On Gatekeepers and Critics (Part 2)

The Desperate Need for More (and Better) Critics

(Image, including weird “R",” generated by DALL-E)

Dear Reader — In Part 1 of this two-part series, I wrote about my belief that there are too many gatekeepers in theater, and that their overall effect is to make theater homogeneous, centralized, and generally uninteresting. For the purpose of the following post, imagine that the Gatekeepers have been eliminated and the Gates of Opportunity have been thrown open to anyone interested in engaging in an act of theater. People are making theater all over the place—there’s a sudden explosion of actors acting, playwrights writing, designers designing, and directors directing.

Now what?

If you’re a spectator, you’re confronted with a problem: how do you choose between the many productions available? If you’re a theater artist, you also have a problem: how do you know whether what you’ve created is any good? This is where “reviewers” and “critics” come in, and like Part 1, we need to start with definitions.

Reviewers

A reviewer is not a critic, and a critic is not a reviewer. There is a tendency to conflate the two, and while each are very important, they have entirely different functions and audiences. As shorthand, let’s use an analogy: a reviewer is to theater what an umpire is to baseball. Umpires are on the field, in the midst of the game, calling balls and strikes in the heat of the moment. They call 'em as they see 'em, and they do not have the option of ambiguity—it’s either a strike or a ball. They are not paid, nor do they have sufficient time, to consider the self-esteem of the player, or their future employment when making their calls; nor can they pause the game in order to offer gentle counseling on how the batter might do better next time, or to put the pitch in the larger context of the season. No, they carefully observe the pitch, and judge it according to generally accepted criteria. Some umpires are better than others, and see the ball more clearly. But all of them are crucial for a game of baseball to occur.

For the spectator searching for advice on what is worth seeing, reviewers function as a filter and a guide, which is why a theater’s marketing department quotes them in their materials. The current problem is that there are fewer and fewer reviewers given space in newspapers; indeed, there are fewer and fewer newspapers! If, thanks to a future banishment of Gatekeepers, there was suddenly an abundance of productions available, those few existing reviewers wouldn’t be able to cover everything-they wouldn’t have time or space. An alternative to newspaper reviewers might be to crowdsource reviews—the Rotten Tomato-ization of the theater. The problem with this model is that, unlike a mass media like film, the number of people who see an individual production is small (so it’s not really an anonymous crowd), and if a play has a short run the consensus might arrive too late.

In other words, the diminishing number of reviewers should be of concern. I suspect the solution involves a group of theater lovers in each town creating a multiplicity of online sources for reviews: blogs, podcasts, roundtable discussions posted to YouTube, Substacks, you name it. Let different voices and different viewpoints be heard, and, ideally, consolidated for easy comparison. I’ll let others figure that out.

My focus in this essay isn’t on reviewers, but on critics.

Critics

So if a reviewer is like an umpire in this baseball analogy, what is a critic?

A critic is to theater what a sports writer is to baseball. Writers like Michael Lewis (Moneyball), George Will (Men at Work). Jim Bouton (Ball Four), Roger Angell (the New Yorker), Frank Deford (Sports Illustrated) and many, many more all placed a game, a season, a career, sometimes an entire sport within a broader context and looked at its place within the larger trajectory of the game and even of society. They looked for details, conveyed stories, described a larger pattern, ascribed significance. And most importantly, they set a standard. They were able to do this because they had more time and space to reflect than the umpire.

This is the function of a theater critic.

Unlike the reviewer, whose primary audience is the spectator, the critic’s primary audience is the artist. Theater artists who complain about the thumbs-up/thumbs-down nature of newspaper reviews are longing for something that a reviewer/umpire is unable to do, but that a critic can. Unfortunately, theater has virtually no critics remaining, at least in the mainstream media—Robert Brustein may have been the last. And that’s a real problem. In fact, it may be THE real problem weakening the contemporary American theater.

The theater needs more knowledgeable critics writing long form essays that apply a high standard as far as the quality and depth of the plays and performances are concerned.

Wolfgang von Goethe famously proposed three questions to be asked about any work of art:

1. What did the artist intend? (What was the artist's aim or purpose in creating the work? What was the artist trying to do?)

2. How well was this intention realized? (How successful was the execution of the artistic intention? How well did the artist do it?)

3. Was the intention worth realizing? (Is the work's subject matter and the artist's intention valuable or significant? Was it worth doing?)

