Why the Disconnect on Critics and Public Reviews of the Upside
leave interview
Ben Brantley on Shutting the Phase Door Behind Him
Later on 27 years and more than 2,500 reviews, The Times'south co-primary theater critic reviews his own tenure and talks about why he's (quietly) making an exit.
Critics look dorsum for a living; that's what it means to "review." Merely healthy ones, focusing on each new play they see, don't spend a lot of fourth dimension on the old stuff. So before Ben Brantley put down his pen, I wanted to ask him (as I hadn't had time to in the three years we've worked together) what his 27 years as a Times critic looked similar in the rearview mirror — and what he saw ahead. These are excerpts from our final chat every bit colleagues.
JESSE GREEN As far as I can tell, Ben, you made your first appearance in The Times in 1981, long earlier you became a theater critic here. You lot were then writing for Women's Habiliment Daily, in which capacity William Safire quoted you in his On Language column every bit an authority on fashion-speak: the "big sweep" of shawls and the "Sir Tom Jones look." Is at that place more than of a connection than we might suppose between what you covered there and the shows you started roofing in 1993, when you joined The Times?
BEN BRANTLEY Ah, I'thou glad y'all brought that up, Jesse, equally that misquotation withal rankles. I said simply "the Tom Jones look." As an English major, I would never have ennobled that foundling hero, and the misattribution made me suspicious of what I read in The Times for a good while. But yes, reviewing fashion — simply out of higher, with no background in the field — was great practical grooming for reviewing theater. You lot had to focus on a fleeting vision, which materialized on a phase (or runway) for a matter of seconds, commit information technology to memory, and instantly laissez passer some sort of judgment every bit to its viability.
Light-green Your first review in The Times was of "Annie Warbucks," the baseborn 1993 sequel to the megahit "Annie." I call back we could telephone call information technology negative: Afterwards ripping through the second-charge per unit score and skeletal volume and cheap sets and shimmying little girls, you lot wrote that even the dog who played Annie's beloved Sandy was "rather wooden." Be honest, did you beloved writing a pan, right from the commencement?
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BRANTLEY I was pleased to have a show (a singing comic strip!) that demanded to be written nigh with pop flair for my debut. And the product wore its frailties so flamboyantly and desperately, it was a sure-fire to anatomize them. Merely, no, I wasn't all that pleased to beginning off with a pan. The theater — the wonderful sometime Diverseness Arts, razed 15 years ago — was only a block away from where I lived in the East Village, and so I knew that I would exist living with the marquee's reproachful epitome for however long "Annie Warbucks" ran.
Green Frank Rich, the chief theater critic at the fourth dimension, had been known almost since he took the job in 1980 as the Butcher of Broadway for his scathing reviews of what was admittedly a lot of trash. Producers, and soon the public, believed he could brand or impale a show, investing him with huge mythic juju. And when you became chief critic, in 1996, you lot soon found yourself the subject of a website — Did He Like Information technology? — that hung on your every word. Did that sort of power, perceived or actual, appeal to you?
BRANTLEY Being powerful has never in itself been something I aspired to. I was probably more than powerful at Women's Wear Daily, which had outrageous weight in the manner manufacture in those days. And so in that sense, again beingness in a position of perceived power wasn't all that intimidating. Years subsequently, when I'd become The Times's principal critic, I ran into Calvin Klein at a political party, and when I stepped away, he told the friends I was with: "You don't understand. He used to be really powerful."
GREEN Is information technology important to at least seem powerful and uncompromising in the job, as Frank did?
BRANTLEY Frank had a stentorian vox as a author, so his criticism delivered an authoritative blast, a quality nevertheless axiomatic today. But he wrote a lot of very perceptively mixed reviews (check out his highly ambivalent accept on the blockbuster "Cats"); he was less of an absolutist than advertised. What I learned from him was not to worry about my indicate of view not coinciding with that of the other critics, that information technology was expert and good for you to go against the grain. The master thing, he said, was to brand sure that your feelings about a testify were loud and clear. I was perhaps guilty of excessive indirection early on, and so much so that I briefly caused the nickname of Gentle Ben in the industry.
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Green Are there reviews from that menstruation — or even more recently — you lot wish were louder and clearer?
BRANTLEY Many readers of daily journalism, I learned, oftentimes merely skim, which means that nuanced arguments can brand them impatient. I loathe thumbs-upwardly, thumbs-down criticism, but in that location is an in-between approach. For the most part, I see no point in training an elephant gun on minor targets. And I remember it'south of import that when you adore a prove's intentions, or its attempts to create something new, that you lot acknowledge this, no matter how imperfect the execution. Sometimes rawness is a virtue, which was how I felt describing taboo-baiting performance artists like Karen Finley and Ron Athey. With Broadway, where people are paying truckloads of coin for tickets, and a corporate bruiser similar Disney is behind the production, the gloves can come off. (See: "The Little Mermaid," "Tarzan.") Musicals nigh vampires ("Lestat," "Dance of the Vampires," "Dracula") always seemed to be asking to be annihilated likewise; they bring out the Van Helsing in critics.
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GREEN How quickly were you lot introduced to — and how long did it accept you to make your peace with — the blowback that ofttimes results from writing honestly about a evidence?
BRANTLEY I expected the blowback, and it came pretty rapidly. The public put-downs from glory stars are to be savored, I think. Interestingly, in my case, the attacks almost always came from white men: James Franco ("Of Mice and Men" — he called me a "little bitch"), Alec Baldwin ("Orphans" — he said I was "not a proficient writer"), Josh Brolin ("True West" — he merely said he hated me in highly charged language though we later made up by email). Then there was my boyfriend critic John Simon, castigating me for liking "the homosexual play" on Charlie Rose'south evidence. So oftentimes, though, comments would contradict one another — ane reader would tell me I was too harsh, another that I was too nice — which just confirmed for me that all responses to art, and to its interpretations, are particular and subjective.
