{"id":1207,"date":"2019-01-03T20:58:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T20:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2022-02-06T20:46:03","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T20:46:03","slug":"the-art-of-criticism-sharing-the-theatre-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/the-art-of-criticism-sharing-the-theatre-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Criticism: Sharing the Theatre Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Don Rubin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract: <\/strong>After forty-eight years of teaching\u2014and some 8,000 or so nights in the theatre\u2014Don Rubin, now a professor Emeritus, recalls how he became an actor, a critic and, then, accidentally stumbled into a most satisfying career in academe. <\/em><\/p>

Keywords: <\/strong>Hofstra University, Register newspaper, Toronto Star, York University, theatre criticism, Canadian Theatre Review, World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, LIEDR Paradigm<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

My\nown beginnings in theatre, like so many others, started with a desire to\nperform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My\nfirst role as an actor was playing a Cold Germ in an elementary school play\ncalled Piffle, It\u2019s Only a Sniffle. <\/em>The\nplay, I\u2019m sure, had many deeply moving moments for audiences. So deep was the\nexperience for me that I actually remember my opening line, a profound example\nof expository verse that I spoke directly to the audience. Looking as menacing\nas possible, I said, \u201cHooray, hip-hip, I\u2019m a post-nasal drip.\u201d Then, adding\ndramatically, \u201cI am mighty and bold, I can give you a cold.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike\nmany would-be thespians, however, I really did wind up as a professional actor\nfor a time. I attended New York City\u2019s High School of Performing Arts\u2014the first\narts high school in North America (later celebrated in the film Fame<\/em>)\u2014<\/em>where,\nfrom the ages of 14 to 18,  I received heavyweight Stanislavski-training\nfrom artists connected to the early Group Theatre, who were themselves trained\nby some of Stanislavki\u2019s own people. These early teachers of mine were also maintaining\ntheir own careers in New York as actors, directors and stage managers.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nof my favorite memories from this unique high school hothouse was the weekly\nrecitals. Every Friday\u2014and this went on for four years\u2014one of the school\u2019s\ndepartments (theatre, dance or music) would host a one hour show (sometimes by\nthe students, sometimes by invited companies). These ranged widely\u2014scenes from a\nrecent or classical play to a ballet\/modern dance concert or music concert\n(classical or jazz). As I look back on that extraordinary training, I reckon\nthat, by the time I left high school, I had seen more than 150 plays, dance and\nmusic concerts. Which is to say that, by the age of 18, I had already had a\nlifetime of performance experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Don Rubin as an 18-year old actor in New York City<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Summers\nin high school were devoted to apprenticing with professional weekly stock companies\nin the New York area, doing everything, from painting sets to helping actors\nlearn lines to ushering (where I had the opportunity to see the same production\nat least eight times a week, a fabulous way to learn one\u2019s art). I wound up actually\nauditioning for one of these companies while an apprentice, getting the role and,\nlater, being cast in the same role for the post-Broadway tour of The Diary of Anne Frank <\/em>(starring 1940s film\nstar Francis Lederer), in which I played Anne\u2019s boyfriend Peter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was also while at Performing Arts that I started my career as a theatre critic, the subject I would wind up teaching in university for more than 40 years. On the same street as the high school was the weekly trade newspaper Show Business<\/em>, which provided casting news for the acting profession. Rather precociously, I thought that, if I worked there, I might be able to pick up casting news ahead of other young actors. I was soon hired to be the paper\u2019s after school office boy and part-time switchboard operator. I met lots of tough New York show biz types at Show Biz<\/em>, including the Damon Runyan-esque publisher of the paper, Leo Shull, a delightful con man who, for some reason, took me under his wing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nwas Leo Shull who actually encouraged me to see as much theatre as possible\nwhile working there. He said I shouldn\u2019t come in to work on Wednesday\nafternoons\u2014Broadway\u2019s major matinee day. \nHe told me to go see the matinees. When I pointed out that I couldn\u2019t\nafford the shows, he said that he wasn\u2019t expecting me to buy tickets. I should simply\nshow up at any Broadway show I wanted to see about an hour after the matinee\nbegan. \u201cWhen the show breaks for first intermission, just hang out in the lobby\narea and then walk back in with the audience. There\u2019s always an empty seat or\ntwo at the back of the theatre.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took his crazy advice and happily wound up seeing the second halfs of more than a hundred Broadway shows while in high school. Of course, I never knew how most of those plays started, but I could sure tell you how all of them ended. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Off-Broadway\nwas also a growing concept back then, and invitations to review came in daily\nto Show Biz.<\/em> Most of the invites were\nsimply hung on a staff bulletin board with a note saying anyone could use them,\nbut a 500 word review had to be turned in. I would often take the free tickets\nand head off to some obscure Greenwich Village theatre with my girlfriend to\nsee a new play. And, then, write about it. Suddenly, I was a published theatre\nreviewer. No one had any idea who I was or would believe that I was only 16.