Several theater blogs have noted the New York Times’ chief theater critic Ben Brantley’s last-ditch, extremely pathetic, desperate grab for attention in last Sunday’s Critic’s Notebook, in which he tries to pull both Tracy Letts and August: Osage County off their much-deserved pedestals, on the very day the Tony Awards were announced. Well, given the fact that August has won a boatload of Tonys, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and every significant New York theater award of note, as well as it’s undisputed commercial success, so rare right now for a serious American play, Brantley’s attempt to derail the August accolade train is a sad validation of what every serious theater lover has been thinking of for quite a while now- that Brantley, and increasingly the New York Times’ theater section, is irrelevant in the new world of American arts criticism. I won’t dignify the article by linking to it (which not only skewers Letts and August but also the Tony winner for Best Musical, In the Heights), but really how can you take any American theater critic seriously who advocates for British plays over new American ones? Who implicitly rejects a play because it came from a regional theater and not from the West End or from the “acceptable” off-Broadway theaters such as the Public? Who talks about the lack of provocative thought in August but blows the trumpet for Rock and Roll, which I thought was absolutely unrelatable and uninvolving, and ultimately quite tedious, or for The History Boys, which was enjoyable, but undeniably old-fashioned, just because they were both written by British playwrights? Who wrote a kid-gloved, starstruck review of Julie Roberts’ abysmal Broadway debut maybe because she is a movie star? For my money, and I’m walking on some very tricky limbs here, I think the theater critic who is relevant, and who should continue to play a bigger role in the national theatrical conversation is our very own Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune. Chris polarizes a lot of people, yes, and I have had misgivings and disagreements with some of his critical opinions over the years, but at least he uses his potentially powerful platform to advocate for new, fresh, unique American playwrights and plays, to get new works to be seen and new audiences into the theater, to get the national theatrical community to discover theater outside of its New York-centric context, in the regional theater circuit where people are writing, acting, staging theater because they are passionate about it, not because they’re looking at weekly box-office tallies, as if they’re in the movie business. In my view, that’s what I think a newspaper’s theater critic should be these days when blogs and online theater sites are more widely read than the print media, when everyone has an opinion (including myself) and ways to publish it, and when dialogue and feedback are the modes of operating, rather than one-way, all-powerful, Mount Olympus critical theorizing. That’s how a truly relevant theater and arts critic differentiates himself or herself. Unfortunately, it’s not August or In the Heights that’s an artifact of the 1950s as Brantley laughably claims in his article, but rather it’s himself and his employer.
Tags: August: Osage County
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