David Cote in the Guardian theatre blog is primarily distressing over the recent firing of David Rooney, the chief theatre critic at Variety. He laments the fact that Rooney’s job will now be filled by freelance reviewers, but by the end of the post he has widened his lens to describe the the role of the reviewer in general. We critics, reviewers, consumer reporters are the dung beetles of culture. We consume excrement, enriching the soil and protecting livestock from…

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I appreciate Leonard Jacobs’ scrutiny of ethics among his peers, but in threatening my and other bloggers’ independence in writing, he offends. He alienated himself from me when he predicated a lunch date on whether I would or would not tell him what I was going to write after attending a certain Bloggers Night. San Francisco Bay Area-based theatre critic Chloe Veltman has published a “preview review” of Beckett’s Endgame currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She does…

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Blogger’s Block is much different than Writer’s Block. It’s more like “biting your tongue.” I have been working as dramaturg on a project and traveling a great deal with it in recent months. I have been writing non-stop during my sabbatical from Rat Sass, sometimes posting in the comment section of other domains, but I have refrained from “publishing” proper because I have been overwhelmed of late by the enormity of the act. After this two-month absence from blogging, I…

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I seem to be mistaken about the theatre editors having any regrets over what they have made public. Neither appears particularly flustered by the attention to their private beliefs and lives. In fact both seem to have flourished somewhat under the scrutiny. And the private/public rift that has developed between them has all the drama and scandal potential of a Rosie/Donald episode. For theatre’s sake, let’s hope they exploit the opportunity. I kid the critics. David wants his pathology to…

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More update than correction, New York Magazine’s Vulture “fixed” the misrepresentation quoted in my last post. It now reads like this: And debate still rages over the Mike Daisey affair! Nick from Rat Sass thinks Mike faked his outrage over a mass walkout from his show, eager for publicity. This new form of “publication” coming out of mainstream press is very strange. Nothing ever really needs to be retracted, just tweaked in an updated edition. I wonder if I got…

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As difficult as it is today to differentiate the alternative from the mainstream in theatre culture, so too is the difficulty in attempting to classify the various modes of writing being used to represent theatre now that the blogosphere has brought the internet into a new age. George Hunka misdirected his fellow theatre bloggers with the abstract he selected from Eric Bentley’s Thalia Prize speech in his post titled “No Critics, No Directors Either”. As a result Isaac Butler, MattJ,…

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The distinction between reviews and criticism, reviewer and critic, should be made. Reviewers have both space and time pressures imposed upon them. The reviewer has a “job” job. More often than not the subject/work is an assignment not a choice. The job also entails that something needs to be written even when nothing warrants it. The critic is not on assignment but begins with the subject/work that intrigues and excites, “something that needs to be written about.” The critic is…

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AMERICAN THEATRE presents Weigh In on Cultural Power The August Wilson/Robert Brustein Debate Moderated by Anna Deavere Smith ************************************************** John Weidman and the Guild should have taken lessons from August Wilson and TCG before they tried to pick a fight with a critic. In a very methodical manner, TCG along with its magazine American Theatre, engendered and nurtured the smoldering feud between the playwright and the critic into a convoluted but interesting cultural polemic. The apotheosis was a public debate…

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We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar And the Hedy Weiss spectacle in Chicago ends in the way it began. Not with a bang but a whimper. Its only accomplishment was the denigration of both theatre and criticism. Theatre as an art form is…

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The Dramatists Guild’s president John Weidman apologizes to Hedy Weiss in a Sun-Times’ Letter to the Editor. Well, not really. As we predicted, the public inquisition of the critic proceeds in the words of The Guild’s executive director Ralph Sevush “without pause and without apology.” So who is the “reliable source” that presented El Presidente with the faulty intelligence that instigated this whole letter writing campaign?   Before writing the letter, I confirmed with what I believed to be an…

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Ezra Pound had the reputation of being the most well-read in literature amongst all his contemporaries. Remarkably, he once said “You don’t need to read an entire book in order to speak intelligently about it.” I am not sure if that “confession” made me think more or less of Pound as an arbitrator of literature. No doubt that Jeremy and Melissa have picked Ms Weiss’ winning offense. A perfect example of the hubris of the Critic, not to see the…

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Thoughts and ideas can become dangerous so I always begin writing to the great metaphysical abyss with the salutation “Dear Editor.” It keeps me on my toes. The greatest fiction writer of the 20th century was of course Vladimir Lenin. The Editor especially enjoyed his pamphlet State and Revolution. In 1940 Leon Trotsky was in the study of his heavily guarded house near Mexico City writing the History of the Russian Revolution when The Editor embedded an alpine climbing axe…

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I will often fall asleep at the theatre. My own snoring sometimes wakes me. Other times one of my companions might elbow me awake. I may then leave at intermission so as not to embarrass my unfortunate theatre companions further. “The performance put me to sleep.” “I left at intermission before I feel asleep again.” For me to claim anything else would be unethical. Whether or not that is an authoritative judgement depends solely on who does or doesn’t believe…

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The NY Times article points toward how/where this controversy began. “The review came to the attention of a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Jeffrey Sweet, who alerted other guild members.” What’s not so well known is that Jeffrey Sweet had an agenda here. As playwright he does not like the way Hedy Weiss reviews his plays. So Jeff has been trying to pick a public fight with Hedy for sometime now. Here’s his Letter to the Editor from…

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Years ago Ross Wetzsteon, the theatre editor of the Village Voice, solicited a series of essays on the subject of the artist/critic relationship. He was asking for not just critics but also artists in the community to reply. I think I remember him titling the series “Crritic!!” after a Beckett quote from Waiting for Godot. VLADIMIR: Moron! ESTRAGON: Vermin! VLADIMIR: Abortion! ESTRAGON: Morpion! VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat! ESTRAGON: Curate! VLADIMIR: Cretin! ESTRAGON: (with finality): Crritic! VLADIMIR: Oh! (He wilts, vanquished, and turns…

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