Questions #1 and #2 are usually addressed by reviewers, but Question #3 requires a critic. The art form suffers without critics reminding artists of what is worth doing, of what theater’s purpose is, of what it’s past has revealed to us. Without them, we end up with…well, we end up with exactly what we have: flashy, insipid, empty, desperate to please, simplistic, and mind-numbing new plays and productions.

We just had the Academy Awards, which led me to wonder where is theater’s Oppenheimer? Killers of the Flower Moon? The Zone of Interest? These are films that tell complex stories about important ideas and experiences, and make serious demands on the audience. For crying out loud, Oppenheimer is 3 hours long and it made almost a billion dollars at the box office, so don’t tell me that people will only accept escapism on the American stage! And the fact that I am looking longingly at Hollywood, of all places, as a source of intellectual depth ought to indicate how bad things have become in theater.

And a big reason for the seeming nonstop parade of theatrical mediocrity is that there are no critics saying the emperor has no clothes, nobody suggesting that this nonsense isn’t worth doing. A decent critic sets a high bar, demands insight and depth, insists on more than spectacle and flash, and places theater in a larger historical and cultural context while treating theater as if it is an important part of an adult life and not just a fun outing with Buffy and Skipper before they start 5th grade in the fall.

And while I’m at it: where is our Theatre Heute? Plays International? The Stage? New Theatre Quarterly? Theatre der Zeit? We have a few: TDR, Theatre Journal, PAJ: Performing Arts Journal (although these have become increasingly academic, as has most arts criticism in general, alas—see Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe). American Theatre Magazine ought to be a source of criticism, but has long been Missing in Action. (Perhaps its newest iteration under new TCG leadership will embrace such a responsibility.) When theater was thriving during a 50-year period in the 20th century, there were intelligent periodicals devoted not only to describing what was happening, but also presenting manifestoes, aspirational visions, and critical articles questioning missteps and compromises. They set a high bar. I’m talking about periodicals like Theatre Arts Magazine, Encore Theatre Magazine, Seven Arts—all long gone.

Did artists read these periodicals? Not only did they read them, they wrote for them as well. Artists not only did their theatrical work, they also felt it important that they communicate their ideas to their fellow artists and the world. Arthur Miller published his famous essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” in the New York Times in 1949, which led to considerable discussion about the nature of tragedy in a contemporary world. Can you think of anything approaching that impact today? Yes, I can: August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” was published in American Theatre Magazine in 1996 (bravo, AT, who also published a standalone book), which led to Robert Brustein’s response, “Subsidized Separatism,” and eventually to the January 1997 Town Hall debate between the two men (which, alas, was turned into a WWE event by the media). As a result, there was a great deal of discussion about the practice of colorblind casting, the nature of a universal story, and the lack of African-American regional theaters in LORT, among other topics. Since then? Maybe 2020’s “We See You White American Theatre.” And what’s important here is not only how many years pass between such discussions, but also how much impact they have when they do occur. These were important moments in theater history.

We need many, many more of these discussions.

And lest my diagnosis seem nothing but despair and bleak nostalgia, I would point toward HowlRound.com as a beacon of hope. HowlRound is providing a rich and varied platform of essays, interviews, podcasts, and videos engaging actual ideas about theater! Of recent interest (to me, at least) was Chris Myers’s “That Which We Call a Struggle: A Response to Ife Olujobi’s “$5000,” which (as the title notes) was a response to another important essay in The Dramatist about pay for playwrights (I loved the fact that Olujobi called out the fact that she was not getting paid to write an article about not getting paid). Not surprisingly, HowlRound is funded by a university (Emerson), which is what allowed it to achieve scale fairly quickly; it is also primarily an internet-based organization, which reduces space considerations and allows it to provide long-form essays, lengthy interviews, and most importantly, a platform for a multitude of voices.

But all of their effort is for naught if theater artists don’t read these articles, engage with them, and pay attention. The future of theater does not lie in the pages of Playbill, Backstage, Variety, Show Business, or even the New York Times. The future is not to be found in careerism at all, which is focused on gaming the current system, but rather is to be found in innovative visions. HowlRound is where the way we make theater is being currently debated, and where the most engaged young artists and thinkers are asking important questions. It is the main platform that gives me hope that eventually theater will be rejuvenated. We need many more HowlRounds, each with their own viewpoints and obsessions; alternatively, we need an expanded HowlRound with even more voices being heard.

So tl;dr: fewer gatekeepers equals more art, and more criticism equals better art. That’s my prescription.