Category Archives: On criticism

21 asides on theatre criticism

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UPDATE (Easy Irony Department): It turns out that theatre and film reviewers for Backstage can’t even “engage” their own, presumably very interested, readership any more — according to this report from Kris Vire, posted late today, the trade magazine will stop publishing all film and theatre reviews on 11 April 2013. Vire quotes executive editor Daniel Holloway: “An analysis of metric data by our executive team led to the conclusion that too few readers are engaging our reviews for Backstage to continue to invest resources in producing them. We will be shifting those resources primarily to the creation of additional advice, news, and features content.” Maybe the problem isn’t with the readers after all, but with the critics who can’t engage even those in the business.

CLARIFICATION: I am told by a Howlround representative that, contrary to what I wrote below, “anyone can invite him/herself to the HowlRound table.” Of course, I stand corrected.

Well, the series on criticism at Howlround has finally wound its way to the end of its weary week; you’ll find essays by Rob Weinert-Kendt (American Theatre and the New York Times), Jason Zinoman (the New York Times, again), John Moore (formerly of the Denver Post), Wendy Rosenfield (Philadelphia Inquirer), and others here, a lineup heavy with print critics. It’s worth what it’s worth.

Critic Mark Brown.

Critic Mark Brown.

Those interested in a rather different perspective can turn to “21 Asides on Theatre Criticism” from critic Mark Brown, which appeared in a 2010 issue of Critical Stages, the Web journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. Mr. Brown, theatre critic of the Scottish national newspaper the Sunday Herald and Scottish performing arts critic for the UK national newspaper the Daily Telegraph, also teaches theatre studies and theatre criticism at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In this essay he writes:

It is painful, and nauseating, to observe and comment upon an arena of cultural practice which is under increasing pressure to infantilise itself. We find this pressure in the commentators and practitioners who deride as “elitist” the assertion that the art of theatre must eschew the commercial and cultural pressure to “entertain.” We find it in the liberal critic who wears as a badge of honour his or her belief in the socio-political functionality of the theatre.

These “Asides,” therefore, are a personal response to the pain induced by this pressure. They are a cry, an ideological assertion, in defence of “radical elitism” in the face of the faux democracy of cultural relativism and the puerile shibboleths of liberal humanism.

1. The critic is a privileged member of the audience.
2. The critic’s pen is a wand, a quill and a dagger.
3. Criticism exists in the discrete space between journalism and art.
4. I write here of true criticism; there are other kinds.
5. The only true critical agenda is the pursuit of quality, and so the critic is a radical elitist.
6. Without mercy or malice: the motto of the true critic.
7. The critic is subjective. She does not deny her subjectivity. Her only responsibility is to be worthy of it.
8. The demand that the critic “reflect the collective view of the audience” nauseates.
9. When he asserts the “equal value” of all genres, the critic slits his own throat with his pen.
10. The critic is not a human “clapometer.”
11. Criticism abhors equivocation (which is distinct from nuance).
12. The bad critic: a fence sitter, deferring to personal sentiment, social propriety or cultural fashion.
13. The true critic: suspicious of consensus, prepared to be in a minority, even of one.
14. Synopsis is not criticism, although it often masquerades as such.
15. All theatre is political. So the critic is suspicious of the term “political theatre.”
16. The critic is not a doctor, she gives no prescriptions.
17. The prescription is a noose around the neck of the free artist.
18. Criticism, like poetry, is not a job, but a vocation; but the critic, like the poet, has bills to pay.
19. Polemic is for the street. The theatre is not the street.
20. The critic has to be a pugilist, prepared to give and take blows.
21. The critic must suffer like everyone else.

I find it doubtful that Mr. Brown will be invited to contribute to any online Howlround symposia anytime soon; I’ll just say that my own opinion hews closer to his than to those at the Howlround table.

Mr. Brown also contributed an essay called “The Critic is Not an Artist” (NB: Weinert-Kendt’s piece for Howlround is called “The Artist on the Aisle”) to the most recent issue of Critical Stages, in which he writes:

[Criticism] is (as I have argued above) not art, because it requires a clarity of analysis which it would be absurd and destructive to require of artistic works. Nor, however, is it journalism. When a newspaper wants a journalist to report on the news associated with the arts, it employs an arts correspondent, a journalist who reports on the facts of the appointments of directors of national artistic companies, the vagaries of arts funding, social or political controversies over artworks etc. This journalistic role is, and should remain, quite distinct from the role of the critic, which is to deal in the entirely non-factual realm of aesthetics.

