This is the most common response I’ve been given when posing this question. The woman in play development said that although she saw so many plays and would love to advocate for them, the ‘conflict of interest’ meant that she couldn’t. Why aren’t there more theater practitioners among theater critics? Why is ours one of the rare fields-unlike sports, books, economics, etc-where esteemed practitioners can’t comment on each other’s work? In fact aren’t they the best people to do this? Now, asking this to a group composed of critics who were not practitioners, and practitioners who were not critics, I assumed I’d be jumped on, and I was. Years later, at Humana-when the Q&A came, I asked the question I’d been burning to ask, though I already had a sense of how it would be answered.
#CALL OF THE SEA TIKI PUZZLE HOW TO#
Just as Cristina Aguilera tells an up and coming singer how to sing, with the intention of sharing that info with audiences in a way that is interesting and engaging, I’m fairly sure that Diane Paulus could share some incredible things about what she’s seen in Boston during her tenure at A.R.T Sherri Kronfeld. I want the designer to share the tricks of the trade they were impressed by when the room seemed to swiftly morph from one location to another. I want the writer or director to tell me in the first paragraph that they’ve always been envious of the amazing things that this artist or company pulls off. In the brief space we were given, I tried in my reviews to celebrate the design, writing, directing and acting that seemed most excellent, and to place the shows in a critical framework based on my own experience as a practitioner, my knowledge of theater history from college years, and my own frequent theater-going. There was a profound lack of knowledge-of the body of work of well-known playwrights, of histories of major companies, theatrical performance styles, and of almost anything about design or direction. And although I thought the paper’s mission estimable, I found the reviews of my young colleagues read at times like brief book reports by writers with limited knowledge of the field. My fellow critics were a throng of young journalists, some in school for journalism or English, and some just graduated. It was the same spot that’s been sore since I worked as a critic for two summers at the Edinburgh Festivals, where I was one of a handful of writers with a theater background reviewing for a print publication that had the worthwhile mission of reviewing all of the shows at all of the festivals. This was certainly a lively and interesting conversation, so why was I angry? There were spats between the internet generation and the older folks, regarding the merits of social media-Facebook, Twitter, blogs like this site, etc.-and whether they were an enhancement to popular theatrical discourse. The journalists ranged in age from their twenties through fifties, and the discussion focused on the decline of theater criticism in print publications-both column-inches and dedicated theater critics being cut, and the tendency of print reviews to be forced into Consumer Report-esque blurbs, informing you whether or not this show was worth your money, as opposed to the lengthy critical essays of the past. Here were arrayed before us a group of prominent theater critics from a variety of web and print publications, as well as an artistic director of a well-respected theater company, and someone who worked at a major theater in play development.
During the Critiquing Criticism discussion this March at Humana, (moderated by HowlRound’s P. Carl and live streamed on #NEWPLAY TV), I felt a familiar rush of anger.
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