The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future by Matt Windman Page A
Authors: Matt Windman
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called Audience , which a young graduate student at Harvard started. It was a nice little giveaway. The first major publication I worked for was the Hudson Review . Robert Brustein, who was moving from the Hudson Review to the New Republic , recommended me. There are other things I did which I can barely recall. After all, I’m now 90 years old, and my memory isn’t what it used to be.
Clay Felker, who was the editor at New York magazine, noticed something I had written for the Herald Tribune . It was a humorous piece about a supposed writing school sponsored by Reader’s Digest . So when the Tribune died and Clay Felker went on to become the editor-in-chief at New York magazine, he took me on because Harold Clurman, who had been the drama critic, was not, in his opinion, a very interesting writer (which I concurred with). It worked out well. It worked out for 36 and two-thirds years.
John Lahr: I don’t think anyone grows up thinking, I want to be a theater critic—or at least they didn’t when I began doing this, which was around 1965. It wasn’t taught at university. You couldn’t take a course in it. You can now take a course in drama criticism, which is ironic since there’s hardly any work anymore.
I had just come back from Oxford and was writing a biography of my father. At the time, I happened to have something I wanted to say about Marat/Sade , which I had just seen in England. I wrote an essay about it and sent it to Manhattan East , a local giveaway paper. It had a circulation of 50,000 because they gave it out in the lobbies of Park Avenue apartments. The editor then asked if I’d be interested in being the theater critic. I’d get free tickets and $10 for each review. Since I had no money, I thought that was great. I didn’t know anything about drama criticism, but I had spent two years writing critical essays with Christopher Ricks, one of the great English literary critics.
From the outset, I wanted to do something different with my drama criticism. My idea was to invite the artists into the article and let them speak. I really wanted to create a sense of the life of the theater. Within about a year, I was hearing from people who I never thought I’d get a response from, like Harold Pinter and Jules Feiffer, and I realized that this was something I could do. I progressed to writing for an underground paper called the New York Free Press . When Grove Press bought it, they agreed to pay me the astronomical fee of $250 apiece. Grove then made me its theater editor, which meant I could get plays published. By 1971, I was also the lead critic for the Village Voice and the literary manager of Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, which meant that I could put on a play, review a play, and publish a play.
When the book about my father came out, it was reviewed on the front page of the Times . Then I left town. I had to get vaccinated from ambition or else I’d explode. I lived in England for seven years and worked on what became Prick Up Your Ears , my book about the playwright Joe Orton. That led to writing for a wonderful magazine called New Society , which all the major English critics worked for.
I was tapped for the New Yorker job in 1992. I told Tina Brown, the editor at the time, that I wanted to write a new kind of drama criticism—more of a discursive encounter that both described the play and informed the reader about theater culture. I also wanted to keep theater professionals in the discussion. I wanted to change how theater was reported, and Tina agreed with that. She was bored by conventional theater criticism.
For instance, when I went out to cover Angels in America at the Mark Taper Forum, I talked to Tony Kushner before the show and went backstage afterwards and described what was going on. I quoted a gorgeous letter that Tony had written to the cast. Anyone who wants to know what it was like to be in that theater at that great moment in our theater history will find it in my review. I
Clay Felker, who was the editor at New York magazine, noticed something I had written for the Herald Tribune . It was a humorous piece about a supposed writing school sponsored by Reader’s Digest . So when the Tribune died and Clay Felker went on to become the editor-in-chief at New York magazine, he took me on because Harold Clurman, who had been the drama critic, was not, in his opinion, a very interesting writer (which I concurred with). It worked out well. It worked out for 36 and two-thirds years.
John Lahr: I don’t think anyone grows up thinking, I want to be a theater critic—or at least they didn’t when I began doing this, which was around 1965. It wasn’t taught at university. You couldn’t take a course in it. You can now take a course in drama criticism, which is ironic since there’s hardly any work anymore.
I had just come back from Oxford and was writing a biography of my father. At the time, I happened to have something I wanted to say about Marat/Sade , which I had just seen in England. I wrote an essay about it and sent it to Manhattan East , a local giveaway paper. It had a circulation of 50,000 because they gave it out in the lobbies of Park Avenue apartments. The editor then asked if I’d be interested in being the theater critic. I’d get free tickets and $10 for each review. Since I had no money, I thought that was great. I didn’t know anything about drama criticism, but I had spent two years writing critical essays with Christopher Ricks, one of the great English literary critics.
From the outset, I wanted to do something different with my drama criticism. My idea was to invite the artists into the article and let them speak. I really wanted to create a sense of the life of the theater. Within about a year, I was hearing from people who I never thought I’d get a response from, like Harold Pinter and Jules Feiffer, and I realized that this was something I could do. I progressed to writing for an underground paper called the New York Free Press . When Grove Press bought it, they agreed to pay me the astronomical fee of $250 apiece. Grove then made me its theater editor, which meant I could get plays published. By 1971, I was also the lead critic for the Village Voice and the literary manager of Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, which meant that I could put on a play, review a play, and publish a play.
When the book about my father came out, it was reviewed on the front page of the Times . Then I left town. I had to get vaccinated from ambition or else I’d explode. I lived in England for seven years and worked on what became Prick Up Your Ears , my book about the playwright Joe Orton. That led to writing for a wonderful magazine called New Society , which all the major English critics worked for.
I was tapped for the New Yorker job in 1992. I told Tina Brown, the editor at the time, that I wanted to write a new kind of drama criticism—more of a discursive encounter that both described the play and informed the reader about theater culture. I also wanted to keep theater professionals in the discussion. I wanted to change how theater was reported, and Tina agreed with that. She was bored by conventional theater criticism.
For instance, when I went out to cover Angels in America at the Mark Taper Forum, I talked to Tony Kushner before the show and went backstage afterwards and described what was going on. I quoted a gorgeous letter that Tony had written to the cast. Anyone who wants to know what it was like to be in that theater at that great moment in our theater history will find it in my review. I
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