\nAnd when I wrote something positive about some barely-budgeted show desperate\nfor publicity, my review could be found quoted in the major dailies including, on\noccasion, in the New York Times.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\nthe time I headed off to university, I found myself trying to decide between a\ncareer as an actor and a career as a theatre critic (at that time, still a\nviable option). I received an acting scholarship to Hofstra University, a major\nuniversity theatre department in the New York area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nfound among my fellow students there some extraordinary people\u2014future film star\nMadeleine Kahn and future Theatre of the Ridiculous founder Charles Ludlam. I\nrealized, at that point, that there were many better actors than I was. It was\nat that moment\u2014after my first year of university\u2014that I decided to focus on a\ncareer in criticism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
IATC President Roman Szydlowski and Rubin debate the role of criticism at a 1976 conference in Montreal as part of the cultural program leading to the opening of the Olympics<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I\nswitched my major to English Literature (with a concentration in Dramatic\nLiterature) and applied to become the student newspaper\u2019s theatre critic.\nWithin a year, I also became the paper\u2019s Arts Editor and, in my last year, Editor-in-Chief.\nIt was a fabulous experience for a would-be theatre critic. And, each summer, I\nwould work as an intern for the New Haven\nRegister, <\/em>a medium-sized daily in a well-known pre-Broadway tryout town just\n90 minutes from Manhattan. When I graduated from university, I was offered a\nfull-time journalism job at the Register<\/em>\nwriting news, general features and, on my own time, reviewing shows and doing\ntheatre interviews. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My\nintellectual interest by that time was focused less on Broadway than on the\ngrowing regional theatre movement emerging across North America. More\nartistically focused on bringing theatre to the people, the regional theatre movement\nincluded many public debates and roundtables with many critics (including me),\nfrom many parts of the continent. Because of my theatre reviewing, I was\noffered an opportunity by my critical idol Robert Brustein to attend the Yale\nDrama School (also in New Haven), where he was Dean. I did attend some classes.\nThe fact was, I loved the time I spent in and around the Drama School, but I\nsimply couldn\u2019t afford financially to give up full-time writing. The experience,\nnevertheless, did inspire me to continue my academic career part-time, and I\nwound up getting my Masters degree at the University of Bridgeport\u2019s\nShakespeare Institute, where I worked with its director, left-wing theatre critic\nAllen Lewis and with actors like Morris Carnovsky, who was performing at the\nStratford (Connecticut) Shakespeare Festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually,\nmy journalistic career took me to the prestigious Toronto Star, <\/em>the paper where Ernest Hemingway once worked.A much larger newspaper than the Register, <\/em>the Star <\/em>hired me as back-up theatre critic and theatre feature\nwriter. After just a few months in Toronto, CBC Radio offered me a chance to be\ntheir morning theatre critic as well. I would often wind-up reviewing the same\nshow for both CBC and the Star <\/em>overnight.\nWorking at the Star\u2019s<\/em> office from the\nmoment a show ended until about 6 a.m., I would then have an early breakfast\nand head over to CBC\u2019s studios, where I would read what had been the first\ndraft of my Star <\/em>review at exactly\n7:57 a.m. The published newspaper review and the \u201cread\u201d first draft were different\nenough that neither outlet minded. Because of my actor training, I was also\npretty good at making the first draft sound unscripted. And, perhaps most important,\nI got paid twice to see the same show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\nwas when my criticism career took an odd turn. A new Theatre Department was\nabout to launch at Toronto\u2019s York University. The Department wanted to include a\ncourse or two in Theatre Criticism and approached the Star\u2019s <\/em>major critic, the celebrated Nathan Cohen, to do it. Cohen,\nhowever, was something of a media superstar (including television and radio)\nand was not interested in teaching, but he said that, if York would hire me, he\nwould do some occasional lectures in the class. And so began my academic\ncareer; a course in how to write Criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Don Rubin in 2012 lecturing at York University. Photo: Don Rubin<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Not so sure myself how to teach criticism, I asked Cohen for advice. He urged me to have the students write a lot and read a lot. He urged me to include lots of theatre theory\u2014Aristotle, Horace, Lessing, and even my old friend Stanislavski. I had never actually read any Stanislavski to that time. My own education had come first as Stanislavski practice. Looking back, I realize that it\u2019s not a bad way to learn\u2014first practice, then theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At\nthe end of that first year of teaching part-time, York offered me a full-time\ncontract, this time to teach not just theatre criticism, but also theatre\nhistory and script analysis. My acting training and graduate lit degrees were suddenly\ncoming in handy. I took the York offer and found I actually loved doing the\npreparation and the reading for the courses. I also found that I loved teaching\nand talking about what I was doing professionally: going to the