Graphic Belittlement

Theater criticism in the San Francisco Bay area is idiosyncratically vested in a San Francisco Chronicle icon known as "The Little Man." This fifty-year-old cartoon character is a trademark of San Francisco's single credible daily newspaper and serves as a graphic reminder of the ways commodification and criticism often converge in the American theater.

The Little Man accompanies each review in one of five well-established postures: "The Leaping Man"--out of his seat, open-mouthed with pleasure, clapping wildly (equivalent to an "A" or four stars); "The Clapping Man"--seated, smiling, clapping (a "B"); "The Staring Man"; "The Sleeping Man"; and "The Empty Chair" (all self-explanatory). The prescriptive nature of the symbol tells the readers and potential audience how they will, or should, respond. The first question you're apt to hear regarding critical response to a theater opening in San Francisco, whether from theater professionals or theatergoers, is "What was the Little Man doing?"

The consequences of the Little Man on the climate of theater production in the Bay Area are lethal. Theaters have charted with consistent precision the financial losses attached to each step down in a production's Little Man evaluation. Anything less than a "Clapping Man" is box office death. And the critics hate him, too. They regularly complain to their editors and to theater artists that their words have less meaning (or go unread) because of the reductiveness of the iconography attached.

Most insidious is the subversion of the potential conversation among theater artists, audiences, and critics, an exchange that is precluded by the presence of this inescapable emblem. The limited range of reactions embedded in the hierarchy of Little Man poses instructs the community to accept a simplified response and consumerist vocabulary that over time have corrupted the very possibility of complex critical response in the Bay Area.

Given the marketing opportunities presented to the Chronicle by this trademark character, it should be no surprise that there are Little Man T-shirts and tattoos. But when you see students in an acting class mime Little Man poses in response to fellow students' scenes, you begin to sense the dimension of the problem.

I trust that my fellow artistic directors will use this issue of Theater to address the larger questions pertaining to criticism. In San Francisco, where the Magic produces adventurous new work for the theater, the local critical struggle is against daily belittlement by our critics' Little Man.