Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

Nothing gets theatre people talking like the topic of criticism. American Theatre’s February ’08 special section “The Future of Criticism”—headlined by a landmark discussion between three iconic American critics, Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein and Stanley Kauffmann—prompted not only a raft of e-mail comments and letters to the editor but a number of full-fledged articles composed in response. You’ll find two of those tell-it-like-it-is submissions in the pages of this issue, both by practicing theatre critics with distinctive points of view about the profession.

The two writers—Misha Berson of the Seattle Times and London-based Matt Wolf of the International Herald Tribune—are longtime contributors to this publication, but seldom have they taken the opportunity to cast a self-reflective, evaluative eye on the very cultural environments they inhabit—on the interface between critic and artist, between public discourse and the work such discourse aims to illuminate. There’s a dash of cynicism in both essays—as frequently as not, both writers would probably tell you, criticism as it’s currently practiced is flawed, uninformed, too commercially influenced or so tangential to the art as to be mostly irrelevant—but in neither case does negativity win the day. Despite the overheated battles in the London press this past year over the implications of theatre writers’ gender and diversity (attributes we’re sizing up in presidential candidates on this side of the pond), Wolf detects “grace under pressure” among the best of Britain’s critics. And Berson is able, after reflecting on the plusses and minuses of getting intimate with the artists she covers, to envision her mission (and by extension, that of critics everywhere) as “contributing to some ongoing communal chronicle…playing a tiny part in an enormous continuum.” If that’s the job, cynics need not apply.

Elsewhere in the issue, the very opposite of cynicism—e.g., a fervent enthusiasm for all the possibilities that theatre affords—is the prevailing mood. Cover subject Nicholas Martin betrays his youthfulness-at-heart when he confesses to interviewer Frank Rizzo that he intends to celebrate his 70th birthday by “working on five plays all at once” at Massachusetts’s Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he’s just become artistic director. Another newly appointed leader, Marco Barricelli of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, tells profiler Chloe Veltman that he plans to act as well as direct on the California company’s two stages in the coming years—as long as, he worries wryly, his taste for injecting new American works into the Bardic repertoire doesn’t result in audiences “running my ass out of town.”

So this issue finds its entrée into the theatrical mind by exploring the very different but never antithetical experiences of critics and directors. Let’s keep talking.