Dark-green Given that, do you lot ever feel bad nigh something yous wrote?
BRANTLEY When I've felt bad has been when I've hurt someone's feelings for reasons other than professional person criticism. I made a reference to a character in my review of the musical "Head Over Heels" that was perceived as a callous misgendering of a nonbinary performer. In such cases, your intention is irrelevant. You apologize immediately. I did answer an email from someone who couldn't get over my non liking something he'd written; my response was very polite. But when I announced my resignation from The Times, he went on Twitter to say I regularly showed upwards at shows drunk and was thrown out of one for making racist comments. Both egregiously untrue statements, but inspiring that kind of vindictiveness reminds you of the touch on you can have on the people you write about.
Greenish Yous mentioned Karen Finley and Ron Athey, whose sexually and politically explicit work fabricated them prime exhibits in the so-called Culture Wars of the 1990s. More than recently you accept been the leading American booster of the Belarus Free Theater, a dissident visitor working under unimaginably repressive circumstances in that former Soviet republic. How much has your own politics come into play in choosing what to write about?
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BRANTLEY I don't think my ain politics have dictated my choices of what I cover. But I am thrilled when politics and art converge in a way that energizes and rearranges your thoughts, when the form and the bulletin are inseparable. I remember the excitement of my introduction to the Republic of belarus Free Theater, "Being Harold Pinter," which combined parts of Pinter plays with testimonies from survivors of state torture in Belarus. It made me realize both how radical Pinter e'er was in his work, in his concerns about abuses of power, and how urgent theater can be as a tool of social reckoning, without turning into propaganda. I recollect we're seeing that once more at present in new works from Blackness playwrights like Jackie Sibblies Drury ("Fairview"), Jeremy O. Harris ("Slave Play"), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ("An Octoroon") and Aleshea Harris ("What to Transport Upward When It Goes Downwardly").
GREEN Those plays represent the upside of changes that have begun to transform the theater — often with your encouragement — during your tenure at The Times. There are plentiful downsides, too: The commercial sector has become heavily dependent on tourist audiences drawn by visiting celebrities; the nonprofit sector has often followed suit; and as the outlets for criticism take collapsed so has organized religion in its usefulness. Plus: jukebox musicals. Not to bum you on your mode out the door, just how practice you add up the pluses and minuses you've observed while writing more than than 2,500 reviews during 27 years in the hot seat?
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BRANTLEY Oh, let'due south accentuate the positive, shall we? The roster of shows in the season interrupted by the pandemic showed a latitude of diversity and aspiration in class and content that I found incredibly heartening. "Slave Play" and "Daughter From the North Land," a renegade reimagining of the jukebox musical using the songs of Bob Dylan, on Broadway? I have oftentimes complained about the Las Vegas-ization of Broadway during my tenure, merely in recent years I've seen new signs of life there. When theater comes back, information technology's inevitably going to be limping, of class. And I have the feeling we'll see a gaping dichotomy: the expressly political, expressly inclusive new works, and the brazenly crowd-courting commercial fare. And, yes, Jesse, that will probably include mindless jukebox musicals. Only who knows? I'm non going to say "Après moi, le déluge," because I'm hoping to yet exist swimming in these troubled waters.
GREEN Then why footstep downwardly? Surely y'all're not tired of writing — you're a perfectly engineered writing machine!
BRANTLEY No, I'm not tired of writing, or reviewing. My metabolism was fabricated for the binge-and-purge rhythms of daily criticism. But during quarantine, when I couldn't feed that habit, I found myself chafing at the place-holding journalism that was required. Then in a Zoom coming together with critics, The Times's executive editor, Dean Baquet, lingered over the question of whether arts reviewers should stay in their jobs indefinitely. And I thought, "That sounds like an leave cue to me." Later on that, it was a surprisingly painless decision.
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Light-green Did yous feel any pressure level from social media efforts to dislodge you (and other white male critics, like me) from the alley seat? Practice you understand with those efforts?
BRANTLEY I practice empathise, and I certainly wasn't oblivious to those public calls for dismantling the white critical establishment. As much every bit I may claim artistic objectivity, we are all inexorably trapped in the shells of our race, class, gender and generation. And so if my departure opens the door to new perspectives from more diverse sets of eyes, so much the ameliorate.
Light-green What about your ain optics? Even if yous aren't writing reviews will you still see as many shows as always?
BRANTLEY I'll go as much equally I can afford to.
Light-green And you won't miss the perks and paraphernalia of the job? If I enter a theater without a notebook I feel naked. Allow alone the seats! Can you fifty-fifty sit in one that'southward not J-101?
BRANTLEY There's a part of me that's looking forrard to attending as a noncombatant, even one who inhabits the peanut gallery. But once a critic, ever a critic. There'll always exist a phantom notebook in my lap.
Lightning Round
Brantley's bests and worsts, from 1993 to 2020
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Patti LuPone and Frank Langella
Your Weirdest Review
My simultaneously declaring my honey for and panning Julia Roberts in "Three Days of Rain"
Best Review past Y'all
I probably felt nearly inspired when I was writing about gimmicky Irish gaelic playwrights, for some reason, so annihilation past me on Conor McPherson or Martin McDonagh, or Brian Friel or Enda Walsh. I as well really enjoyed explaining why I liked the downtown auteur Richard Maxwell.
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Best Review of Y'all
"Your review this morn made me very happy." — Edward Albee in a letter, after I wrote for the first fourth dimension about his plays in The Times. Runner-upwards: "He's a lot cuter in person!" — Rosie O'Donnell
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/theater/ben-brantley-retirement.html
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