Recently, Charles Isherwood panned the play of a friend of mine. That's a very double-edged thing for an emerging playwright; it means, on the one hand, that you're considered important enough for the most influential theater reviewer in...well...probably the United States...to review. Which is no small thing. But a bad review from Isherwood? The folk knowledge is that it can kill a play, kill a career.
I *don't* think that will happen, in this case. The playwright in question is too damn good to slip into obscurity, and too entrenched/connected in the NY theater scene to ignore. Still, will it slow his (relatively meteoric) rise? Yeah. It might.
I will admit that this post is, in part, a pissed-off and defensive reaction on my part: I want my friend to succeed, and I don't want him to be hurt or upset. Still, to my mind, there was something fundamentally out-of-balance in Isherwood's review, something that flies in the face of what I think is a critic's job to do.
Because he went after the play, yes, but to my mind he didn't go after the play in its own terms. Isherwood has made it clear that there are certain stage conventions, certain kinds of stories, he prefers to others. It's absolutely his right to have preferences. And I have to say, much of the time, especially when he is praising the work of realist playwrights like Amy Herzog, Annie Baker and Stephen Karam, I'm in complete agreement with him. These are skilled playwrights who know their craft, who are writing beautiful plays. But it seems to me that, far more often than he should, Isherwood will (to bastardize a catchphrase) criticize dance because it doesn't look like architecture.
There is more than one way to write a play. There is more than one kind of play. There is more than one set of intentions that can be ascribed to the writing of a play. Small, slow dramas where we watch characters deal with each other onstage? Great. Huge glitzy, testosterone-driven spectacles with plenty of direct address? Also great. Musicals, yes. Magical Realism, yes. Fairy Tales -- yes. And Comic-Books-no-Really-it-IS-"graphic-novel"-come-to-life? ALSO yes.
We need a multiplicity of narrative forms to contain a multiplicity of voices. Just because you prefer one set of conventions to another doesn't make the other conventions invalid -- the job of a critic, as I've always understood it, is to take a play on its terms, not cut off its limbs to fit it into the procrustean box of your own assumptions of what all drama should be.
Like I said, everyone gets to have preferences. But the danger, when you're the most important critic in a field that is expensive, that is increasingly risk-averse, is that when you candidly dismiss out-of-hand the terms at work in a certain mode of story-telling, rather than taking the work on its own terms and arguing against it within those terms, is that you are cutting off the oxygen not just to a particular play or playwright, but to whole modes of storytelling. Yeah, maybe you don't like THIS play, but the next play LIKE it might be brilliant -- and with every review slamming a play for the use of direct address, for working within the (incredibly popular, incredibly relevant) conventions of the graphic novel -- you're narrowing the possibility of cross-genre-pollination, you're narrowing the fields of gender, age. You're actively working as a gate-keeper not just to quality but to diversity of experience. You -- and the people who make decisions based on their predictions of your judgments -- are cutting off our chances of reaching new audience at the knees.
We no longer live in a world (and haven't for a long time) where the Aristotelian conventions are the ones by which we can or should judge work.
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