Jesus Is Back, This Time It's Personal

At the heart of religion are mystery and terror; peace, joy, gratitude, and forgiveness, all the nice and comforting things that comprise what might be seen as religion's attractions, aren't free goodies but are rather byproducts of, responses to, our encounters with the divine, which is maybe just another word for the awful, irreversible, unexalted realization that we are huge-spirited animals who will nevertheless die alone in misery and pain—or, as a former colleague of mine, Tom Jacobs, recently put it, much more sanguinely:

What makes the challenge of living so goddam exciting is that we have limited resources, a limited amount of time, and an infinite imagination.

Why would we respond with peace and gratitude—or, in Tom’s formulation, excitement—to the terrible truth that we will unavoidably dream big and perish small, that our reach will ever exceed our grasp? Actually, we don’t all respond so nicely to this paradox, but that’s where the religious sensibility comes in, for me, at least: In facing the basic truth of temporal existence, which is that it is temporary, we are liberated to live in it; we’re freed of our anxious myopia and self-concern; we can see clearly the absurdity of desire, of striving for gain, of doing anything more important than holding and helping each other through this vale of tears. And in that freedom is a kind of resurrection, a rebirth, a living in eternity now—which is in turn a kind of tribute, a gesture, to the divine, to that which is outside the time that marks and measures our lives.

These, at least, are some of the thoughts that have tumbled around in my head in the weeks since I saw/heard/experienced The Gospel According to the Other Mary at Avery Fisher Hall, in a one-night-only visit during Holy Week by the L.A. Philharmonic under the exuberant leadership of Gustavo Dudamel (and the L.A. Master Chorale, directed by the tireless Grant Gershon). This arresting Passion play by composer John Adams and librettist/director Peter Sellars, a kind of sequel to their Nativity oratorio El Niño, was appropriately much more high-stakes dramatic than its predecessor, which wrung as much conflict and wonder as was possible out of Jesus’ portentous outlaw birth. Gospel was also much more thoroughly staged, with three dancers and six singers enacting the drama on a raised platform in front of the violin section and around a table nearly in the midst of the cellos.

The texts, as with the previous oratorio, wove together an eclectic mix: Alongside the evangelists’ accounts was writing by Louise Erdrich, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordan, Primo Levi, Hildegard von Bingen, and Ruben Dario, in a sometimes jarring, sometimes revelatory, never less than stimulating stew; the opening has Mary Magdalene (Kelley O’Connor, with short-cropped hair and a ravaged look) singing, “The next day in the city jail we were searched for drugs. We were stripped naked. We were given prison clothes and put in cells” (according to Alex Ross, this is Dorothy Day recounting an arrest in her youth). A later section has Martha (Tamara Mumford), cast in a more explicitly Day-like role as a sort of den mother for the dispossessed, including a certain itinerant preacher and his disciples, lead the chorus in recounting, with granular specificity, a mass arrest in conjunction with a United Farm Workers strike.

This anachronistic patchwork, coupled with the Venice-Beach-casual costuming of the performers—a trio of countertenor angels looked for all the world like squatters fresh from the dispensary—had a disarming more than an off-putting effect. And the score struck me as a jagged, swelling sonic wonder; I couldn’t identify everything I was hearing, and I was as frequently surprised as I was moved by just the sound of it.

But it was the intent, unapologetically intense approach to the gospel, what Ross has perceptively pegged as Sellars’ “devotional irreverence,” that got under my skin and kept me awake. This Gospel didn’t just mine the material’s pith and drama—in Magdalene’s prostitution, in the brutal Roman occupation, even in Lazarus’ resurrection, Sellars’ texts and direction embodied their contemporary resonance in visceral, even gritty ways. It also found its way to depicting the Passion and the Resurrection with a tremulous immediacy, terror, mortification, and mystery—and that is as much as even I, who consider myself a believer, can bring to a contemplation of these incomprehensibles.

