San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A defense of writing reviews during a year of catastrophe.
Maybe some critics relish writing a zingerstuffed, disdaindrenched drubbing. You know this sort of pan. To read it is to sneak a forbidden candy — provided you’re not the one being panned.
Even in the before times, though, my own pan process was less licking of lips, less issuing of “muahahaha” and more pulling out of hair, more gnashing of teeth, more curling into the fetal position to ask the gods if it’s really worth it to make so many people hate me once again, just to write something less than a paean.
And now? When so many artists are out of work, or sick, or facing eviction? When they must care for sick loved ones and risk contagion themselves? When their homes have burned down? When they fear police violence all the more? When they can’t use their years of training and expertise in their usual spaces, with their usual tools, in their usual mode? When they must compete more directly with Netflix on Netflix’s turf, on a minuscule fraction of the budget? After some of their dream projects have been postponed, maybe forever?
Yes, criticizing feels all the more unpleasant in 2020. In the hierarchy of the pandemic’s most loathsome creatures, the critical arts critic is below the heedless superspreader, but perhaps not by much.
All the same, I found myself bound to write some at least semicritical reviews this year — on ACT’s “A Christmas Carol: On Air” and San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s “King Lear,” among others.
I might defend myself in part with the same rationale I’d use in any era: A critic’s first responsibility is to her readers and theater audiences, not to artists and producers. Many of us are spending even more time on digital devices than we did before. As much theater has migrated to that realm, a critic’s job must evolve to help you decide if it’s really worth it to let a screen tax your eyesight for another hour or two for a play after you’ve already been on Zoom meetings all day for work and your social life.
Anyone else in an artist’s community can offer support, but a critic is the only one tasked with publishing an opinion unchecked by conflict of interest. To shirk that responsibility ( and privilege) is to make our art form less honest.
Yet as I went through something more than my standard selftorture to write criticism this year, it’s incumbent on me to offer something more than my standard justification for it.
Honest criticism is the one bit of normalcy I, in my own small corner, can offer in a year that has razed any notions of normalcy. It’s also my way of making a case for theater’s importance at a time when local, state and national governments have been, at best, slow to recognize the arts’ role in our economy, in our morale, in our sense of ourselves as a people, and to support it accordingly through its time of financial catastrophe. Even, or especially, when I write a critical review, the urnarrative I aspire to fold in is that if you’re not paying attention to the local theater scene, you’re missing an essential piece of the story Bay Area residents are writing about themselves. To pull punches is to risk painting local theater as a decorative diversion instead of the vital force, hit hard but resilient, that it is.
It’s right and good and natural that what we seek from art and from arts criticism would evolve as the world evolves. Last year’s hit might not serve us the same way this year; last year’s scorchedearth review might now sound cruel instead of crusading; last year’s rave might now sound fawning. We critics have always depended on art for our own survival, even as we must criticize it. Until the after times, we must all the more review to revitalize; we must criticize in part to remind the world that theaters and theater artists are still dreaming and crafting and creating even as marquees remain dim — and that those efforts are important enough and strong enough to be able to grow, not shrivel, from honest appraisal.