AMERICAN THEATRE: What would it look like if a major U.S. theatre city lost its last full-time theatre critic? While many U.S. cities have already run this dystopian experiment, it had never happened to one of American theatre’s largest markets until early in February, when massive layoffs at The Washington Post included its entire arts and culture section, chiefly theatre critic Naveen Kumar, arts and entertainment editor Jonathan Fischer, senior editor Zachary Pincus-Roth, and many more across all departments.
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This is yet another instance I’ve seen of the seemingly invisible ways culture shifts and overall economic decline can affect institutions. To be honest, I’ve never even thought about the role of art critics and what it would mean for them to have no media presence, but this article showed me just how detrimental that reality is right now. Due to layoffs at the Washington Post, there is now no full-time theatrical art critic publishing reviews on the Washington DC theatre scene. Despite theatrical critics having a notoriously controversial existence within the theatrical space itself (IE: the argument that “theatre is art” and thus who are we to judge it), critics are still fundamental to the functioning of the theatre industry currently. It saddens me to see this outcome, even if it might seem miniscule or even positive on the surface, because it genuinely sets a precedent of how we treat and value art in the form of theatrical performance.
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