Sellars and Adams, who are not believers in any orthodox sense, may share the rough liberal consensus about Jesus—that he was a cool, radical dude who preached love and forgiveness, and was tortured and killed for it, and that much of what Christians have taught and believed since has been delusion, embroidery, or even mischief. But in reckoning with the story’s irreducible essence (which the non-Biblical sources somehow only sharpen and crystallize), Sellars and Adams went beyond mellow hippie Jesus and created, through this wracked Mary and her fellow witnesses, a gospel as wrenchingly apocalyptic, and as cathartic, as any I’ve experienced.

Related posts: Atomic Implosion, Purpose-of-Art Quotes.

Attention Deficit, and Surplus

This is why I love the theater, or keep coming back to it, in any case: It holds my attention like nothing else. It may be my age, and it most certainly has to do with the multi-screen age we live in, but I can barely get through a film, or anything more than a half-hour TV show, without distraction; I barely crack a book, even on an e-reader, anymore; months ago I had to make myself turn off my iPod shuffle and listen to records all the way through (it was a lovely and rewarding experiment; it didn’t last). On my most recent birthday, my simple wish was to sit home with my family and watch a movie all the way through with them—one I’d been putting off for decades, Stop Making Sense (we all loved it). How sad is that?

This struck me powerfully last week during Annie Baker’s The Flick, which happens to be set in a struggling single-screen movie theater, and which happens to be a bit of an exercise—an entirely salutary and rewarding one, thankfully—in attention-span maintenance. Much had been written about the show’s glacial pace and 200-minute running time (including by Playwrights Horizons’ very own artistic director), and indeed the first buzz I heard about the play months ago, delivered in a vaguely scandalized whisper, was “It’s three-and-a-half hours long.” So I’d been steeling myself; I consider myself something of an Annie Baker fanboy, but her last theatrical effort quite memorably, and painfully, did not hold my attention.

I needn’t have worried. While I think some colleagues may have overstated the play’s greatness, and its subject and style—aimless but endearing nerds digressively arguing about movies and trying to make sense of their inchoate lives—almost guarantee that it will be overrated by a certain similar class of aimless nerds (critics), The Flick (which closed on Sunday) is inarguably a great achievement, and a joy, and another worthy entry in the unfolding Baker canon.

I should probably say the Baker/Gold canon, since director Sam Gold’s contribution is inextricably linked to the play’s success, and while I did have some fun trying to imagine what another future production might look like, I know that Baker’s work isn’t director- or actor-proof; she herself described to me a non-Gold production of The Aliens that elided the show’s lengthy pauses, and accordingly sucked.

But here’s the point: I can’t recall the last time I’ve heard an audience so intently silent for so long as I did last Saturday. It wasn’t quite the pin-drop snap to attention that sometimes happens in the theater when something really major or suspenseful is going down onstage (though that happened here, too); it was more a general attentiveness, a kind of relaxed but alert wakefulness, to the finest detail. While watching characters frozen for several seconds at a time in mid-thought, or craning to see two crucial and entirely inaudible scenes of connection taking place behind the picture window of a small projection room, my mind didn’t wander—at least, not outside the entirely sympathetic, enveloping, reverberant world the play created, a place we somehow shared with the characters to a degree I’ve seldom felt in the theater. This may partly be the byproduct of a kind of literal mirroring, as we sat in a row of seats, facing a row of seats, in set designer David Zinn’s perfect simulacrum of a tiny cinema.

It wasn’t just the space the play mastered, it was also time. We often think of playwriting “craft” as having something to do with plot and structure, but the meticulous crafting that Baker (with Gold) put into their work is more about creating a living theatrical world and locating arresting moments within it, even if in the case of The Flick those moments last long enough to be movements. I’m reminded of another playwright whose work is finely entangled with its realization, Jackie Sibblies Drury; someone recently said of her that what she’s doing with her plays is “curating experience.” That’s close to a name for what Baker and Gold did with The Flick: created a kind of installation, and placed their quietly squirming characters within it (and then gently, inexorably, wrapped us up with them).

There’s an aesthetic paradox in this: The play’s open-ended, almost documentary realism is also tightly and rigorously controlled, like a single string pulled taut on which the slightest disturbance or variation registers thunderingly. The play’s tight/loose rhythm and range actually put me in mind of film editing; we always knew where our eyes should be directed, and no action felt superfluous (even the non-action). In short, the symmetry between the playwright’s attention to detail and ours was deeply satisfying.