More here.

Books: The Age of American Unreason

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Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason. New York: Vintage Books, 2009 (an update of the original hardcover edition published by Pantheon Books in 2008). 357 pages.

Age of American Unreason_smallIn 1963, Knopf published historian Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life–not a jeremiad, but a thorough historical consideration of the place of the thinking citizen, as opposed to the feeling citizen, in American culture. Already we reach a thicket, for surely thinkers feel, and feelers think; the dichotomy is not as binary as some would like, for the sake of facility, to assume. Nor does the intellectual value ideas over people. Intellectualism is an approach to the world and culture that valorizes a clear-eyed balance of the two. For the intellectual, history has much to tell us (but it should be a history that maintains a sense of context and is validated by determinable facts, rather than ideological assumptions); the scientific method is the court of last resort for the natural world (but not for the social world of human beings, in which culture and nurture may trump genetic, racial, or gender essentialism); and the products of aesthetic endeavor more than simple emotional self-expression. All of these are essential for the health of a functioning democracy, which must choose its leaders carefully and conduct important public discourse with a right respect to the world in which it either flourishes or decomposes.

At least, this is how it should go, argues Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, a recent sequel to Hofstadter’s pioneering work; unfortunately those who style themselves intellectuals today (on both the left and the right; with a mordant wit, Jacoby castigates the worst excesses of both ends of the spectrum) have more often than not betrayed at least one, and often all three, of these characteristics, and to be fair they must take their share of blame for the parlous state of public discourse in America. No wonder, then, that Jacoby in the title of her book shifts the emphasis from “anti-intellectual” to “unreason.” This unreason, alive in the continuing distrust of the American intellect that Hofstadter so ably documented, is pursued through chapters on politics, including the various Red Scares of American history; a middlebrow culture that once held open an avenue for educational and cultural ambition among the lower, middle, and working classes of all races and backgrounds; the debated legacy of the 1960s; science and religion, especially regarding the teaching of evolution and creationism in American classrooms; and of course digital/visual versus print culture.

In the disciplines in which I operate, theatre and literature, the upswing of this rhetoric of unreason has had its effect too. The one thing that the educational system today seems to lack (and Jefferson, a pioneer in the thinking about the definition and value of public education in America, is rolling in his grave) is the attempt to create a habit of critical thinking in young men and women, necessary to the health of a democracy as well. The citizen must be able to recognize when the wool is being pulled over his eyes, whether it’s by a politician or an artist, but without this habit you get to be anyone’s fool.

Of course thinking is hard. Responsible intellectualism demands a constant attention to the difference between one’s own ideological prejudices and those valid facts and ideas that may undermine those prejudices; a due regard for context means that one can’t cherrypick the facts and ideas that support one’s conclusions but must regard the situations and arguments from which they emerge; and, however fun they might be over drinks at a cocktail party, ad hominem arguments are utterly irrelevant.

All this is as true for aesthetic criticism as for political discourse. I wonder whether this refusal to bear these laudable qualities in mind has led to the low regard in which literary Modernism is currently held–for the Modernists, history and context were nearly all; in searching for what may have been lost, they hoped to shore up some decent regard for the human individual in a world stripped of spiritual certainty. They were certainly intellectuals, and public intellectuals at that.

