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

at the New Yorker . One day at the office, I went up to the woman who edited the theater listings and said, “There’s this play that I think you should cover.” She said, “Do you want to go out and write 100 words about it?” I did that, and then she sent me to see two other plays that same week. And it took off from there. I had a body of knowledge about theater, and they just happened to need someone at that moment to go out and see plays. Most of my criticism in the New Yorker is unsigned. Unlike my reporting, my theater criticism is a little more under the radar, which is kind of nice because I make fewer enemies that way.
    Michael Sommers: I’ve been doing this for a long time. I reviewed movies for my high school paper. Then I became the theater critic for my college newspaper. I was also the football writer, which is pretty much the same sort of thing. (I always wonder how my career would have turned out if I stayed a sports writer. I’d probably be making a lot more money.) When I came to New York, I worked for Actors’ Equity. I didn’t like it very much. I thought there must be other ways I could wreck the American theater, so I became a drama critic (laughs).
    I got a job at Backstage in 1981 and became an editor there. I was the first reviewer that Backstage ever paid. I wouldn’t do it for free, so they had to pay me for my reviews in addition to my salary as an editor. I got five bucks a review. (I don’t know if they ever raised those rates.) I then started reviewing as well for the New York Native , which is the newspaper they keep talking about in The Normal Heart . I started at the Star-Ledger in 1991. They hired me to review New Jersey theater. In 1993, William A. Raidy, the paper’s New York theater critic, died, and I nabbed his old job.
    Peter Marks: I acted in college. When I was coming out of college, I applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse and to a newspaper, and I got the newspaper job. In 1996, I was the theater reporter at the New York Times . An editor came up to me and said, “We’re looking for a second-string critic. Who can you recommend?” I gave him some names, and he said, “Well, what about you?” And I said, “I’m certainly willing to try.” I did a couple of practice reviews. They liked them, and voilà!
    I wrote reviews for the Times for three and a half years. Then the Times thought it would be fun for a theater critic to cover the 2000 presidential election. After I did that, Bruce Weber had become the second-string theater critic, so there really wasn’t a job for me anymore. Then the Washington Post called me in 2002 and offered me the theater critic job.
    Robert Hurwitt: I wrote my first piece of criticism without actually meaning to become a critic. I was an undergraduate at NYU, where I was active in theater. Most of us in the theater community were very scornful of the reviews being printed in the campus paper, so I walked into the paper’s office one day and said, “I’d like to write the next theater review,” without actually having the forethought that it would be of a play that I wanted to audition for. That review is something I hold on to. It’s a total embarrassment. It’s full of inside-baseball jargon and is probably incomprehensible to anyone outside of the theater.
    After I graduated from NYU and got a master’s degree from Berkeley in English Literature, I got back into acting and worked in the San Francisco area. This was in the 1960s, when the underground newspapers were starting up, which led to the alternative press of today. A friend of mine who started one of those papers in Washington, D.C., asked if I would be his West Coast correspondent. After I started writing for him, other papers began picking up my stories. Because I knew a lot about theater, that quickly became one of my beats. I then became the theater critic of the San Francisco Examiner. And when the Hearst Corporation bought the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, they