Himalaya Criticism: A Speech to the American Theatre Critics Association

Traditionally, the critic and the artist have had about as much in common with each other as the mongoose and the cobra, though there's little doubt about which of these creatures has been doing most of the swallowing and has the biggest lump in its throat.

One source of the enmity, of course, is that the critic can wield such power over the theater artist--whether in terms of career, development, or future employment. But another, I believe, is that these two opposing professionals so rarely communicate directly with one another. The critic can write reviews. All the theater practitioner can write, usually with great trepidation, is poison-pen letters to the editor. Once Sylvia Miles dropped a plate of spaghetti on the head of John Simon, but while the gesture was eloquent enough, I don't count it as a form of communication. My point is that any fraternization between the artist and the critic is generally forbidden or condemned. One Boston media critic, who shall be nameless (a lot of people would like to see him jobless), finds any commerce between the two a sign of conflict of interest--otherwise known as COI, to use its dreaded acronym. It is an acronym that gives this gentleman a serious case of acid reflux.

As some of you know, I hold both jobs myself, critic and practitioner, which makes me one of the causes of this critic's indigestion. Another is John Lahr, partly because Lahr is a sometime playwright as well as a scribe, and partly because he occasionally conducts interviews with people whose work he reviews. (So, by the way, without any sense of contradiction, does our fulminating Boston media critic.)

No question, there is some danger if a critic grows too friendly with an actor, a playwright, or a director. Will he modify his opinion to preserve the friendship? Will he soften his standards to mollify the performer?

There is an even greater danger, to my mind, of a critic poised to make fundamental judgments about a production without knowing very much about the artistic process. One reason for this ignorance of process is that the critic isn't familiar enough with the people who create it.

A coterie of critics, particularly those ensconced in academia, seem to believe that theater is created not so much out of human characters or large passions as out of fashionable theories and political ideologies. Admittedly, there is a growing number of plays being written these days dominated by racial and gender issues, just as many plays of the thirties were preoccupied with issues of class warfare and workers' rights. But this is a relatively narrow and repetitive slice of the theatrical pie, to my mind, as well as being a pretty boring way to write about and look at theater.

Feminism, performativity, multiculturalism, and all the other burning issues filling the pages of the academic theater magazines (and American Theatre) have proved pretty peripheral to advanced theaters like the Wooster Group or Théâtre de Complicité, nor do such adventurous theater artists as Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Andrei Serban, Robert Woodruff, or Ariane Mnouchkine look much to Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida for insights into how to fashion their work. There was a time when major critical minds had an impact on theater practitioners, when critics like Eric Bentley were guiding us toward previously unrecognized beacons of dramatic literature (not only Brecht), and when Jan Kott was stimulating unprecedented interpretations of Shakespeare and the Greeks. Today, when the study of dramatic literature is considered passé, academic critics talk primarily to each other, in a language that no practicing theater artist can be expected to understand.

If academic critics often try to bend their dramatic interpretations into theoretical and ideological constructions, media journalists tend to validate works of dramatic art primarily on the basis of their opinions about them. Their only obligation...