to Broadway is probably the reason you're stuck where you are. Such fatuous dreaming that is, as if you had a clue about how this business works, which I thought, at first, you did.The one thing this "nasty, petty thunderdome" has going for it is the opportunity for dialogue, for disagreement, for constructive engagement, for change -- and it starts with being open about your identity. You won't admit who you are because you already know your cause is probably lost. Given your attitude, that shows the market pretty well doing its job. Best of luck.

parabasis said...
Hey Leonard,
Some interesting points here. I think people would be more willing to flex muscles if they (we) thought they (we) had any. What ways do you (or other readers) think OOB theatres could get together on this?

Tim said...
Leonard...I'm in agreement. Any interest in coming to the next Dish meeting and discussing it?

Leonard Jacobs said...
Hey Parabasis/Isaac, I think the first problem is the idea that there aren't any muscles to be flexed. It's an Alamo mentality that assumes the cause is lost. I think OOB has economic muscle, artistic muscle, muscle in numbers, and loud voices -- all must be used in order to affect change. The precise manifestation of those muscles is up for grabs. I just think people have to stop whining about the lack of OOB media coverage and start doing specific, credible and coordinated things in order to change the situation. All whining does is promote stasis.

Philucifer [aka Charlie Willis] said...
I know it's kind of silly to even bother, but I want to respond just for a moment to something Lucretia said, because it's endemic these days: "You seem to be pretending to have forgotten that OOB was always a place of artists striving for something more, some step up the food chain. We all want to be Torchsong Trilogy..." While I don't mean to imply this just isn't true -- I see it quite a lot -- not every company or artist who works in OOB has this mentality. And it drives me FREAKIN' NUTS that this is the common (mis)perception, not only from the outside, but quite often from the inside as well. Yes, OOB began with artists wanting more, but it sure wasn't a step up the food chain. How often has a production from La Mama been to Broadway? Was The Living Theatre out there to systematically take over 42nd Street one production at a time? And Joe Cino was, I suppose, working to be the next Nederlander, right? What they WERE doing was looking for a place to do work they believed in, with the freedom to do it the way they thought it should be done. One of the best things about this community, at least in my opinion, is that there's plenty of room for those who are practicing their craft with an eye on a more mainstream career, AND those who are digging in for a life-long residency of bringing stories to the public that are deep and challenging in both subject matter and presentation. Those kinds of stories -- by necessity, and quite understandably -- aren't going to appeal to a large demographic, except under very rare circumstances. Yet OOB is both large enough and diverse enough to accommodate both of these, and everything in between. And for God's sake, can we please stop using "community theatre" as something derogatory and dirty? It's insulting to your community -- the audiences and colleagues who work with and support you on a regular basis.
--Patrick Shearer
Nosedive Productions

Jen said...
Bubbe, you are correct --as usual! I hate to accuse mainstream media of being elitist (!) but that's what happens when the PR companies control what gets reviewed, and not the editors.

RLewis said...
As someone who spent the last 2+ years researching OOB's first 20 years can I just underline what Charlie noted - OOB did NOT come about as a place to develop future Bway shows. Quite the contrary, but times have changed, and there's nothing wrong with that either.And while I have no problems with VV, TONY or even NYT, I do lament the passing of a different kind of press. There have been publications like OFF and Other Stages that once covered the downtown scene - theater-specifically. And maybe they didn't get anyone an Obie, but they played a vital role in our community theater, and cultivated some of our better current critics.Theater-speicific small publications grew a wing of our community that is growing nowhere today, but online. I mean, we're all fortunate to have nytheatre.com (though we know their critics should be tougher on us), but there needs to be much more.The only other hope that I see are the bloggers. The talent is here, if not the attention-span. I wonder if a team of bloggers couldn't rule our community faster and easier than a nation-wide play production (though I know neither are easy). I'm just saying, if we're not allowed to whine, don't we have the tools and talent to begin solving this important issue ourselves?

Leonard Jacobs said...
Patrick -- I totally take your comment on community theatre. It is one of the various things that made me utterly, totally nuts over "Anonymous/Lucretia." I think he/she is a putz.

RLewis, everyone is allowed to whine, but if it is whining for the sake of whining, if there is no solution creation, then it is a waste of energy. And that's one thing I just don't support.

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An Attack on Critics

This one from the U.K. Some interesting thoughts but mostly horse poo.

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Browsing

On today's issue of Browsing:

1) This article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is one of the better calls I've read in some time on behalf of critics and criticism. Trouble is, there's still the whole print vs. Web business model to work out, plus the fact that no one likes critics...