It also helps, of course, that within this beautifully realized world, Baker’s dialogue and dramaturgy are as crisp, funny, and surprising as ever. And in the sly self-critique of stereotype she gives to Avery—something of a black-nerd stereotype himself—Baker proves again how trickily truthful she can be. But her emotional register also reaches a new level of risk and vulnerability; all the indirection and subtextual longing that infuse The Aliens and Circle Mirror Transformation is here, too, but there are also a few moments of bald honesty and confession in The Flick that rise up strikingly from the play’s anomic baseline.

I’ll object here only to a few quasi-LaBute-ian plot twists that don’t have the force or shock they probably should, and to a long quote from Pulp Fiction that doesn’t quite connect with the moment where it’s placed, even subtextually. (Indeed, there’s an academic paper waiting to be written about how Baker handles Avery’s race, and this Ezekiel 25:17 moment is one of the few in the show where I think her instincts on this subject may have faltered.) But I can think of few better things to say about The Flick than that it affirmed for me, again, the irreducible humanism of the theater, where, as a famous character once said, attention must be paid.

The Non-Readers

I got a lot of response to Sunday's post on the future of arts journalism—encouraging words, actionable ideas, quibbles. I should acknowledge the response of Bitter Lemons, the site that gave the world the initial scoop about Backstage's decision to stop reviewing theater.

But three comments in particular have given me fresh food for thought about the changing value and meaning of criticism. This is not just about the Internet, folks. Something is afoot.

Exhibit A: I got a Facebook message from a college acquaintance who has two young sons enrolled in a major musical theater program at a prestigious college:

Since my teen years, I have been one to read reviews avidly, sometimes from several sources, before I see a show. But I don't see my sons do that. Even when I refer them to particularly helpful or enlightening reviews, they usually show little interest. Sometimes they say they just want to enjoy a performance and form their own opinions. Other times I think they just avoid "my way." And yet they have extensive knowledge of plays, musicals, performers, composers, etc. Much of this comes from various sources. In particular, I've seen them glean info from early-adopter friends, social networking, teachers, and even youtube clips. (High school students actively share Youtube videos of Joe's Pub performances of their favorite MT actors, for example.)

But this all got me thinking: I've been told that the number of applicants for college-based musical theatre programs is on the rise. One well known college audition coach tells me some of the top schools have seen numbers of applicants increase 30% over prior years. (Some of this increase may be due to application inflation, i.e.: as the competition for the same number of MT program spots increases, students apply to more and more schools. These days it's not uncommon for BFA MT candidates to apply to 16 audition-based schools.) But some of this is likely due to the popularity of the genre itself. (I credit shows like "Spring Awakening" for sparking a new fervor for MT in recent years.)

So we don't appear to have any drop-off, and perhaps we even have an increase (thank you "Glee/Smash") in students interested in theatre. (And I say theatre specifically, since students in MT programs typically start out aiming for a career on the stage, versus TV or film.) And yet Backstage reports a drop-off in interest in theatre reviews? Curious.

OK then, to quote Raising Arizona; chalk another vote in the less-fearful-for-future-of-theatre-than-of-arts-journalism column. Then I got an email from a Twitter acquaintance, a dramaturg with several years experience at major American resident theaters. She spent the first part of the email talking about her experience at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, and about how she realized partway through a speech on criticism there that

I hadn’t been following any of the criticism coming out of the Festival...And, I realized I hadn’t read a review of anything in months or longer – New York Times, or anywhere. I get the NYT delivered on the weekend, but almost never get up to the arts section. Often, I just click through online if someone links to something on Facebook or Twitter that sounds interesting and I have time at the same time.

It was also interesting to me, in my own head, to be thinking of the role of the critic as the tributes to Roger Ebert were flowing in. When I was in graduate school in the mid 90s, Linda Winer of Newsday was my criticism professor, and Michael Feingold was trying to teach us something I don’t quite remember. Linda worked very hard to get us out of the thumbs up/thumbs down world she felt criticism was spinning into. But, then I lived in Chicago for almost 10 years, and both Ebert and Gene Siskel were champions there – not just of film, but arts in general, theater in particular.

