Editor's Note

By Jim O’Quinn

Yes, the stony visages affixed to illustrator Miguel Hernández’s faux Mount Rushmore on this month’s fanciful cover represent the three leading lights of American theatre criticism who are still with us to discuss the volatile, much-castigated, underappreciated and utterly essential literary genre they helped to shape and define. The spot still under construction to the right of Robert Brustein and to the left of Stanley Kauffmann and Eric Bentley is reserved, as we see it, for the Critic of the Future. Who will she be? Our commentators don’t presume to foresee what kind of personality, with what kind of professional credentials, expressing herself in what media context, is most likely to carry the art and practice of theatre criticism forward from its troubled berth in the present day. They all have some pungent observations, though, about the challenges she’ll face in a dumbed-down, gossip-saturated culture hungrier for sound bites and consumer appraisals than genuine, informed, passionate discourse about theatre art.

Should you find yourself riveted—or perplexed, or enlightened, or unsatisfied—by our special section, “The Future of Criticism,” I can recommend some collateral reading, all from back issues of American Theatre. The last time we devoted a cluster of articles to the subject was in September ’01, in a seven-part section called “Understanding Critics.” Alongside the views of practicing critics Frank Rich, Tony Brown and Jonathan Kalb, an eye-opening essay, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Good,” by Todd London (former AT managing editor and artistic director of New Dramatists), called for a new, more constructive critical vocabulary: “However much we need criticism, it’s clear we need it in a different voice—unveiled, expressive, more nuanced, precise and wholly human,” London wrote, with customary eloquence.

Dial the calendar back more than a decade, and you’ll discover London addressing criticism in a somewhat different key: “The Critical Knot” (Feb. ’90) asserted that, in an American society that views artists as unruly children, critics have taken on the role of abusive fathers. That analogy about the unhealthy interdependence of critics and artists unleashed a flurry of response, which subsequently took the form of a lively forum in the June ’90 issue.

In that same June ’90 issue, author Carol Gelderman lent historical perspective to the contemporary critical scene in “Critics and How They Got That Way.” In May/June ’99, Robert Marx moderated a fascinating conversation between Rich and Brustein under the rubric “A Critics’ Summit,” in which the notoriously judgmental Rich confessed, “I have looked at some of my earlier stuff and said, ‘I can’t believe how harsh this was, and how unforgiving it was, and how I was so concerned with artistic principles that I forgot that there was any kind of humanity involved.’” (Of the pieces mentioned here, only London’s September ’01 essay is available in AT’s online archives.)

All these words by no means add up to the last word on criticism—the discussion is destined to continue, in this publication and elsewhere. Mark Blankenship, representing an idealistic new generation of theatre writers with a critical bent, asks the key question: “If the world of criticism is changing, what will we help it become?”