In defense of criticism: A theater critic asks what good does it do in an upside-down world

Why would anyone want to be a critic? As I’ve admitted before, it wasn’t in my case an aspiration but a series of accidents that only in retrospect seem inevitable.

When I was growing up, the most visible critics were those who appeared on television, like Rex Reed, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and local broadcasters like Stewart Klein from New York’s Channel 5. John Simon fit the acerbic bill so well that he even appeared on an episode of “The Odd Couple,” along with the more gentlemanly example of Los Angeles Times theater critic Daniel Sullivan. Statler and Waldorf from “The Muppet Show” made a long-running joke of dyspeptic critics.

Never once in my teenage years did I point to the TV and say, “Mom and Dad, that is what I want to be when I grow up.” They already thought I was odd enough. Why compound their image with an outlandish ambition?

Theater critic isn’t a category of profession, like doctor, teacher, firefighter or astronaut, that young people imagine. Today, as newspapers and magazines are slipping into extinction, I wonder if anyone under 40 is even aware that there once was a time when critics bestrode the media universe like giants, issuing cultural verdicts with the gavel-pounding authority of high court judges.

The role of tastemaker has, alas, devolved into influencer, where the main qualification isn’t aesthetic judgment but the size of one’s social media following. Despair comes naturally to a critic, but I had a bout of unexpected optimism recently when asked to appear on a panel organized by Critical Insight, a writing fellowship program established by Pittsburgh Public Theater and American Theatre magazine that brings together established critics with emerging voices in the field of arts journalism.

One of the questions I was asked to consider beforehand was how I make the case for criticism to myself, to my editors and to my readers. The panel, which paired me with Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar, took place two weeks after the presidential election had shattered my faith in any notion of collective values. I don’t want to dwell on politics at the moment. I’m tapped out. But the conversation with inspiring fellow journalists came at a time when I had to reconstruct for myself the reasons for my professional existence.

It might surprise people to learn that I didn’t become a theater critic because I wanted to lord my taste over the masses. Connoisseurship was never a motivation. I fell into criticism because I wanted to be a writer and needed a practical means to support myself.

A writing life held the hope that I might be left to my own devices. (I was too naive to understand that money was a precondition for freedom.) It also brought me into dialogue with those artists who had inspired the dream in the first place.

Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett, the ancient Greek tragedians and Tennessee Williams were among the voices who originally called out to me. Unlike the novelists I avidly read in my formative years, these playwrights invited actors to endow their words with body and voice. It was the combined power of literature and acting, and in particular the way private experience could be lifted into a public forum, that drew me to take up the theater as a main subject of writing.

My immersion in the art form had an unexpected windfall. The theater taught me how to think. And it was this benefit that was foremost in my mind when I spoke on the panel of how I justify the practice of criticism to myself and to my readers.

As a theater critic, I feel part of a tradition that includes not only illustrious critics from the past but also playwrights, directors, actors and designers. I don’t make the separation between the critical and the artistic, mostly because the critics who have taught me the most are those who, having absorbed the lessons of great playwriting, were able to articulate the theater’s most enduring values.

The best critics don’t impose an arbitrary or subjective set of standards onto the work they’re evaluating but attempt to relate the play or musical or performance piece at hand to precedents that have stood the test of time.

Critics like Eric Bentley, Richard Gilman, Kenneth Tynan, George Jean Nathan, George Bernard Shaw or William Hazlitt derived their standards from the best of what has appeared over the centuries on a stage. Even Aristotle, who could be said to have launched literary criticism, set forth the precepts of tragedy by empirically studying the indelible examples of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

What are these mysterious values that have guided my path in theater? Before the panel began, I jotted down a list of principles that have shaped my critical sensibility. It’s an intuitive set of criteria that I never thought to enumerate before, but it forms the basis not only for how I judge theatrical works but for how I make my way in the world.

1. A skepticism toward conventional wisdom that is rooted in a distrust of cliches and stereotypes. Trafficking in generalities rarely leads to universal truth. The theater recognizes the revelatory potential of the individual case.

2. A refusal to see the world in schematic terms. Simplistic binaries might make for powerful melodrama, where the world is divided into good and evil. But great dramatists recognize that our lives exist largely in gray zones, and that no ideology can contain our contradictory humanity.

3. An understanding that our most consequential actions are largely overdetermined, meaning not reducible to a single motivation. Human beings are not mathematical problems with definitive solutions. We are each, in our own way, a Hamlet, forced to ponder our own frustrating opacity.

4. An ability to distinguish between sentimentality and sentiment. We are emotional animals, and far less rational than we’d care to admit. But emotion in art must be earned. Tears can be manipulated, but deep feeling involves both heart and head.

5. An appreciation of the theater as a dialectical art form that puts perspectives into collision. The conflict between right and wrong is far less compelling, as Hegel understood, than the collision of sides with competing claims to legitimacy. Great drama initiates us into complexity. It builds our capacity for what Keats called “negative capability,” a tolerance for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Some of us may go to the theater in the hope of making up our minds on some burning issue of the day. But the truth is that we need the theater to teach us how to think, to open us to ambiguity and to remind us of the limits of what can be known. The content of my thoughts changes with the tide, but the pattern of my thinking has been forever shaped by dramatists far wiser than I could ever be.

As a critic, I consider myself a teacher who is at the same time a perpetual student. What I hoped to convey on the panel was my belief that criticism is a practice more than it is an identity. Being a professional drama critic is a great privilege, but it’s the critical sensibility that I’m most anxious to preserve in an age of increasingly militant dogma.

Technology has enhanced our world in innumerable ways, but it has also diminished our attention span, deteriorated our reading capacity, encouraged our herd-like tendencies and impaired our ability to argue with ourselves. The theater’s rich intellectual inheritance serves as a buffer to society’s recrudescent stupidity. Upholding this legacy seems a more vital role for a critic than operating as a tour guide of commercial entertainments. The survival of our democracy depends on the recovery of our critical thinking skills.

In the past, when I’ve made the case for criticism, I’ve focused on the theater as a training ground for empathy, but I’ve become wary of instrumentalizing this benefit. I know that the theater builds our empathetic capacity, but this muscle must be exercised in a way that our niche culture no longer encourages. It’s not enough to identify with characters like ourselves. We must find opportunities to identify with characters quite different from our lived experiences.

The theater is still the finest university I’ve attended. But like any good education, it is up to us to do the work.