If I’m not reading reviews, who is? Why am I not interested in reviews, especially in my line of work?

I do read features, though. Although, less and less. Some of that is just time, some is attention span, some is my desire to read about anything other than theater and to be in the world at large when I can, and some of it is that I haven’t found a writer whose critical voice I trust to fight or follow.

So young folks coming up don't read reviews; seasoned insiders don't read reviews. What about in-the-trenches practitioners? A comment on an earlier post came from a theater maker who wrote:

This is a vibrant topic in Philadelphia, where I live and create work, in no small part because there are so many generative devisers and multi-disciplinary artists in our community and very few critics whose background in theater overlaps with this approach.

In a time when works are shown multiple times to the same community in various iterations, the role of critique should be MORE important than ever, and yet in my own experience I consistently find myself less and less interested in reading or even inviting reviewers into my work environment.

Clearly, something is in the air all across the country.

She sent me to a recent post on the blog of her company, Swim Pony, in which she lays it out still more starkly, with reference to a show the company recently remounted, The Giant Squid:

My own experience with review has been this: it is totally unaligned with my sense of my own work.

I have had pieces that I loved that were panned. I have had pieces I thought were weaker and not ready for audiences that get raves. Mostly, it feels really random.

And perhaps more importantly, I have had a show utterly slaughtered in print but sell out every performance and another get glowing words in literally every venue that it was showcased in that I was dying to get butts in seats for. I have had every iteration in between. And always, it feels really random and disconnected to the work.

What was amazing about the experience of remounting Squid was this: I never had to think about getting people in the door through this imperfect intermediary. I could just market directly to these people and then watch how much they liked it myself. I could talk to them and ask what they thought. I could hear them laugh or gasp. I could see how the things I’d tried to do worked or didn’t.

And it made me think, “What if I never had to have a critic in a show of mine again?”

Because if I don’t feel in alignment with the assessment and most of the time the assessment doesn’t seem to make a difference on who comes, why bother?

True, you may respond, but these are insiders, not consumers, theatergoers, general readers. You might say insiders have a warped view of criticism, since they're often on the receiving end of it. Fair enough. But it's the indifference, not the hostility, that gets to me here. I firmly believe that theater is the original social medium, an ephemeral art that only lives on in reflection, argument, conversation, and of course revival and reinterpretation. And there is clearly a conversation, a discourse, going on about it; each of the three examples above cite sources where those extratheatrical discussions are happening (actually, the dramaturg's I didn't include, but she mentioned internal discussions in the field and HowlRound as meeting that need for her).

Can critics, these imperfect intermediaries, remain an important part of the conversation theatergoers and theater audiences crave and deserve, and seem to be finding elsewhere? I don't know. Maybe because I like a challenge, maybe out of curiosity, but damned if that last post doesn't make me want to see Swim Pony's work all the more.

Who Needs Critics?

When I opine and argue about the state of criticism and arts journalism, as I have often in this space and which I had occasion to do last week on HowlRound, I realize I speak from a position of privilege, which is that for my entire adult life, apart from an odd job here or there, I've made my living exclusively writing and editing about the arts, and the great majority of that time about theater. As I mentioned here, this happened as much by happy accident as by aspiration, but in any case I'm very grateful to have been able to spend the hours and years I have reporting on and contemplating the lively arts.

As the Internet has radically changed the economics of the journalism racket, I've fretted and argued about new models, trying to keep an open mind about the unfolding future, trying not to take for granted anything, not even my own shifting place in the arts-journalism ecosystem. As jobs have dwindled—and since I didn't get the one I really wanted—I've gulped hard and held on tight to my contacts and tried to keep my wits about me. As a result, I make a living at it; I have health insurance and do my bit for a small family; I have a certain degree of freedom, and still a lot of fun, at this racket.

What I didn't realize I was taking for granted, and I guess it was staring me right in the face, was the intrinsic value of criticism itself. I've been in lots of bitch sessions with fellow critics about what we do and why, about how little we receive in compensation or respect; I've engaged in plenty of back-and-forths with theater makers and press reps and concerned theatergoers about the relative value of criticism, and about their self-contradicting frustrations with it—that on the one hand critics have no power as advocates and on the other that critics have too much power as, well, critics (in the negative sense).

