Working in theatre education, I’m also finding it frustrating that we’re not engaging the young people we’re “outreaching” to in a real dialogue. You, the students, see the play. We, the artists, hold a talkback with our prefabbed answers for your questions about line memorization and where the blood comes from. You, the students, are forced to write a response letter by your teachers. Maybe you have some problems with the show that you vent onto the paper, problems that stem from never being exposed to anything that is truly theatrical and not catered to your TV/film-based expecations of acting (expectations which you can’t help and which are not your fault). Maybe you send hyperbolic, thesaurus-laced praise (i.e. “this is the most incredible, illuminating, revelating play in the history of anything ever.” Maybe – and thank you – but my goodness, we need to get you in more theatres, as many as we can, so you have something else with which to compare and contrast this play). We, the administrators (here’s another problem), receive and read the letters. And that’s where the “dialogue” stops in most big theatres. Maybe the actors see the letters – some of them – but even the best of the best send blanket response letters back to the students that end rather than continuing the conversation.

Is the answer on-line in blogs like this one and open web-based forums? Is it in holding open rehearsals where audience members can see part of the process and provide input and engage in discussion before everything’s so final, allowing them to then come back and see this piece that they helped to create? Is it in artistic town-hall meetings? We’ll hold those for politicians and pundits, why not for our artists and audiences as well?

But in this culture where everyone’s a critic, everyone has their fifteen minutes, eveyone is feeling more empowered than ever to express their opinion to a world-wide audience, we need to jump on that train. We need to harnes that energy to make our art just as vital and exciting and dynamic as this crazy blogosphere.

Theatre can change the world – we just have to remember that the world is already constantly changing and the merry-go-round isn’t going to slow down so we can jump on. We just have to find a way to get a running start.

Lights go down–silence. Lights come up, “thank you for coming”–silence.

Is there a possibility for a conversation?

Funny you mention the Critiquing the Critics series. It’s by far the most widely read thing I do, but also by far the least amount of comments.

I think the conversation is too one sided, not just between artist and critic, but also between artist and audience. We seem to have segmented ourselves into silence.

No one can control their narrative completely. But we, most theatres in general, miss a big opportunity by not engaging others in conversation.

I wonder about this. I recall Chris Jones writing a review of a Hypocrites show where he discussed at length his admiration for Sean Graney’s retooling of Angels in America, Part II after the show had already opened. The etiquette I’ve experienced, for lack of a better word, is that one shouldn’t give notes or tweak after the show has officially opened, that the director’s work is officially “done” as of the moment audiences have begun to pay full price to see the work. And I can understand the way it needlessly increases the stress level of the production for a director to hover over the show, trying to fix this and that, but in some cases I feel like we may have gone too far to the other end of the spectrum…decided that the process is over and that the director is therefore expendable at that point.

Yes, there are often moments when the critical narrative flies completely off-base (I recall, in particular, a certain critic who made editorial suggestions about The Permanent Way that would have rendered Hare’s whole reason for writing the play irrelevant), but there are also moments when the critic finds something that is not only incisive and correct, but also can be fixed.

However, in the current paradigm, even if we find that comment to be convincing, often I’ll see the production shrug their shoulders–”oh well, this is the way we’ve directed it, if it’s wrong, it’s too late to change it.” Why?

I’m not sure if this is really what you’re getting at, although I will say that the other thing that struck me about the relationship between the critic and the production is how part of the problem is that the critic is often responding in the moment via their notebook or via the words they’re writing in their head to be polished later. In other words, they’re not necessarily experiencing the narrative the way you’re telling it. The average audience member is there to listen, the critic is there to talk back.

But most theatre is built to show-and-tell, not show-and-tell-and-debate.

We often complain that critics miss or outright misrepresent certain details in their write-ups, but why bother? The nature of their job requires that they spend half of the production silently talking over the story; they don’t have the luxury to take it in because they’re on deadline and the more work they get done during the show the better it is for them.

Sucks for you, though. But you’re not their problem.