The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future by Matt Windman

. I write reviews regularly for America magazine, which is a Catholic weekly. I feel like there are a lot of folks in my sort of category, who consider themselves critics, even though they mainly write features and preview pieces. We cut our teeth writing reviews, but it’s hard to find a place that wants to publish only our reviews. To make a living, we have to do a lot of features and other stuff.
    Robert Faires: I stumbled into this. In the early 1980s, Austin was still very much a small town. There was an upstart free biweekly called the Austin Chronicle , and I happened to have a friend of a friend who was writing theater reviews for it. Periodically, we would talk about theater. At one point, he asked if I had considered doing theater reviews. At the time, I was doing community theater in the evening. I had done enough complaining about critics, so I thought, Well, the universe is telling me to either put up or shut up. So I gave it a try, and I found that I really liked it. At the time, there were a few other people who were also writing about theater at the paper. But within six months, I was the only one left. Before long, it was more of a calling in my life than anything else. After about 10 years, I was invited to be on staff as an arts editor, but theater has always been where my heart is. It’s still what I cover most regularly.
    Roma Torre: Both of my parents were involved with the theater in New York. My dad was a producer, and my mom was a columnist and a critic. For a long time, I thought I would be an actress, but that didn’t work out so well. I became impatient with the whole process, but I still loved the theater. Several years out of college, I decided that I wanted to be a news reporter. My first on-air job was at News 12 Long Island. While I was there, they started a magazine called Total TV . Knowing of my background in theater, they asked if I could write theater and film reviews for it. One of my first reviews was of Les Miz .
    I was at News 12 Long Island for five years, and then I got a call from NY1. It was this start-up 24-hour cable operation based in New York City. I was very happy to join it. After six months, Steve Paulus, who was the news director and a big fan of the theater, said, “I know you did theater reviews over at News 12. Would you like to continue doing that for us?” So I’ve been continuously reviewing theater since 1987.
    Scott Brown: I’ve been writing criticism in one form or another since college. That led me to Entertainment Weekly . I was an editorial assistant, working my way up the ranks. I spent seven or eight years there and ended up writing a lot of criticism because there was bandwidth for it at the time. They had their major critics, plus a lot of other people picking up the slack. They had a stage section, which came out whenever there was a crop of new shows. There wasn’t one dedicated theater critic, so I ended up doing a lot of theater reviews, filling a niche where there was one. From there, I got my foot in the door at New York magazine. One of my former editors had taken a job there, and they were looking for a new theater critic. Like a lot of these things, there was a great deal of luck and people you know involved.
    Jesse Green: When I was at Yale in the late 1970s, I reviewed two plays for a campus publication under a pseudonym. I had some pretentious idea that Robert Brustein, who at that time ran the Yale Rep and Yale School of Drama, would get back at me if I used my real name. Between then and just recently, I haven’t written any other theater reviews. I wrote a lot about theater, but always in the form of profiles, feature articles, or news stories, mostly for the New York Times .
    After the 2008 financial crisis, the Times was particularly hard hit and couldn’t afford to pay me what it had previously, so I started looking for other work. And lo and behold, New York magazine offered me a position as a feature writer, which would