I didn't have much to say about last week's Charles Isherwood Cutesy Column™, relating to playwrights and the Hollywood writers' strike. I'm not a playwright, and the playwrights of the web, from Marisa to (as endlessly linked to by the theater blogosphere) Robbie Baitz, had it covered.
This new one, though, is all about the Broadway strike, and purports, Cutesily™, to speak in the critics' voice, and I gotta speak up. In offering suggestions for how our shared species, the theater critic, can occupy itself over a holiday weekend in New York devoid of Broadway openings, Isherwood points out the eight Broadway shows still open, throws a bone to Off-Broadway (Peter and Jerry) and proceeds to highlight non-theater cultural options.
There's nothing wrong with any of his suggestions—aside, perhaps, from the 'gawk at the regular people at Trader Joe's' number—but it's downright disheartening that he doesn't even consider heading downtown to sample any number of Off-Off-Broadway shows.
At some point in Isherwood's theatrical education, I imagine he must have encountered the genre. Did it never occur to him that he could have pointed Times readers—both the regulars and the tourists who are surely consulting the paper of record for alternatives—to the vast array of options to be found at nytheatre.com? Maybe even something like (to plug local) the Hypocrites' production of The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide, currently running at 59E59 and highly praised by Times reviewer Jason Zinoman?
As a matter of fact, I wonder if Isherwood is even counting all of the Times' own reviewers in his estimation of New York's theater critics as "oh, a full dozen or so of our city’s citizens." As of this writing, the online NYT Theater section front sports the names of Brantley, Isherwood, Zinoman, Caryn James, Rachel Saltz, Neil Genzlinger, Stephen Wells, Sylviane Gold, Lawrence Van Gelder and Anne Midgette attached to theater reviews, plus Stephen Holden on cabaret. That's eleven right there. Is it the other NYC publications that don't count, or the Times' stringers?
Or maybe instead of theater critics, Isherwood's "dozen or so" was counting Broadway critics. Either way, it seems like a problem. My thinking is, theater critics in any city are best off recognizing and attending every level of theater. Otherwise they're doing themselves, their readers, and the theater community a disservice.
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