The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future Read Online Free Page B

someone who is at one corner of a triangle. From that corner, there are the two lines that go out. On one line, there’s the critic speaking to the potential audience member about why he or she should go to a show, and hopefully telling the audience member a little bit more than he or she would have known about the piece, its style, and all that. The other line goes out to the artist, and the critic is saying to the artist, “This is what I saw. This is what I liked and why. This is what I didn’t like and why. This is how I think you achieved your goals.” Then a line forms between the audience and the artist because of those two dialogues that have happened.
    The classic example I use is Richard Christiansen of the Chicago Tribune . At the beginning of the Chicago Theater Movement, Christiansen went to some tiny theater and saw a play by a writer no one had ever heard of. A few days later, he wrote that he’d seen this play, that he didn’t think it was a terribly good play, but that audiences should see it because this playwright needed support and would be someone someday. That playwright was David Mamet. That kind of support of an artist at an early juncture is incredibly important.
    Robert Faires: I like to refer to a celestial metaphor, where the artistic experience is the sun and the audience is the Earth. Sometimes the audience isn’t facing the sun directly. It’s turned around, and maybe it’s not receiving the light. A theater critic can be the moon, reflecting that experience onto the dark side of the Earth, and giving the audience a sense of what that light was like coming from the artists. I feel like I am at my most valuable when I’m providing that function—when I can reflect as powerfully as possible my experience at the theater and what I think it meant.
    Rob Weinert-Kendt: We all have a critical impulse: we see a show and then we want to talk about it. We want to supplement the experience of seeing theater by arguing about it and reading about it, and we turn that over to people we think are really interesting, authoritative, or funny. I’m not saying that we need theater critics to tell us what to go see. I really believe that theater criticism is only going to survive if it’s seen as part of the theater experience, and not just as something you read before you go to a show. In my idealized world, people would be seeing a lot of shows, and criticism would be in the mix of that. It would be the icing on the cake, something to help people think about what they already saw.
    Theater also needs to be recorded. It’s the same with dance. It needs reporters. It needs someone to say, “This is what happened. This is what we saw.” I can’t go back and look at old plays. I can look at old films, but I can’t see the original production of Oklahoma! It’s lost to history. All we have is the review, and that’s an awesome responsibility.
    Jason Zinoman: I see theater criticism as a branch of reporting. Going to see a production is like going to see a presidential debate. If some new, really interesting actress has a great role, that’s important to mention. If the play contains an idea that’s in the zeitgeist, you want to talk about that. It’s also an act of translation. It makes connections and puts the show in a context that makes it more meaningful than whether it’s just good or bad. It could be a historical context, a political context, the context of the playwright’s work, or the director’s work.
    Linda Winer: I love reading critics. I love newspapers. I still get four newspapers delivered to my door. I love picking up the paper and reading what my colleagues said about something, and how often it sounds as if all of us have been to totally different events. The lesson there is not that critics are stupid, but that human beings are complicated, and the arts are complicated.
    MATT WINDMAN: Who is your favorite theater critic of the past or present?
    Terry Teachout: The critics