theatre and\nwriting about it. I had begun to see theatre criticism even then as simply a\nform of sharing knowledge, as a way to explain to anyone who would listen what\nI had seen in a performance. Teaching, I came to understand, was the greatest\nof learning experiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I signed that first contract, I still wasn\u2019t totally committed to higher education, however, and I told myself that I would only stay in the academy for a few years, five at most. Forty-eight years\u2014and some 8,000 or so nights in the theatre\u2014later, I finally retired as a Full Professor from York with the honorific title of Professor Emeritus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The first issue of the quarterly journal Canadian Theatre Review<\/em> co-founded by Rubin at York University in 1974 and edited by him through 1982<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

After\nso many years in the classroom and after seeing theatre around the world, I had\neven evolved advanced teaching specializations in areas like Canadian Theatre\nand Drama, African Theatre and Drama, Critical Theory and Theatre History. I\nhad also helped to create the department\u2019s MA and PhD programs in Theatre\nStudies and had even started a national quarterly journal called the Canadian Theatre Review<\/em> (still\npublishing some 50 years later), along with a theatre book company called CTR\nPublications, which specialized in scholarly theatre publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking\nback over that extended teaching career in theatre, I can still say that what\nmost held my interest were the courses I established in Applied Theatre\nCriticism and, what I called early on, Theatre Aesthetics (Theatre Theory by\nany other name). I offered these applied courses for some 40 years at the third-\nand fourth-year undergraduate levels and at the graduate level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Africa volume of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre<\/em> series edited by Rubin and published between 1994 and 2000<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The\nthird-year course simply offered opportunities to read theory, to study current\nexamples of outstanding journalistic and scholarly criticism, and to offer\nstudents, each semester, an opportunity to write six to 12 pieces of criticism,\nsome short, some long. The fourth-year version of the course gave students the chance\nto edit and publish their own 24- to 48-page journal, paid for by the\ndepartment. The students were, then, able to market it any way they wanted and\nsome issues reached across the country. The best of these young criticism\nstudents often wound up as editorial assistants on the journal CTR. <\/em>The one year grad course offered these\nsame opportunities but with more theory, and, of course, writing expectations at\na higher level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout\nmy own teaching of theatre criticism, I insisted on maintaining that strong\nbalance between theory and practice; between reading the ideas of\ntheatre-makers and critics, and trying to put those ideas into actual practice.\nOne week, the students would read a piece of theatre theory (theatre<\/em> theory as opposed to literary,\nlinguistic, political or social theory) and, the next week, they would go to\nsee a show of their choice and, then, write about it. I never pushed the actual\nlinks between what they had just read and their writing, but they were certainly\nthere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nwould often start them off as would-be theatre critics by asking them to go to\nan art gallery and choose two or three paintings to write about. They all\nthought they had a lot to say about plays. By asking them to write about Visual\nArt, I was trying to force them to break away from their strengths and\npreconceptions, trying to make them describe<\/em>.\nAs American critic Eric Bentley once said, criticism is discussion before it is\nanything else. To discuss, one needs to first describe at some level the thing\nbeing looked at. Describing something is trickier than most young writers\nbelieve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Don Rubin, ed. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings<\/em>. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I\noften gave an assignment early in a semester to write a short piece (200 words)\nabout tasting something. Most were rather quick to go to an immediate judgement.\nThe thing they were tasting was good or bad; the experience positive or\nnegative. But few would actually describe the experience of actually tasting something;\nwould express what the thing itself was like. Over and over, I would tell them\nthat I really didn\u2019t care whether they liked, say, vanilla ice cream. What I\nwanted to know was what vanilla-ness<\/em>\nwas. Forcing young writers to describe, to discuss, was always the major\nchallenge. Insisting that judgements were the least important aspect of critical\nwriting was a wake-up call to many. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As was all the reading they were doing. Over the decades, my reading lists for young critics grew and changed, but I did stay with some of the original ideas of my colleague Nathan Cohen. I had them read Aristotle\u2019s Poetics<\/em>, so they could understand that Aristotle\u2014coming from a science background\u2014was, first, a describer of what he saw and not a judge. The judgments, the rules\u2014so often attributed to Aristotle\u2014were connected to French neo-classicism of the seventeenth century. They also learned that saying a play was not<\/em> Aristotelian, that it did not <\/em>have a beginning, a middle and an end, for example, said very little about what a particular play actually was. Even Absurdist plays, I would point out, had beginnings, middles and ends, just not necessarily in that order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Guardian<\/em> critic