But in none of these overlapping discussions of criticism and its relationship to artists and audiences has anyone had the temerity or common sense to ask the obvious, impertinent, terrifying question: Who reads criticism anyway? And then, the corollary question, given the answer to the first (a precious few people): So why do it at all? Why not—in an age when Web publishers (which is to say, the only publishers there will be soon enough) can monitor exactly which content draws the most readers, and which doesn't—cut our losses? What and who are theater reviews for?

This, at least, seems to be what the executive editor of Backstage, a magazine for which I worked as the West Coast editor in chief for 10 years, was thinking when he composed this memo to his theater critics recently:

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.

Let that sink in: Backstage, a 53-year-old industry trade publication with the word "stage" in it, will no longer employ critics and no longer print reviews of theater, either on paper or in its inevitable online-only incarnation (within the year, sources tell me). This is a magazine that, for much of the time I've known it (and this includes its 1998 absorption of L.A.'s mom-and-pop actors' trade Drama-Logue, precisely midway through my time there), was uniquely committed, in both its New York and LA markets, to reviewing more theater productions than any other (weeklies on both coast have come close, and in recent years online publications like TheaterMania have had a similar try-to-cover-everything ethos). So this would seem to be a huge blow.

But to whom?

This is my cue to rage self-righteously against the philistinism of the masses, the blindness and cynicism of publishers, the tyranny of the click, the A.D.D. zombie that is Buzzfeeding on our brains, etc. Instead, since the news came down on Friday evening, I've been in a soul-sick, and soul-searching, mood. Backstage's decision may be—almost certainly is—a short-sighted, deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic move, rather than a bold, forward-looking, Web-savvy innovation. But I don't imagine that the folks who made this decision are in a special class of boobs or villains, and the notion of letting audience metrics guide coverage priorities is, alas, not their exclusive invention. This radical step, it seems to me, may be the real canary in the arts-journalism coal mine.

And if I'm honest with myself, am I surprised that the vast majority of reviews of tiny shows, and even many of the reviews of big shows that now turn up in every corner of the Internet, are meagerly read at best? No. And I'm starting to wonder whether the rot goes deeper than the stock observation about theater's marginalization from the mass-culture mainstream, a marketplace where it will never be able to compete for clicks with TV, film, games, books, and popular music. I'm by now well used, and happily reconciled, to theater's intrinsic liveness and hence relative niche position in the culture. But it seems to me that the readership for theater reviews is not even in healthy proportion to theater attendance; of the hundreds and thousands of people who attend the average play, how many will have read a review of that show, let alone more than one?

@robkendt maybe time to reinvent form. Or cultivate writers who can respond in more interesting ways to theater productions.
— Charles McNulty (@CharlesMcNulty) April 5, 2013

No, the problem, I'm starting to feel, may have less to do with the changing habits of the reading audience than with the widget-like form criticism typically takes, and the weak, out-of-context critical writing it produces. I'd love to see what the metrics are for reviews in all media, but it seems to me that there's something rote, lazily dutiful about the format of most review sections: a few-hundred-word commentary about a new film or book or play or record, another about another, and so on. Is there a way, instead, that criticism in the 21st-century could/should be more about building and following critics' individual voices and affinities, and less about building up glorified listing sections? Or, if audiences want to browse listings, why not leave that to aggregators like L.A.'s Bitter Lemons or New York's StageGrade, where the lines between print critics, bloggers, and community reviews are already blurring?