2) Should Ian McKellen strip down to his skivvies -- or beyond -- when he plays Lear in Singapore? My instinct was to say, you know what Singapore? We're gonna take our Shakespeare and go play elsewhere. But the more I think about it, how much better is it to engage people than to disengage with them. So, Sir Ian, keep your booty unrevealed. Plus, we already know you have your, um, SAG card...

3) My pal Matt Freeman has proposed the idea of national premieres for plays. Actually, here's the link to the piece that got Matt thinking. This is very much in the vein of 365 Plays/365 Days, actually, and a nifty idea. What org. would coordinate? How would it work? To be discussed...

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Touch Me in the Brobdingnagian, Then Just Walk Away

Brobdingnagian -- well, it's not the usual word I might use, although this evening, while appearing on a panel sponsored by TRU (Theatre Resources Unlimited), the word kept popping into my head. Perhaps it should have been part of a phrase in my head: Brobdingnagian out of a molehill. Or maybe, better yet: Brobdingnagian bitterness. You'll see why all this nattering adjective-as-noun nonsense in just a wee moment.

It was an interesting panel that featured my critic colleagues Andy Propst and Adam Feldman, my PR colleagues Susan Schulman and Judd Hollander, and playwright Jeffrey Sweet. Jeff was, of course, a very welcome addition to the gabfest: he is a prolific playwright, has taught playwriting (and written about it from a craft perspective for Back Stage), has worked as a critic, and for the Best Plays series now headed up by my friend Jeffrey Jenkins, has been a contributor, editor and commentator. Bob Ost, one of the TRU co-founders, led the discussion, and I must say all of us bucked up under the airless heat of the room quite well. And props to Propst for making sure I knew when it was time for me turn over so as to get my other side roasted. (All right, he didn't really...but I did ask him to.)

We talked about how theatre artists ought to get press and how (and when, and why) they ought not to get press -- all the usual stuff, and certainly valuable information for anyone in the room who didn't know various aspects of this already or who wanted to get into it with more specificity. I ended up mentioning some of the please-please-please-review-me swag I've gotten in the mail of late, including a press packet from the Andhow! Theater Company that included a fake press badge using my IT Awards photo as a negative (foreshadowing?). Some people in the audience, I think, mistakenly got the impression that stunt packaging and bribing me with swag either gets me to the show more quickly (or at all), but what I was doing was just making a point about how (and when, and why) a theatre artists ought to get a critic's attention. Later, in reply to a question that suggesting taking critics to lunch or dinner, I hurriedly backtracked to make sure everyone understood that I am not at all advocating bribery. Could you imagine ABSCAM for critics? CRITSCAM? The tempo of this story now suggests that a joke or a pun would follow, but I'll just continue, as I still have to finish my paper tonight for Glenn Young's class on tragedy at Hunter College, as the push continues for me to finish my master's before I'm older than Eric Bentley.

Anyway, I think Jeff was there so that Bob could raise ethics as an issue. Fair enough, fair game. Really, though, it seems as if Jeff is still carrying around, like a crown of bitter thorns around his intellect, this seething, toxic anger about what Hedy Weiss did in Chicago, what the Dramatists Guild far too rashly and self-righteously did about it, and how things ultimately reached some sort of unpleasant and unresolved stalemate. I would be remiss if I did not add that Jeff also blogged about the incident over at Back Stage's blog, and wrote some things that my executive editor, David Sheward, eventually made him retract. Personal agendas and the truth sometimes oppose each other, basically.

Anyway, there was just so much huffing and puffing about this that I was sure Jeff was going to blow the house down. Jeff's such a smart guy, but there's also just so much anger and bitterness there. And, you know, critics are a cheap target: sometimes attacking them strikes me as a way for people who can't come to grips with the fact that their work sometimes sucks to attempt to deflect the issue -- to create some Brobdingnagian smokescreen -- as if that will somehow serve to change reality. Thirty years from now, will Jeff still be fire-breathing "Hedy Weiss! Hedy Weiss! Hedy Weiss!"? Will it be like Gus Hall furiously banging his communist foot on a lectern somewhere for 14 people in the audience? Aren't there so many more fights in the world to be fought?

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Ratings for Theater: Horrid Idea

Just took a peek at the new post on the nytheatre i and I am SO dismayed that anyone would even suggest ratings for theater. And to think my good buddy Jon Stancato, the man with whom I have consumed so much peaty scotch, even suggested this as a topic of discussion! (Jon, Jon, debate me, debate me, let me show you the error of your ways! Here...drink! DRINK!)

In all seriousness, critics have all the reasons in the world to totally reject the idea. Just because everyone else is jumping off the roof of the Empire State Building doesn't mean the street below is begging for your dead body. Er, let me think about constructing a different metaphor.

