L.A. Theater Criticism--a Stink Piece

As a former member of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle who has spent his adult life in and around theaters, I have endured several panel discussions of the kind described in “Are Critics Emptying Theaters? It’s a Bum Rap” (Jan. 24), in which Dan Sullivan concludes that the best way to fill theater seats is to stage good plays well and to sweep the lobby out before the audience arrives.

What is never said by the theater producers at these gatherings--for fear of reprisal--is that their problem is not the fact of criticism, but the wretched quality of theater criticism practiced in Los Angeles.

Many of the people who make theater in L.A. think that local theater criticism simply stinks , and, for the most part, they are absolutely right.

Among the perceived problems are that most of the people who get paid to say yea or nay in print wouldn’t know decent theater if they saw it; that they have no training in either theater or criticism; that their taste is hopelessly retrograde; that they operate in vacuums of personal prejudice devoid of theoretical underpinnings; that they haven’t a clue about the canons of journalistic practice; that their writing is inadequate either to report facts or to express reactions; and that they are, generally speaking, incapable of the sophisticated combination of responses (emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual) that good theater evokes.

Naturally, the critics aren’t all wrong all of the time, and most are underpaid, hard-working and dedicated. It’s just that the frequency of silly “criticism” in the face of valid work debilitates risk-taking, gutsiness and unpopular views of truth.

A panel discussion about criticism that pussyfoots around these problems is a waste of breath.

I would, however, gladly attend a symposium in which Sullivan and his colleagues are called upon to defend their integrity, their commitment, their motives, their craft and the quality of their ideas--issues that L.A. theater critics constantly force on Bill Bushnell at Los Angeles Theatre Center and Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper and even the best of the usual Equity Waiver suspects: Ron Sossi, Ted Schmidt, Laura Zucker, Susan Loewenberg, Paul Verdier, Joe Stern, et al.

And, just for the record, since everybody seems to be using the pages of Calendar to decry the LATC’s “Three Sisters,” I thought it was one of the most moving, memorable, sensitive, revealing and exciting readings of a Chekhov play, one of the best of thousands of productions I have ever seen.

Why, it might even have been produced in a major American city in the late 1980s! Which is why, perhaps, so many L.A. critics missed its point entirely. Some members of the Drama Critics Circle didn’t even bother to attend.

MICHAEL LASSELL

Los Angeles