Maybe I'm overreacting and overreaching here. I just happened to recently read Brian Kellow's excellent biography of supercritic Pauline Kael, absorbed the death of beloved film buff Robert Ebert, and took in Nora Ephron's infotaining Broadway play Lucky Guy, which glamorizes the rough-and-tumble world of New York City tabloids in the 1980s and '90s, and maybe these outsized media figures of recent yore are over-coloring my thinking. But I do feel like a return to critics-as-tastemakers, as larger-than-life personalities, as polymaths and advocates and pugilists—in short, as infotainers in their own right—may be the only thing that can save the form from a slow death by anemic metrics. And while I can't help feeling a little excited by the notion, personally, the unavoidable catch is that this would demand a lot more enterprise and judgment, and probably pay less, than just waiting for assignments from a theater editor to cover discrete shows. For all its demands, though, I'd imagine this approach has the potential also to give back more, not only to critics, who would benefit from having a wider purview, but also to theater audiences, who don't just need but I think actually want to be guided, challenged, stimulated as much by criticism as by the theater they see.

As I said last week, I'm now officially less worried about the future of theater than about the future of arts journalism. But the continued thriving of theater, and the shrinking of arts-journalism institutions, means that the vacuum of leadership in the opinion leader/pundit space gets wider by the day.

Who will rush in to fill it?

Russian Flashback

in Light My Fire at Teatr.doc

This time last year, thanks to the generosity of the Center for International Theatre Development, I was in Moscow to cover the Golden Mask festival, a sort of annual best-of Olympics of Russian theater--though I heard a lot of internal contention from theater-makers about the politics of who was and wasn't competing, who got state money and who didn't, about the dominance of Moscow over the regions. They're tussles that shared certain recognizable features with the arguments you hear in American theater circles, though with different implications and histories, given Russia's vastly different literary and economic traditions.

The most striking affinity I felt, though, was with the underground-ish indie theater of places like Teatr.doc and Praktika in Moscow and On.Teatr in St. Petersburg, the latter of which staged Annie Baker's Aliens a few years back (and which is having problems with its basement space). These spaces were clearly the Soho Reps and NY Theatre Workshops of Russia, embracing such new-for-them forms as docu-theater and devised work with a bracing matter-of-factness and lack of dogma. Let's just say I didn't expect to see this in the land of Stanislavsky:

The strongest Golden Mask offering from this indie-theatre scene exemplified a freewheeling aesthetic eclecticism that might be recognized by fans of Austin, Texas’s Rude Mechanicals. Sasha Denisova’s Light My Fire (also at Teatr.doc) blends documentary techniques with sketch comedy and rock-and-roll, giving dead-by-27 rockers Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix a remix at once both raucous and intimate. In Denisova’s beguiling conceit, actors slip effortlessly between broad, ballsy stabs at Famous Rock Moments—some lip-synched to loud playback, some screamingly funny, all stunningly successful—and quiet diary readings from the actors’ own contemporary Russian lives that redirect the larger story’s pop-cultural, and countercultural, currents in fresh and provocative ways. I doubted that anyone could make the legendary music and mayhem of these three overexposed icons feel freshly revolutionary, but that’s exactly what Denisova and company, under director Yury Muravitsky, have done.

John Freedman, the indispensable American expat/Russian theatrical ambassador, has posted a PDF of my story online here (the text is also here, somehow).

Band for a Run

The Lisps

I've been in bands, and I've written musicals, but apart from my actor/singer/musician adaptation of The Devil and Tom Walker a few years back, I've never really put the two together. In much the same way I learned to play classical and pop music almost entirely separately (and in that order), and have struggled ever since to bridge the two in terms of technique and theory, there's a kind of impermeable right-brain/left-brain wall between the worlds of bands and musicals—one in which you write discrete songs, teach them to a band, put them together into a setlist, and get people to come out and hear you, the other in which you write songs for a show with a playwright, teach them to a band and singers, and get people to come out and hear you.

Why is there such a gulf between the two? It has everything to do, of course, with the different expectations, economics, and aesthetic traditions/possibilities that have grown up around each way of making and sharing music. Luckily for the future of music and theater are some artists coming up who don't see or feel the distinction as clearly, and these hybrid writer/performers are the subject of a big new cover story in American Theatre I spent the last few months putting together. One of my goals was to avoid the way new voices in musical theater are still too often written about (essentially, in a tone that's a variation on, "Good golly, musicals are rocking now!"), and I think—thanks to the input of a seemingly endless, interlocking network of sources and tipsters—I managed at least to make some kind of case that this is a trend worth noting.

