The play opened in Chicago in 1975. All of the major reviews, save one, were rotten. "A foul-mouthed episode" was legendary critic Claudia Cassidy's estimation. Roger Dettmer of the Chicago Tribune called it "almost two hours of bleep-rated dialogue." In the Sun-Times, Glenna Syse described it as "dreary" and said that it needed massive reworking.
I get these quotes from Richard Christiansen's history of the Chicago stage, "A Theater of Our Own." Christiansen remembers that in his review for the Chicago Daily News, he called the same play "a triumph for Chicago theatre -- and a treasure for Chicago audiences." He can look back on his dissenting opinion with some satisfaction. The play in question was the premiere of David Mamet's "American Buffalo."
As much as many of us like to bitch about the press, those of us who have viable careers writing for the stage often are in this position because some reviewer for an influential publication has gone to bat for us.
You can do fine, groundbreaking work, but if some credible reviewer doesn't recognize and celebrate it, you won't get much of an audience. Cassidy may have called "American Buffalo" wrong, but she was the first to throw considerable and well-timed support behind Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," and Williams was ever grateful to her for it. In London, Kenneth Tynan is credited for much of the attention that was given to John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," helping to launch the postwar revitalization of British drama.
Sometimes, too, a critic can be of material help in the development of a struggling work. Neil Simon was wrestling with a third act that wasn't coming together when, in conversation, Boston critic Elliot Norton, having seen the out-of-town tryout, casually mentioned that he wished the Pigeon sisters had made a return in the third act. Simon rewrote the act, adding the Pigeons to the resolution of the story, and "The Odd Couple" went on to make history.
In the cases cited above, playwrights had the good fortune to encounter critics who had the sensibilities to appreciate, interpret, counsel, and champion the worthy. I cannot help but think that some fine works have been lost because no critic of sufficient perception was in the neighborhood to offer support.
What is particularly grisly is when a critic maintains a position of considerable influence and visibility but behaves irresponsibly and so does damage.
"I have just returned from the latest Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Having seen a dozen plays by a dozen new writers, I can speak with confidence where the future dog walkers of America are coming from." This is a paraphrase from memory, but I believe a pretty accurate one. The critic was the late Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe. Among those writers he consigned to doggy oblivion were William Mastrosimone, John Pielmeier, Kathleen Tolan, Murphy Guyer, James McLure, and Timothy Mason. A vigilant and responsible editor would have caught that bit of gratuitous nastiness before it besmirched newsprint.
Friends in theatre in Indianapolis tell me of their recent ordeal. For more than a year, the lead critic of The Indianapolis Star was a guy named Peter Szatmary, who told local producers that he didn't like reviewing new plays. His actions backed up his declaration. When the Indiana Rep and the Phoenix Theatre mounted world or local premieres, he gave them as little space as he could. When he published his annual 10-best list in 2003, he called "Nunsense" the best show of the year (above "Stones in His Pockets," "The Lion in Winter," and "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?"). Discontent in the theatrical community with this guy got so palpable that he was called into the editor's office and told he should try to, uh, refocus his priorities. Reportedly, he felt he didn't have the support and confidence of the paper and abruptly resigned. Word has it he has found employment not as a critic, but as a features editor for the Longview News-Journal in Longview, Texas, about two hours east of Dallas.
Now to another case:
Of Tony Kushner's work on the musical "Caroline, or Change," this journalist wrote, "Unfortunately, Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots."
Kushner didn't appreciate this. In a letter he sent to the paper in response, he called the review "a vicious ad hominem attack" and went on to write, "It is appalling that a playwright can be flatly accused of hating his own people without a single word cited from the play in question.... My anger at this critic and her editors for accusing me of hatred for the Jewish people -- for my people -- exceeds my abilities to express it."
This was not the first time this critic got into this kind of trouble. She labeled a dance by the famed Pilobolus troupe anti-Semitic, a charge no other critic covering the piece echoed and one that mystified Jonathan Wolken, the piece's co-choreographer, who, incidentally, is Jewish.
In a recent review of the touring production of "Wicked," she saw the schoolchildren's uniforms as being patterned after the clothes that concentration camp inmates were forced to wear, and she claimed that with the casting of an African-American actor, "the Scarecrow [is] now revealed to be a lynched black man."
Like Kushner, director Joe Mantello demanded and got space in the paper to respond: "Not once in 'Wicked' 's history has any other critic ever leveled such inflammatory accusations at the production. That [her] editors would allow her to do so without demanding factual accountability for her reckless opinions is irresponsible at best," leaving an impression that is "not only inaccurate but deeply offensive and obscene."
The critic in question is Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times, and I first had cause to be concerned about her judgment in 1991 when she interviewed me. I mentioned how much I admired John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation," and she told me that surely I must see that "it's a racist play." I told her I saw no such thing and that I thought that hers was a serious misreading of a major work. She shrugged as if to suggest I must be blind to the obvious, and she's panned all of my premieres in Chicago since.
Those of us who work in the theatre accept that it is the job of the critics to evaluate the work we put up. I have received good reviews and lousy reviews, and, though I may occasionally mutter darkly, I acknowledge that if I put work out for public consumption, it is fair game for public comment.
But critics, too, put their work out for public consumption, and they too should be held accountable.
Kevin Kelly has gone to his reward, Szatmary is in a town in Texas where he is not likely to be plagued by many new plays, but Ms. Weiss apparently still has her editors' support. They have the right to employ whomever they wish. We have the right -- and responsibility -- to object when she (or any critic) doesn't do the job correctly.