How those two roles enhance each other.
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I never thought Id be a writer.
No, thats not true.
For most of middle school, I thought Id be the next Lloyd Alexander or Ursula Le Guin.
Somehow, my one completed novel, a seventh-grade Celtic-mythology-and-burgeoning-sexual-awareness-infused opus calledThe Changeling, never made it to publication.
So runs the world away.
I didnt train as a journalist.
Im a director who went to the theater one day and got really mad about what I saw.
I never really wanted to write plays.
For a long time I thought I only wanted tomakethe thing, not talk about the thing.
But plays arent frogs, and taking one apart wont kill it.
I am a critic.AndIm a director.
ButNew Yorks first drama critic was the great director Harold Clurman.
stamp, illogically praying for audiences to believe good write-ups and ignore bad.
(Whats the old saying?
If you liked it, tell your friends!
If you didnt, tell your enemies!)
One thing Ive learned in a year and a half?
If my fellow critics are anything like me, theyre often just tired.
I saw approximately 150 shows in 2018.
I wrote about roughly 120.
I also directed one play and am currently in process on another.
The input-output cycle is constant and, for me, invigorating.
Writing, by contrast, is pure output.
Articulating ourselves is the hardest thing.
Burnout twinkles ceaselessly on the horizon.
At the very least we should do a bit of crop rotation every now and then.
But again: money and fear.
Even at its snarkiest, though, criticism cant kill.
Not these days, not really.
The unfortunate thing is that there are far more of the latter than the former.
TheTimeswont toppleKing Kong, and I wont closeAmerican Son.
Criticism at its best can increase both marvel and understanding.
Dismantled humanely which doesnt mean meekly bad plays often have much more to teach than good ones.
Theres an essay I love by E.M. Forster: What I Believe.
It starts, I do not believe in Belief.
I get those words stuck in my head like tenacious pop-song lyrics.
Reverence and militancy, I think, tend to come hand in hand.
Im not a worshipful person by nature, but I love hard.
And sometimes I think I ended up in this what should I call it?
Profession, field, life?
I spend my life searching for the joy and attempting to interrogate the anger.
Its like a person I love, with equal parts anxiety, absurdity, and fierce loyalty.
Theater annoys the living hell out of me.
There are times I want to punch its stupid face and never speak to it again.
I also want to spend the rest of my life with it.
So runs the world, etc.
I try not to engage in social media.
I dont have the constitution for it.
This person knows me as a director.
The thing is, no ones soapbox is ever really at home.
Theres no such thing as critical objectivity.
Wouldnt it be pretty to think so?
And wehavethought so, or told ourselves we think so, for a long time.
Plenty of critics have written with removed, impersonal authority.
Weve allowed them to be our voices of judgment thumbs-up or thumbs-down like Caesar in the Forum.
Our fraught moment demands that we do something we should have been doing all along: acknowledge our subjectivity.
That we own the specifics of who we are and dare to share our histories with each other.
Its a waste of time to talk blandly about plays as if theyre expensive vacuum cleaners.
Its easy to be objective about a vacuum cleaner.
(It sucks.)
I use my judgment and I take a stab at say what I see.
Frankly, we need more theater practitioners writing about the form.
(Think about it: Virtually all book critics write books of their own.)
Studying the thing has some intellectual cachet, be it journalistic or academic.
But doing it is niche and nerdy.
We still eye it with a touch of suspicion under the glamour second-oldest profession that it is.
Its like us its been dying since it was born.
Its a wake, a dance astride of a grave.
(My own passionate frustration is nothing new.
Seventy years ago!)
Weve got to keep taking it apart and putting it back together again.
Weve got to recognize that were all engaged in more than a transactional relationship.
My job as a critic isnt to tell you if something is worth your money.
Its to attempt to engage you in an ongoing conversation about this whole theaterthing.
What makes it different?
Why is it not TV or cinema?
Why should any of us care?
I get into more subway conversations wearing this, she said.
Thats what I believe criticism is for.
For asking that question every single time I write.
The Russian director Anatoly Efros described actors as having no skin.
My entire life Ive been encouraged, or downright ordered, to develop a thicker skin.
To work on my defenses.
To stop crying so damn much.
I think Ive finally given up.
Theres no unpinning my heart from my sleeve at this point.
For the melody inside the noise.
Recently while working on that same review that sparked the Facebook debate I went back to Maria Irene Fornes.
And I believe its true.
And its very, very rare.
Because art is hard.
Art is hard and most of it fails either in small ways or catastrophic ones.
And the failures are fascinating.
Astonish me, Diaghilev used to tell his performers.
Its the only direction, really.
Our assembly lines spit out productions in six weeks.
Its a miracle that as many things are as good as they are.
Its all a miracle, really.
The artistcritic war of attrition is boring.
I generally laugh it off, as if to say,Yeah, crazy world isnt it?
But what I really want to tell them is that at heart, criticism and directing are the same.
Sister processes with complementary results.
Its my job to see and to imagine.
To look at what theater is and to imagine what it might be.
To keep interrogating and refining my creed.
To piece out my own What I Believe every time I write.
Never to become reverent or militant.
To own what I know.
To call out boredom and cynicism and cliche.
To keep seeking that wondrous animal.