And in contemporary theatre criticism one needn’t look far for the damage that the absence of these qualities can do to intelligent discussion of drama and theatre. In a quite silly essay about Kenneth Tynan that was printed in the Wall Street Journal recently, critic Terry Teachout manages to slander the late drama critic as well as falsify Tynan’s influence in an ad hominem attack that beggars the imagination. “He failed to appreciate Gielgud’s refined art, underrated William Inge and Eugène Ionesco, misunderstood Terence Rattigan,” Teachout writes, as if the apparent importance of these artists was a matter of fact, not opinion. “He was also a moral idiot, a pornography addict who went in for what he euphemistically called ‘spanking,’” Teachout continues, without explaining just what this has to do with Tynan’s critical acumen. (And if one’s sexual appetites do have some bearing on a writer’s critical acumen, I think Teachout must be obliged to, in the interests of honesty, offer an account of his; otherwise, this is mere condescending puritanism and indefensible namecalling.) “In 1963 he [became] the first literary manager of London’s National Theatre. Alas, his work there is now forgotten,” Teachout writes; but not forgotten, perhaps, by Tom Stoppard, whose landmark Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was plucked from an Edinburgh fringe stage for the NT by Tynan personally, thereby changing the landscape of the English language theatre for decades to come. (Tynan did more than this too, none of which, anyway, I forgot.) “In order to be a great critic, it’s not enough to be clever—it also helps to be right,” Teachout concludes. And drama criticism, as Mr. Teachout surely knows, is not a matter of right and wrong, but of opinion, which by its very definition is neither right nor wrong.

I wouldn’t single out Mr. Teachout’s essay for this treatment (unfortunately such things are more common than anyone interested in the health of theatre would like to see) if it didn’t demonstrate the very dangers that, according to Jacoby, a culture of unreason exhibits. For those who read the essay and have neither the time, the resources, nor the interest to ascertain the accuracy or validity of Mr. Teachout’s assessments, this will be Mr. Tynan–and so the readership and the state of aesthetic criticism will be badly served. Good criticism of any kind–whether it’s of a play, an idea, or even another critic–exhibits nuance, good faith, shades of meaning, knowledgability, apt and entertaining expression, and discernment, even in the space of 750 words. And this ain’t that. That such a bluntly inaccurate and ad hominem essay found its way into one of America’s leading newspapers as “criticism” skirts the edge of journalistic irresponsibility.

Jacoby’s welcome volume, obviously, is about much more than this; and for anyone interested in the state of the culture and the nation, it is required reading–not to agree with all of Jacoby’s conclusions, but at least to know the high stakes of the current anti-intellectual game.

From the archives: A few notes on the subject

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Originally posted on 23 March 2012.

One of the responsibilities of criticism in this century is the reclamation of the individual subject, a subject who has been susceptible to undermining and erasure in the postmodern condition. [1] The difficulties of the human dilemma, that subject and object inhere in the same identity in the empirical world to those who stand outside of ourselves, are no different now than they have been over the millenia. Modernist thought explored the crisis of the subject, attempted to reconceive it for a post-industrial and urbanized world; some postmodernisms have evaded the question by denying the existence of the subject entirely, by rendering it a construct as much an object as the human body. Criticism and the essay inhere in the realm of subjective thought, wherever that may be, though we can’t map it as we can map the brain; we can say where thought occurs, but not from whence those final thoughts express themselves in our subjectivity.

The capitalism that expressed itself through the industrialist dynamic, however, is not the same as that expressed through digitization and globalization. The Culture Industry encourages us to commodify ourselves as objects; the criticism that would emerge from an engaged subjectivity is a criminal activity. As we give up subjectivity to enjoy our status as objects to be entertained, or sell our privacy to the lowest bidder for more Facebook friends or Twitter followers, we give up that critical faculty which belongs to subjecthood. This is writ more largely in the assumptions that underlie the German word kultur, not just those pages and endeavors that are categorized and alienated from the broader discourse as culture, arts, and leisure in the experience of the newspapers. The individuals of the Occupy movements subsume their individual subjecthood in the mass as well: as part of that larger object called a collective protest. We are rendered consumers and salesmen of an abstract progressive ideology, as we are consumers and salesmen of aesthetic product. We want buyers, forgetting in the process that there is no greater sucker, no one more susceptible to the sales pitch, than another master salesman. The lack of critical subjectivity that would allow him to recognize the inauthenticities of his own sales pitch is the same lack of critical subjectivity that would allow him to recognize the inauthenticities of others. As an American philosopher once put it, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” [2] This is the same in theaters as when we read newspapers or participate in political actions.

Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a mid-20th century project, is being reconceived for the 21st century by a variety of writers, explicitly by Edward Bond and Heiner Müller and implicitly by Richard Foreman and Howard Barker and many others. Criticism is not ready to receive it until critics recognize that the work of these theatre artists is an attempt to reconstruct the individual subject in opposition to, contending against, the Culture Industry, at the same time that that Industry continues, in its ravenous hunger, to consume and market even those objects that mitigate and militate against it. Critics, and especially reviewers, are embedded in this Culture Industry; so far as they unquestioningly practice according to its assumptions, they will not recognize it. Postmodern criticism fails these works precisely in its erasure of the subjective consciousness: it does not know how to see through the use of the subjective eye that needs to be reclaimed.

The primary literary sources for a consideration of this crisis remain Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and the great quintet of Shakespeare’s tragedies that limn the ambivalence of subjectivity in the enlightened world: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and especially Antony and Cleopatra, which eroticizes this crisis.

Footnotes
  1. See especially Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” in the first volume of Notes to Literature. An online .pdf version can be found here. [↩]
  2. Another dramatized aphorism from the same philosopher is relevant here as well. Man to W.C. Fields at a poker table: “Is this a game of chance?” Fields: “Not the way I play it.” [↩]

A modest proposal

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I am rarely tempted to offer suggestions as to the improvement of drama criticism and reviews in the mainstream media. As some of the responses to John Lahr’s recent essay suggest, however, this is far from a new controversy, and one or two observations may be made about what can be done, and who can do it.

When it comes to daily and weekly print journalism about the theatre and drama, those best placed to advocate to editors for a broader and more nuanced discussion of the art in the pages of these newspapers and magazines are the current reviewers who write for these outlets themselves — the staffers and freelancers to whom the editors turn for their reviews. Ideally, those theatrewriters are gifted with the ability to express their ideas about the importance of the art about which they write, and they can turn this gift to advocate to their editors for the kinds of longer-form criticism necessary to the health not only of the art but also of the culture in which the outlet finds itself. The question here is whether or not, after all the hand-wringing, they’re actually in dialogue with their editors about the issue. There is no reason to believe that either theatre practitioners or the general public would have the same influence and sway with arts and culture editors as their staffers would. If they are advocates, they should advocate, and they should advocate to those closest to hand, those with the influence and power to publish this kind of criticism: the arts editors themselves. If they are doing this now, judging from the continuing dissatisfaction of readers and critics as well as the elimination of critics and reviewers from the pages of mainstream publications, they are not doing a very good job of it.

Alternatively, it should be remembered that the critic or reviewer deeply engaged with the art about which he or she writes will pursue other outlets for their advocacy, especially if the advocacy to their bosses proves fruitless. They will open the dialogue to a broader public and participate in that dialogue, and they’ll do so outside of the confines of Twitter and Facebook — feeds and timelines are inherently exclusive, not inclusive, mechanisms. It is to be hoped that the constellation of critics and reviewers is not an exclusive clique, like high-schoolers around a lunch table from which others are excluded from their deliberations. The mainstream critic or reviewer will use the low-cost resources of the Internet to pursue this long-form criticism, paid or not, and they’ll also advocate there for those sources of strong criticism not appearing in the pages of a newspaper or the Web site of a media outlet or institution, for whatever the reason. The proof is in the writing, not in the byline or the name of the organization which issues the critic’s paycheck.

In his recent essay, Lahr wrote, “A drama critic has a historical and descriptive function; his job is to look at and look after the theater; a reviewer’s job is to look after the audience.” I would like to think that this is not true; that a drama critic participates and advocates among all of these, not to any exclusion of the other, for the audience is just as central to the theatrical experience as the performers or the playwrights. But if Lahr’s diagnosis contains a kernel of truth, the current population of critical and review-writing doctors should turn to healing themselves.

John Lahr v. Charles McNulty: Round 1

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John Lahr.

John Lahr.

