“It’s not color, it’s culture. [...] There are cultural differences. I know, you know, we all know what it is when a hot comb hits your hair on a Sunday morning, what it smells like. That’s a cultural difference, not just a color difference.”

— Denzel Washington

In rehearsals we always say the final and most integral piece of a production is the audience. The final cast member. The king on the chessboard. The most informative part of the entire experience of putting on a play. The theater critic is the authoritative rook — unbelievably necessary, integral to the structure. 

In practice, the reviewer has a responsibility both to the prospective audience member and to the budding production. We know two bad reviews from revered critics could destroy a production before it even gets its sea legs. So, in the current structure of theater criticism — with the same five white men over the age of 45 reviewing plays that don’t fit in their generational lexicon — how can we trust the amplification of new voices in the bursting canon of contemporary American theater? When we know there is a cultural ravine that divides understanding of experiences, why do none of the critics look like the stories they are forming critical public opinions on?

Speaking personally, when you lack the understanding of my humanity— how can I trust that there is care, consideration, and effort to understand my culture’s nuances? How do we move forward in the American theater canon with the support we know is needed to shape its future?

It's been six years since We See You, White American Theater crystallized a reckoning that was already long overdue.

Or so we thought. The pendulum swings, we know that. It always does. I just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. With a surplus of foreboding casting announcements showing:

• All white casts of…

• plays written by white men with…

• all white production teams amid a sea of…

• all white seasons (with the exception of the annual August Wilson Black History Month feature)

It feels like we’re back in the early 2000’s again.

Then, to watch the respective reviews released, lionizing these productions as if they were at the forefront of theatrical revolution — I can’t help but feel a distinct shiver of restlessness up my spine. That restlessness turns to agitation when we see reviews of productions written by, directed by, and starring underrepresented groups getting panned or even attacked by those very same heterosexual anglo-saxons of a particular age reviewing them.

To restate: the pendulum has swung. Why hasn’t it started to swing back? And why hasn’t the pendulum ever seemingly swung to change the demographics of taste arbiters? Why aren’t critics, the people who can decide a production’s fate, also experiencing an upheaval? 

This pendulum has yet to swing in this direction, and I humbly believe we are overdue.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lifelong fan of the Martin McDonoughs and Sam Shepards of our world — they are major influences in my voice as a playwright, interestingly enough. But, as I learned from the experience of premiering my first full length play this year, old white men seem distinctly less interested in my variation of their structures and tones than up and coming young white men doing the same. In many reviews, my play’s content was rarely spoken on, but my “style” was. 

“Long winded.” 

“Too complicated.”

“Convoluted.” 

Such a list wouldn’t be complete without my favorite: “Even more troubling is a scene in which Ciara opens a bottle of Hennessy and mutters a racial slur. Rather than illuminating character or advancing the narrative, the moment feels gratuitous and awkwardly inserted for shock value”.

…… 

Nigga.

To be clear: this is not a case against critical rigor. A sharp, fair review is what many artists can use to grow. This is a case against criticism that mistakes cultural unfamiliarity for artistic failure — that calls a bottle of Hennessy gratuitous because the reviewer has never been in that room.

This brings me back to Denzel. Culture. Those folks don’t know the smell of a hot comb hitting your hair on a Sunday morning.

They don’t know the taste of grandmama’s catfish at the cookout.

They don’t know the lyrics to “Set It Off” by Lil Boosie.

They don’t know the pain of losing a family member to the prison system for a crime they didn’t commit — simply for being a nigga.

And yet, these white men are the jurists of a production’s life and its worth. Interesting. And we voluntarily continue the pattern of allowing them to decide on whether or not our stories have worth, both in our industry and in our sociopolitical system. Very interesting metatextuality.

What’s more: We all know a critical pan from someone like the Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones could tank a show before, or shortly after, opening weekend (it famously has in more than one case). What happens when one  white man becomes the arbiter of theatrical truth for an entire city? What happens when one critic is expected to do so with over a century passing since the last explosion of Black art? With the knowledge of what impact relentless criticism had on people like Sarah Kane?

With all the respect and admiration to the older white male reviewers in town: as a Black, Asian and queer femme artist, I can not help but ask these questions every time I see a negative review on a new piece of work by an artist within my cultural alignment.

Let’s take a brief aside here. It’s been 100 years since the Harlem Renaissance: a time when Black voices were unafraid to live in abject poverty to throw shit at the wall, knowing it wouldn’t stick until likely after they died. This also brings the infamous (litany of) reviews on Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995 to mind. She was a white British woman to be fair, but the example stands stronger because of it. If critics were willing to call her work "a feast of filth" and "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" only for her to be lauded after her death — because white men like Harold Pinter said the work was "too new, too complex, too good" for those who spoke poorly of her — what does that tell us about who gets to decide what art is worth, and when?

She was forced to walk her living years with those words in her mind as she tried her hardest to build out her now revolutionary and small canon — small because she died by suicide at the age of 28. If one of those major reviewers understood her burden as a woman suffering an illness at the time, would things have played out differently? Could they? Would we have more of her work?

Nella Larsen — the first Black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing — published two celebrated novels, then had her career ended by a plagiarism accusation that was investigated, found baseless, and still destroyed her. She never published again, died alone, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Brooklyn.

Langston Hughes, who in 1926 wrote that “the road for the serious Black artist is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high,” spent years being told his dialect writing was “low” and his characters degrading — by white critics who didn’t recognize the blues as literature and Black middle-class critics who called his work a sewer for not being respectable enough.

Zora Neale Hurston — one of the most prolific Black American female authors of the 20th century — died penniless in a county welfare home, her books out of print, her grave unmarked, her legacy only recovered nearly two decades after her death when Alice Walker went looking for her.

Are we down with allowing 100 years to pass with us in the same tired old boat going down the same tired old river? Or is it time to find people who look like us, sound like us, cook like us, laugh like us, empathize with us — and put them behind the influential and critical words being published on behalf of new art? That would require trust from major publications first and foremost, and I suppose that’s the question we need to be pressing.

Do you have the right to criticize us if you do not understand the words used in our culture — beyond  the confines of Black suffering stories or the August Wilson canon? Do you have the right to criticize a story about Filipino immigrants playing into the model minority myth so they may  survive a country built around your personal benefit? Again, we hope to use theater to keep our flawed humanity in conversation; but do these reviewers actually have the cultural literacy to form opinions with care for these stories? Can the voice of criticism be trusted to understand that undercurrent of pain? Of joy? Of its intent or its impact?

The new voices bursting into this historically straight white male centered narrative of theater are begging to be analyzed by people who understand our cultures, our voices, our orchestrations. They must be held to the same standard of evolution we hold theater companies to — critics should reflect the stories being put up onstage.

I’m no longer interested in waiting.