A Cricket Chirping

A common question that I get asked, because I work for a fairly well-known theater publication, and I know a great deal more than the average person about theater (for better or for worst), is, "Do you have a theater background?" I have decided to come clean with all of you and say...nope. Nada. Nothing.

I've never written a play, never taken an acting class, and never even taken a theater class. I did audit a play analysis course in college but stopped showing up halfway into the semester (the reason, I was clocking in a lot of hours at an internship).

"But Diep," you may say, "You seem to know so much about the theater. And you work for one of the most respected performing arts publications in the country! How is it you've never been onstage before?"

Does a play I co-wrote in college (for a Vietnamese student advocacy group) count as being on stage? Even if it was for one night only?

The reason I spend so much time with plays and musicals, and this has nothing to do with failed dreams of being an actress or playwright, is because I am a geek. A theater geek, which is the rarest kind of geek to be. It's because of the language. For someone who loves words, the way they sound, the power that they hold, theater is a paradise. And there are few things that give me as much of an adrenaline rush as seeing a really good play. (The other thing that does that is seeing my byline, but that's to be expected.)

If I did not love the field the way I do, I would have 8 more hours a week to spare (since I see, on average, 2-3 shows a week and I don't even write about them). For me, there is no agenda, though I have favorite playwrights whose work I am more predisposed to. And I have playwrights who I don't enjoy as much. But I see theater for the reason most artists see theater, for something amazing.

And that is why this much-discussed piece, "The Illumination Business," by former "New Yorker" theater critic John Lahr hit a nerve with me. Amidst the understandable beefs he had with the state of theater criticism today (mainly with how its devolved into up-down-thumbs reviewing and the lack of analysis), he wrote this:

In the American whispering gallery, most of the people dishing out judgment about plays these days have no working experience of the theater, have never written a professional play or a sketch or even a joke, have never taken an acting class, or published any extended work of any kind. They are creative virgins. Everything they know about theater is book-learned and secondhand. Most of what they have to say is cultural gas. These are the “crickets.”

So according to John Lahr, I am a fraud because I, as a journalist, choose a beat that I have no experience in. My opinions on the lack of diversity in the theater, the lack of young people in the theater or how tweeting in the theater is distracting, is not relevant because I have never been in a play.

Granted, I haven't reviewed a play for money in months, and I mainly do essays on this blog. But what if I want to be a critic someday? Is the body of work in reporting and blogging I've built up invalidated because I am not a playwright?

Pauline Kael never worked in film and she's one of the most respected critics who ever lived. No one asks political columnists if they've ever served in politics. And really, would you trust a politician-turned-reporter? A majority of the fanboys of AintItCool.com have never stepped behind a camera or drawn a comic-book spread, but they sure as hell love comic books and movies. And can write damn-good articles about those topics.

So why does theater need experts to write about it? Is it more complicated than politics, film or comic book culture? Do you need more brain cells to analyze Harold Pinter than "Harry Potter"?

Considering that theater coverage is shrinking, not growing, the field needs more reviews, criticism, blogs, Twitter conversations, from both professionals and geeks like me. Lahr calls it "loose talk," I call it conversation and maintaining relevancy. And right now, theater needs more people talking and writing about it, not less.

P.S. To be fair, Lahr does make a good point, and one that I was taught in journalism school, about the differences between criticism and reviewing:

The reviewer and the critic have opposite objectives. Criticism treats the play as a metaphor; it interprets it and puts it in a larger historical, psychological and theatrical context. The critic is in the illumination business; the reviewer, by contrast, provides a consumer service. The reviewer treats the play as an event and reports its contents to the paying customers.

Reviewing assumes that the plot is the play; criticism, on the other hand, knows that the plot is only part of a conversation that the playwright is having about a complex series of historical and psychological issues. The job of the critic is to join that conversation, to explore the play and link it to the world. The job of the reviewer is to link the play to the box office.

...A drama critic has a historical and descriptive function; his job is to look at and look after the theater; a reviewer’s job is to look after the audience.

But I would argue that having one does not preclude the other. The two pieces of writing serve different functions, neither of which is worst than the other. Because without reviews leading the audience to the box office, they wouldn't come back to read the criticism. Beautiful pieces of journalism is not going to ensure the theater's survival; it's the audience's wallet. And if a piece of writing, either a review or a piece of criticism, can get those butts in seats, then Lahr would do well to not pit one above the other.

Though maybe I should just write a shitty play. Then I'll have some credibility to critique other people's shitty plays. But for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of theater students being churned out yearly, into an over-saturated job market where they can't make a living wage, I'm grateful I did not go into theater. The world does not need one more theater artist abandoning the field.