On his public Twitter page yesterday, Los Angeles Times theatre critic Charles McNulty took issue with “The Illumination Business: Why drama critics must look at and look after the theater,” an essay by former New Yorker drama critic John Lahr that appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the online Nieman Reports on the condition of criticism and reviewing of all the arts (a very good collection of essays, by the way, all of them worth reading). He posted his response on his Facebook page as well, pasting together the several 140-character tweets in the correct order, but because this page doesn’t appear to be available if you don’t have a Facebook account I repost it in full below:

Re John Lahr’s broadside: I always thought he was part of the problem. His reviews rarely provided in-depth analysis of a production. Lahr would relegate acting commentary to a parenthetical — for example, (the expert John Lithgow) or (the excellent Mary Louise Wilson). Lahr had a penchant for rehashing, book report-style, very rudimentary historical material. Lahr would supplement this with psychological speculation that always seemed to circle back to his father’s sad clown character. I lost all confidence in Lahr’s critical integrity. I would read his reviews and see his dinner parties. And unlike Robert Brustein and Richard Gilman and others of that generation, Lahr wasn’t particularly discerning about playwrights. Read Gilman or Bentley on Odets: Lahr has become a nostalgia junkie, not seeing the limitations of writers, longing for his father’s era. I like Lahr’s notion about writing fewer but more substantial reviews. And of looking after the theater rather than the audience. But Lahr’s high-handed attack of other critics is unwarranted. There’s no shortage of writing talent or sensibility among today’s critics. There is a journalism challenge. And a cultural one. But the war isn’t over. And I don’t see any white flags on the horizon.

I’ve written here about the quality of contemporary American drama criticism before, and you can judge to what extent Lahr’s opinion parallels mine. I don’t think there’s any need to rehash that; you can look for yourself. But what I want to point out here is that McNulty seems to engage not with Lahr’s opinions or ideas but his person and his career, attempting to undermine any authority with which Lahr may speak, responding to the person, not the ideas he expresses. One can trashtalk Lahr and even his criticism to one’s heart’s content, but that’s not a response to the concerns he articulates in this particular essay (with some of which, McNulty admits, he concurs).

Alas, this is not rare, especially on the blogosphere. An interesting story that runs today in the New York Times notes that the very tone and demeanor of online commentary affects the reception of ideas themselves — even scientific ideas, let alone opinion essays. In “This Story Stinks,” Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele report on their recent Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication study that measured the reaction of readers to a news story after being exposed to both civil and non-civil comments to that story. “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself,” they found:

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought. While it’s hard to quantify the distortional effects of such online nastiness, it’s bound to be quite substantial …

Not that I think Lahr would care very much about what I think either; his essay includes the usual pro forma gratuitous swipe at the medium in which my own criticism appears: “With the shrinking of newspapers and the shift in cultural tastes, there is less theater coverage than ever before, and almost no drama criticism — a parlous situation that is compounded by the deplorable loose talk and lazy writing of the blogosphere.” Et tu, Mr. Lahr?

But one can bemoan a few of the characteristics of contemporary criticism without turning to the online world, and theatre is not alone here. After quoting from a recent review of Clifford Odets‘ Golden Boy by New York magazine’s Scott Brown, Lahr says:

The reviewer proclaims his ignorance, then blithely practices it. His chirpy tone is the voice not of a critic but of a “cricket,” the derogatory label theatricals sometimes apply to the critical enterprise. The writer makes noise but not meaning. He’s full of energy but not information. He knows that what he’s looking at is good; he just doesn’t know why. He makes the reader feel his opinion, but he doesn’t have the stylistic wherewithal to make the reader feel the play. His article is not criticism; it’s bluffing.

If one is going to take on Lahr because of this comment, one has to take on several thinkers who have considered this more deeply than he has. In her recent and quite excellent book The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby makes very much the same point (and she’s following in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter and his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life). It’s one thing — and praiseworthy — to admit one’s ignorance; it’s quite another — and blameworthy — to be proud of it and parade it as a virtue, especially if one sets up shop and earns one’s paycheck as an expert in the discipline one is writing about.

It’s always easier to attack the messenger instead of the message. After my rather casual post about the lugubrious, sentimental quality of some contemporary reviews, one wag on Facebook confessed, “I’m puzzled by your obvious distaste for emotion” — a “When did you stop beating your wife?” construction that permits no meaningful response. A meaningful response, by the way, is what Lahr’s essay really requires, and not a broadside against his person and career. It would be more in keeping with the study finding if McNulty had publicly posted his response as a comment to Lahr’s piece at the Nieman Reports, which he can do easily enough — but at the moment (9.30 of a Sunday morning), he has not. In the interests of continuing the dialogue in public instead of on Facebook or Twitter, perhaps McNulty would like to do so.