(Jon, are you drinking? DRINK! I'm sure I misunderstood...)

Anyway, it's impossible for me to see why it would be to the good to give ratings to a painting, for example, so why should we devise ratings for theater -- either as an industry-wide practice or on a single website or publication? Just to ease the financial transaction for the ticket buyer? True, popular music is the obvious counterexample to all this, and I'll let Tipper Gore, for better or worse, address that one. What I find most regrettable in our society is this impulse toward reductionism -- and it's regrettable that coming out against theater ratings is something that must be defended, as if it isn't already common sense. Thumbs up, down... what is the American consumer, a hopeless lemming? Um, maybe we shouldn't answer that. Let's try this instead: Critics must lead, not follow.

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Superfluities and Critics

Terrific post on Superfluities, George Hunka's blog of which so much seems to be spoken and written every time I turn around. As I've noted several times recently, I'm still relatively new to the theatre blogosphere, so I'm discovering who the particular heavy-hitters are. There's a certainly lots and lots of gab-festing galore, but Hunka's analysis of Nick Hytner's analysis of the problem in contemporary criticism is damn smart.

I happen to think that the problem -- which I'm not sure has been convincingly defined in one digestable statement-- is almost too easily defined as "too many...dead white men." Obviously the theatre is not finding itself overwhelmed these days with critics of color or the fairer sex, but the theatre is also not finding itself with more critics, period: outside the blogosphere, the list of venues is shrinking, not growing. The newspaper industry contracted something like 12% last year, and in case anyone had any illusions to the contrary, the headcount reduction came out of newsrooms, not top-level management, and certainly not ad staff.

Critics and practitioners have a natural affinity for one another and also a natural antipathy. Fundamentally it is a question of what one believes the function of the critic should be. If you believe that the critic's function is to act as a consumer advocate for ticket buyers, then Hytner's criticism relates more to the problem of audience development than anything else; if you know anything about the current demographics of theatergoing in America, it's certainly a worrisome concern. But I don't believe the critic ought to be any kind of consumer advocate -- if I wanted to be Betty Furness, I'd do just that. I believe the critic in the ideal sense is the outside eye that is there during development, there during rehearsal, there during production -- the dramaturge whose views are communicated via public forums and read by a public eager to understand the work from the perspective of that insider eye. Now, please understand that what I suggest here is never going to happen. Contemporary journalism has neither a use nor a forum for this idea: As long as there is a commercial theatre, reviews/criticism will remain fundamentally all about post-opening ticket sales and marketing/advertising strategies, or, at the Off-Off-Broadway level, about just trying to get someone, somewhere, to put something about the piece in print so cash-strapped companies can get the word out.

My point is not new, and I won't bore you with chat about Shaw and Walter Kerr and on and on. My reference point is what Peter Brook writes in The Empty Space:

"[The critic is] part of the whole and whether he writes his notices fast or slow, short or long, is not really important. Has he an image of how a theatre could be in his community and is he revising this image around each experience he receives? How many critics see their job this way?”

“It is for this reason that the more the critic becomes an insider, the better. I see nothing but good in a critic plunging into our lives, meeting actors, talking, discussing, watching, intervening. I would welcome his putting his hands on the medium and attempting to work it himself.”

So the issue for me is not whether critics are dead white men, but whether they are people who are sufficiently interested, schooled and skilled in order to fulfill -- or even consider -- Brook's dictum. Most of the time the answer is no: the only theatre John Simon would work in is the one that allows you to watch through a plexiglass window as cynanide pellets are dropped on those horrible homosexuals. But some critics are prepared, in this sense. I have done a lot of theatre, and I plan to again in the future. If you've never done it, I just don't think you have a right -- or a fair reference point -- to write about it. And that's not about color, necessarily, or gender, so much as thinking about how we ought to characterize, and how we ought to reshape, the critic-artist relationship, or maybe (worst-case scenario) whether it can even be reshaped at all. In the critical community, I can tell you that Margo Jefferson's tenure as the second-string at the New York Times was not looked upon favorably -- critics had problems with her style, her lengthy citations of text, and her seeming inability or unwillingness to reduce her reviews to easily quotable thumbs-up/thumbs-down bits of text. But as a black woman, I thought it was totally refreshing. Margo and I have been friendly, and I suspect she didn't care for the grind all that much -- the contemporary critical superstructure struck her as unhelpful to the theatre. I'd be curious to know what Hytner would say about that.

Anyway, the interesting thing about blogging to me is that they are neither critics, singularly, nor artists, singularly. That cross-pollination fascinates me.

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