An Explanation of the Role of Student Reviewers on Campus

Editor's note: This piece originally ran in a 1978 Crimson photography magazine, The Grand Wazoo and was written by a former Crimson editor. The production he refers to was staged in the spring of 1978 at Harvard.

EVERYONE hates theater critics--those nasty bastards--but college theater critics belong in a special pantheon of cretins. It's easy to see why. Look at those pictures: people dancing, laughing, horsing around, working hard, waiting nervously in the wings, taking curtain calls. As the company of Damn Yankees demonstrates, putting a show together can be a warm, fun, exhausting experience, a time to form new and intimate relationships, a time when individuals merge into a team and develop together. (Sounds like an ad for Summer of '42.) The conflicts and squabbles of rehearsal can teach you more about yourself and other people than you'll learn at any lecture hall at Harvard. Yes, you see, we all know the joys of college theater.

Okay, so here's this by-now tightlyknit group of people who finally think they've got it together, going out on a stage and exposing themselves (for the actors, as we've heard, is naked), and in comes this smart-ass dandy with a little notebook--this peer--who wasn't at any of those rehearsals, who hasn't put in any time, who can sit comfortably in a chair, scribbling away, and who, with a few sneering phrases, can choose to mock and malign everything that took two months to build. No wonder you hate the critic, even the genuinely insightful critic (a rare bird, anyway).

If a critic blasts a show and no one goes to see it, the poor attendance is blamed on him. But if he raves, no one credits the critic with generating anything--people came becausue the show was good. I'm not saying the critic ought to be thanked when a show does good business, but it's too convenient to make them scapegoats when things go wrong.

One fellow who acted in a show I panned called me up and asked to see me to talk "philosophically" about reviewing. In the spirit of fairness, I accepted. He worked his way up to the charge: the principal organization behind the show had applied to various House drama societies for a production slot in the fall and had been turned down everywhere-all because of my review. This is truly astonishing. Because of me. I think there might have been a better reason: the production sucked.

I should think that any House drama president who saw the physical shambles of that production--the pathetic set, the confused, undirected actors--or who heard the tales (after the fact, as I did) of parents and friends being called in to clean up the messy staging and to coach the actors, would be crazy to give money and a coveted directing slot to an organization so clearly incapable of exercising any judgement. But with a little psychological displacement, you can blame anyone for failure.

The same actor, incidentally, accused me of poor writing. Good critics, he said his friends told him, evoke the flavor of the performances, whereas I had conveyed nothing. He ought to have thanked me--this was deliberate. Some people don't appreciate a favor.

BUT back to these pictures. When people put in all this work, they improve, and sometimes the difference between what they begin with and what they end up with is startling--so much better that they might not be aware that it still isn't any good (I'm not refering to Damn Yankees now).

Here's an example. There's this lug in your cast with the acting range of an oak tree, who reads his lines like a zombie with hemorrhoids. But he's a plodder, practicing for hours, week after week, and suddenly--maybe a week before your performance--life begins to creep into his performance: the gestures become bigger and more fluent, the line readings more flamboyant and on-target, and you convince yourself, in the euphoria of the opening, that he is giving a good performance.

Then the critic comes, and brushes him off as a dull stiff. "That asshole!" you think, "It's so unfair--he improved so much!" True, but the critic doesn't know this, nor, for that matter, does anyone in the audience. In a realistic, careful appraisal, those things are very hard to incorporate. When dealing with a professional company a critic can impose a universal standard: with a college production he is expected to be flexible. Sometimes it's impossible.

In the professional theater, critics have a large, unbiased reading public. In college, where you may run computers while your roommate sings and dances, a jab at a production can alienate half the campus. That's a gripe. But then, maybe it's a good thing that critics have so many built-in enemies, because it forces them to be more careful in their attacks, and more considerate of other people's feelings.

"Feelings" is not a good word when you're talking "art," because a bad production is a bad production, no matter how nice the actors or directors are. As Kant has pointed out, "One must not be in the least prepossessed in favor of the real existence of the thing...in order to play the part of judge in matters of taste." Often, however, dwelling on an individual's feelings is gratuitious and self-indulgent, and when a critic is far removed from the theater he tends to forget that.

WHAT kind of person reviews theater in college? Fewer weirdos than you think. Many are simply aspiring journalists with honest, Ralph Nadertype desires to protect the public from bad investments. People always say that critics are critics because they have failed in the theater and want to stay close to it--taking out their furstrations on those who have the talent. Not always true--some people are just better writers than actors and have the sense to recognize it; others return periodically to write or direct.

Sure, some guys have axes to grind, but if they are conscious of their responsibilities and have a little self-awareness, most personal attacks are eliminated in the first draft. (You could probably learn a lot about a critic's personality from his first drafts.) Then there are the lonely critics: may be they have friends in the theater and would like to be friendlier, or maybe they would like to have more friends in theater, or maybe they would just like to have more friends. They love writing a rave review, but better yet, they love visiting with the cast after the review has been printed.

One critic I know was so upset when a musical got a vicious review from someone else, that he wrote a review of the review, and sent it, along with words of praise, to the cast. Then he went backstage during intermission to say hello. Some guys just want to be loved.

Are reviews and critics necessary in collge theater? Uh, huh, very. Only I'm talking abstractly now--we could do without some reviews and critics.

First, simply, they can save the theatergoer time. In a week stuffed with plays, movies and concerts, you have to make a choice, and a lucid, well-written review combined with general word-of-mouth can give you a good idea whether or not a production is worth checking out.

Second, they provide a forum for artistic debate. This sounds bloated and silly, but an intelligent, experienced critic, even a peer, can sometimes give you a lot of insight into a particular branch of the arts. If more people responded to reviews (or if more reviews were stimulating enough to respond to), some lively debates could be generated.

Third: critics are often the only ones who can give a director or an honest appraisal of his work. Unfortunately--or fortunately--people in our society rarely have the honesty guts to criticize a person, especially a friend, to his face. Who tells you you're giving a bad performace--your friend? As Alceste discovered, not if he wants to remain your friend for very long. (Although I have been very critical of some performances in print, I have never told a friend I thought he was bad.)

Sometimes, when an actor or director loses perspective, a critic is the only person who will suggest he is doing something wrong, and that kind of judgement is vital for the artist to consider if he wants to develop.

But back to Damn Yankees, which only tried to be entertaining and fun. When you look at all those people in shots like these, you think: "Is it really necessary to be critical? Why not just enjoy it?" And then comes the inevitable guilt feelings. I've felt rotten about some things I've written--not because they were wrong or even unjust, but because I've enjoyed writing them.

If a critic tries to write carefully and stylishly, deriving a great deal of pleasure from the finished work, should that pleasure extend to the criticisms themselves? Both the writer and the reader have to separate the process of finding fault from the process of writing well--too much gleeful panning begins to sound suspiciously sadistic.

It's not easy, just as writing a mixed review isn't easy (because you can't chuck everything as patly into a mold of good or bad), but being a critic shouldn't be easy.

By reviewing a play, passing judgement on the creative output of others, a critic implies that his taste and opinion are valuable tools of measure. All critics must earn that power they wield: by the time they put in, the quality of their writing, their committment to good theater, their sensitivity and discretion.

This may be boring, because who cares what a critic has to say anyway since they're all assholes, but as you finish browsing through these photos, which depict the life cycle of House production, you'll see that it is very important, too important to dismiss. A critic who doesn't ask himself after every show whether he has any business being a critic has no business being critic.