Free The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future by Matt Windman

income uncertainty, etc.) that it takes to be a working director in America. So this career path was really a happy accident.
    Don Aucoin: It’s been a long and winding road. Towards the beginning of my career, I worked for a newspaper in Meriden, Connecticut called the Record-Journal as a news reporter. But as is the case with many small newspapers, they let me do other things so long as I didn’t ask for extra money, and I was interested in reviewing plays. Meriden is about 20 miles north of New Haven and 20 miles south of Hartford. I began reviewing productions at Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, and Hartford Stage.
    In the mid–1980s, I began freelancing for the Boston Globe , which is where I really wanted to work. I had grown up in the Boston area. I was even a newspaper delivery boy for the Globe . I did an interview with August Wilson when Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom premiered at Yale Repertory. I think it was the first piece about August Wilson published in the Globe . In 1986, I joined the Globe as a copy editor on the night news desk. After a year or so, I began writing theater reviews for the Globe on my nights off. Kevin Kelly was still the drama critic back then. But if there was a smaller production or something that he couldn’t get to, I would review it.
    When I left the copy desk and became a reporter, I didn’t write any theater reviews for two decades. I worked as a general assignment news reporter, a reporter in the City Hall and State House bureaus, a TV critic and reporter, and a feature writer. Fast-forward to 2009. Louise Kennedy, the theater critic at the time, was on maternity leave, and the features editor (who heard that I had written theater reviews once upon a time) asked me to fill in. About eight months after Louise came back, she decided to leave the paper, and they asked if I wanted the job.
    Elisabeth Vincentelli: I was the arts editor at Time Out New York . The job of theater critic opened up at the New York Post after Clive Barnes died. A former colleague of mine, who had gone on to be the features editor at the Post , called and asked if I was interested. They wanted to mix things up and take someone from outside the pool of usual suspects with a different background. They wanted someone who could take a show that, on the surface, didn’t look accessible and make it feel exciting to a lay reader. They wanted someone who could go to everything, from the big Broadway musicals to the super-experimental European stuff, and make it all interesting and fun to read about.
    Frank Rizzo: I went to the University of Arizona, where I majored in journalism and minored in theater. I didn’t intend to go to graduate school right away, but I couldn’t get a job in journalism at the time. When I finished grad school, I got a job at a small newspaper in Massachusetts as a general writer. That gave me the best training in the world. It was outside of Boston, so I could give myself assignments in Boston all the time. I covered the world premieres of Pacific Overtures , A Little Night Music , Angela Lansbury in Gypsy , and all those other great shows that were coming into Boston in the 1970s. I would also cover the fire department, the police department, school board meetings, and everything else.
    I cobbled together a pretty good portfolio and got a job at the Journal-Courier , which was the morning paper at the time in New Haven. I was a general arts writer, covering everything from disco and rock concerts to theater. I was there during the last years of Robert Brustein at Yale Repertory Theatre. I just missed Meryl Streep’s time there. Then I got hired by the Hartford Courant —not as a theater critic, but as an arts journalist. By the 1990s, I was pretty much the theater writer. And starting in the late 1990s, I was reviewing more and more.
    Frank Scheck: I think people end up becoming critics in the same way: they love going to the theater, the movies, or whatever. In my case, it