The thesis graf:

Perhaps the most heartening and transformative trend in American musicals...is a swelling wave of hybrid shows created, and often performed, by indie bands and singer/songwriters. Some begin as staged concept albums (the Lisps’ Futurity, Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys’ 28 Seeds, Black Francis and the Catastrophic Theatre’s Bluefinger). Some begin as devised-theatre pieces in which live music is as integral as the script (PigPen’s The Old Man and the Old Moon, Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die). Some begin as quasi-cabarets built around performers with stories to tell and/or roles to play (Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s Passing Strange, Ethan Lipton’s No Place to Go, and the trannie granny of them all, Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Some even begin as essentially traditional musicals, but with the clear stamp, and often the actual presence, of their composer/performers (Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s Once, Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, Groovelily’s Sleeping Beauty Wakes). 

None are Broadway-tooled properties by brand-name stars, though some (Once, Passing Strange) do end up on the Main Stem. And while most are mere flickers on the radar of the nation’s resident theatres and play-development houses, that is rapidly changing. In a trend analogous to the way “devised” ensemble work is increasingly welcomed by institutional theatres (see “Group Think,” March ’13), bands and actor/musicians are teaming with directors, playwrights and dramaturgs as full partners on new stage pieces, not simply rolling their gear through the stage door just before tech rehearsals to play through scores fully notated by a single composer.

There are MP3s and links galore with the online version of the story.

Crritic!

Among the many things critics can be counted on to have strong opinions about is their own reason for being. Indeed, the why-criticism-matters essay seems as evergreen a genre as the don't-listen-to-me commencement speech. The form persists not only for its obvious appeal as a means of self-justification and sanctimony for a class of routinely despised and insecure souls, but in large part also because it is such a live topic, on the minds and lips of anyone who's ever disagreed with a critic or had a box office line go cold because of a bad review: Who died and made these unelected assholes kings? That's partly why every attempt by a critic to clarify and defend their work and work ethic, like this recent classic example, stirs interest, further debate, even some vestige of understanding on the part of the critic's critics, one would hope--until their next eviscerating review, their next "offense."

As print media gets wood-chipped in the maw of the Internet Hydra, the stakes have only gotten higher, for both critics and criticized, which may be why hand-wringing essays and public forums about the state of criticism have only seemed to increase in recent years. While I used to feel guilty that I made a living writing about theater when so many people making actual theater didn't, I'm starting to feel the ground shifting; while too many people doing theater still don't make enough money, I now fear less for the future of theater as a going concern than I do for the future of paid arts media.

All of which is preamble to a week of posts I've curated at HowlRound, the indispensable online journal of the Center for Theater Commons, about theater criticism as a calling, even an art, unto itself. The assignment emerged from a free-ranging conversation I began with Polly Carl last June, when I was in Boston for the TCG conference and reporting a feature on the Center. And partly in response to Sherri Kronfeld's post on HowlRound (which I did respond to initially here), I had the impulse to seek out pieces that might humanize critics, demystify them--to make them appear, as I know the best of them to be, as passionate practitioners of their often unforgiving but frequently glorious work as are the theater artists I know. That, in any case, was my initial impulse, and it informs some of the essays you'll see this week, including mine, but the topics range beyond that, in pieces by Philadelphia critic Wendy Rosenfeld, Twin Cities dramaturg/director Dominic Taylor, Denver critic John Moore, South Brooklyn critic Jason Zinoman, L.A. hip-hop and theater critic Rebecca Haithcoat, and Seattle critic-turned-playwright John Longenbaugh. (There will also be a Weekly Howl discussion on Twitter this coming Thursday, Apr. 4, 2-3 pm EST; you can use the hashtag #newplay.)

One essay I wish I'd assigned, but you should read in full as a supplement, is Omar Willey's extraordinary, searching examination of the dysfunctional relationship between theaters, audiences, and critics that's as devastating, and as clear-eyed, as anything I've read on the subject. And I will also direct you, as I do every occasion I get, to my favorite purpose-of-criticism essay ever: Fintan O'Toole's "What Are Critics For?" As I once routinely signed off to my Back Stage West readers: Read on, and tell what us you think.