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One time, I took part in a very strange round-table conversation at the Ontological Hysteric theatre. It was a summit called between Richard Foreman and a group of theatre bloggers, including David Cote, who was then the editor of Time Out's theatre coverage.
Richard had summoned us there because he was concerned that bad press from theatre blogs had negatively impacted the reception of his latest show. He was wrong: his pivot to multimedia work had been largely a disaster, but very few bloggers had written about it.
But once we dispensed with the reason why we were all there, it turned into a really fascinating conov w/ Richard bout his work and the press. I remember saying to him I disliked his latest one because he had stripped out the humanity and he said "Yes! I did that!"
Anyway, he told this story about Ben Brantley taking over as chief theatre critic at the Times, and how this caused great panic within him—The Ontological even considered banning the Times from its productions!—because Brantley was just some fashion reviewer from WWD.
But someone convinced Richard that this was a bad idea, so instead he invited the Times as usual and waited with high anxiety for the review, which turned out to be glowing.
In that moment, Foreman praised Brantley's open-mindedness. That always stuck with me, because at the time I was essentially attacking Brantley on my blog every time he filed a review. And I realized that Foreman was right, whatever problems one might have w/ Brantley...
(and I've had plenty of them!) he often tried to view theatre with far more openness than many critics or artists I knew, including myself.
Theatre reviewers for the daily papers have a very different job. They aren't writing for posterity; they are writing to tell the audience whether a show is worth paying money to see or not. This often gets derided—even by other critics— as "consumer reports" style reviewing...
... but (a) consumer reports provides an extremely useful service and (b) doing this kind of reviewing multiple times a week, every week, for *years* is actually quite hard. At the Times, you have the additional problem of the institution's power & that its reviews are archived
so even though you're not writing towards prosperity, thanks to TimesMachine... you kinda are! It's a grind is what I'm saying, and you're exposed to a lot of opprobrium from people like me, and maintaining any kind of open mind in the midst of that is hard and to be admired.
