Sound and Fury

Driving through Tennessee the other day, I was suddenly aware of a curious smell. Moments later, I was shocked to find smoke pluming from the steering column. While the auto was being tended by some helpful gents at the Nashville Cadillac dealer I took the chance to catch up on Writer’s Strike gossip. Best of the lot so far is a testy HuffPo post by Brothers & Sisters scribe and producer Jon Robin Baitz. Baitz responds to an “interesting essay” (his words) by NY Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood, in which Isherwood suggests that striking Hollywood writers “return to the fold” and use the strike as a chance to come back to their “first love,” the theatre. While conceding that “one would have to be insane to disagree with this admirable exhortation,” Baitz resents the tone and context of Isherwood’s plea. In short, he finds it a little hypocritical that a theatre critic who is known for his chilly reception of new work should exhort writers to resubmit themselves to his evaluation.

Some background before we plunge into the sniping. Isherwood is the lieutenant to Ben Brantley’s police chief in the all-powerful Times culture pages. Brantley’s seniority means that he reviews most Broadway (and UK) openings, while Isherwood usually passes judgment on off-, and occasionally off-off-, Broadway offerings. In this position Isherwood has the reputation for being, in Baitz’s words, “dismissive, cool, and brittle.” For example, the first paragraph of a recent Isherwood review – of Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense – consists of the following swipe: “If you are not interested in human behavior, why write plays?” Then the review’s brutal conclusion: “I left the theater feeling more than bored,” Isherwood writes. “I felt assaulted by empty artifice.” Take that, Mr. Rapp, for even daring to think that you could write a play.

Isherwood does not pan shows across the board, of course. In fact, his most notorious review was a rave. In 2005, Isherwood took to calling the obscure Will Eno off-Broadway one-man show Thom Pain (based on nothing) “a masterpiece,” puzzling the many Times readers who dutifully followed his demand that they “run, don’t walk” to see the play, where they found, as Baitz puts it, little more than “an inscrutable monologue.” More recently, in an eccentric article extolling the virtues of YouTube, Isherwood delighted in discovering clips of the Broadway flop Carrie: The Musical, a show that former Times critic Frank Rich compared to watching the Hindenberg expire. Isherwood, on the other hand, liked what he saw. “It’s kind of fabulous,” Isherwood writes. “My suspicion grows that Carrie: The Musical has been unjustly maligned.”

Batiz fumes at the underlying hypocrisy of an influential Times theatre critic who has the temerity to suggest that former playwrights who have gone Hollywood to return to their “first love.” He submits that critics like Isherwood “do not necessarily add incentive to the already tendentious struggle that playwrights face in trying to make a life in the theater.” While noting that Isherwood “has been respectful of my work, even when critical,” Baitz contends that “there is a slight whiff of disconnection in Charles’ essay.”

This disconnection – between the artist who risks everything in creating and the critic who risks nothing in evaluating – has been the case since the first Athenian panned the new Aristophanes. However, the conundrum is rarely directly addressed by artists, at least in print. Furthermore, while Baitz’s HuffPo snit may seem a bit outsized, so is the sway of the Times’s theatre critics. Their ability to topple a show with a single swipe of the pen is legendary and entirely unmatched by reviewers in other mediums. As Baitz somewhat petulantly points out, “There are no other critics that matter in New York.” When theatre folk say Brantley or Isherwood is “The Critic,” this is what they mean.

It reeks of unfairness, of course, that one individual – especially an individual who himself professes no skill in what he purports to evaluate – should have such influence over the critical and economic reception of a play. At the same time, this is not a dynamic that Brantley, Isherwood, Rich or any of the Times’s critics created themselves. Rather, they are the beneficiaries of a society that has ratified the Newspaper of Record’s authority not only in current events but in cultural events as well. Isherwood, in other words, didn’t start the fire.

Nor does Baitz accuse him of doing so. Instead, he takes issue with, as he calls it, the critic’s “coldness” and hypocrisy. Baitz writes: “The serious young playwright could use less of what makes Mr. Isherwood a lesser critic than he could be: namely, coldness and a rather shocking lack of humility.” The attack against Isherwood’s humility probably refers to the first paragraph of his article which he directs to “all those writers lying on the couch in Hollywood perfecting their video-game scores or weeding the backyards of their Laurel Canyon haciendas, or whatever it is television and movie writers do when they are not cooking up dialogue for detectives, superheroes, or nerdy, horny teenagers.” That “whatever it is” is pretty callously dismissive of the writers who, Baitz reminds us, “are currently unemployed” because of the strike, and trying to “figure out what to do about [their] mortgages.”

How will this all shake out? Well, it won’t, of course. Charles Isherwood has his job and Jon Robin Baitz has his, and the irony is that, while Isherwood’s job is entirely dependent on the existence of people like Baitz – and their ability to produce work – it is Baitz who lacks job security and Baitz who has to worry about someone like Isherwood – not the other way around. This relationship echoes the problem that writers are currently having in their negotiations with the AMPTP, by the way, and one of the many indications that we are in for a long strike.