Michael Billington and Rubin at a Canadian seminar sponsored by the Shaw Festival<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Another\nclassical reading that I found useful for students was the Ars Poetica<\/em> of the Roman satirist Horace. Discussions usually\nfocused on his ideas about the ultimate function of any work of art and his\nnotion of \u201cdocere\u201d and \u201cdelicare,\u201d to teach and to delight. Horace argued that works\nof art could do either of those useful things but that a great work managed to\ndo both: could make us understand things more deeply as <\/em>it entertained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dryden\u2019s\nEssay of Dramatic Poesie<\/em> brought in\nthe neo-classic thinkers and the beginnings of journalistic criticism with the\nrise of the coffee house culture, in seventeenth-century England. Lessing\u2019s Hamburg Dramaturgy<\/em> introduced students\nto the concept of the dangers of the in-house critic, the \u201cimbedded critic,\u201d in\nmore contemporary critical parlance.As\nthe first \u201cimbedded\u201d critic (working with the Hamburg National Theatre),\nLessing set out to write a twice-a-week journal looking at that theatre\u2019s new productions\nand its artistic vision. So unpopular were Lessing\u2019s comments on these shows,\nhowever, that he quickly stopped writing about what he was actually seeing, and\nhe began to write instead about what could<\/em>\nbe on their stage. He also said much about the responsibilities of the critic,\nespecially one working in a developing theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nwas through Lessing that I tried to introduce the ideas of the German writer\nand thinker Goethe. In particular, I would speak of Goethe\u2019s three principles\nof analysis; his so-called three questions that he felt should be asked about\nevery work of art: what was the artist trying to do? how well did the artist do\nit? was it worth doing? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead\nof applying those questions to a work of art, I found it useful to use a more shocking\nexample\u2014Auschwitz and its death camps. If Auschwitz was an artistic creation,\nwhat was it trying to do? The simple answer: kill people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goethe\u2019s\nsecond question: how well did it do it? As one of the greatest of the death\ncamps in World War II, it killed people very well. By this marker, it was also\na success.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Don Rubin hosts a visiting Chinese theatre company at York University<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And,\nthen, we would discuss the third question, to me the most important question\nand one that set apart opinionated, report-oriented reviewers from genuine\ncritics: was it worth doing. It is here that the writer is asked to put their\nown values on the line, to reveal who they are. That is: how dare anyone create\nan Auschwitz? It was important here to point out that this crucial positioning\ncan only come after <\/em>real description\nand real discussion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

More\ncontemporary theatre theorists were brought in as well in this pedagogy\u2014Stanislavski\nand his methodologies for reproducing a naturalistic reality on stage; Meyerhold\nand his challenges to Stanislavksi\u2019s core ideas as he sought to bring about a\nheightened, circus-like reality; Edward Gordon Craig utilizing darkness and\nlight, shadow, shape and sound in his visionary theatrical mix; and the French\ntheorist Antonin Artaud taking the Craig-ian vision to darker ends with his\nTheatre of Cruelty, his theatre of \u201cextreme\u201d action arguing that every act has\nthe potential to be extreme, to be cruel, to be part of a theatre using all\nthat is found in war, in fear, from screams to actually breaking through the\nwalls of the stage. Students responded viscerally to Artaud\u2019s final statement\nhere: \u201cand if in the beginning a little real blood is necessary. . . .\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nsecond half of the twentieth century was represented in this pedagogy, for me,\nby the ideas of the Polish theorist Jerzy Grotowski, who took Stanislavskian\nhonesty to extreme limits. I also used the sociological examinations of the\nItalian theorist Eugenio Barba and his ideas of theatre anthropology, the\nBrazilian Augusto Boal and his political action-rooted Theatre of the Oppressed,\nand the American critic and scholarly provocateur Richard Schechner and his\nideas of Performance Studies; an idea rooted in the notion that everything we\ndo every day can be connected to and evaluated as part of a performance\ncontinuum. From choosing our daily \u201ccostumes\u201d to hair-styles, make-up, posture\n(playing life, being alive), all the way to examining the rituals we live by in\nperformance terms\u2014rites of passage, weddings, funerals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And\nin between discussions of these theatre-rooted readings, the students would\nwrite about a performance they had seen. I would ask them for 750 words\u2014two to\nthree pages. They had a week to write. They would, then, read their pieces in\nclass and discuss them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nof the most satisfying things for me was replacing formula reviewing with what\nmight be called a more thoughtful pedagogical template for serious theatre\ncriticism. Since some have found that template useful over the years, I offer\nit up here to would-be theatre writers. Take it if it works for you. Ignore it\nif it doesn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\ncall this template the LIEDR Paradigm, with LIEDR itself being simply a series\nof initials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I begin it with the letter L for Lead, a journalistic term but a useful one for beginning any piece of writing. For even scholarly writing doesn\u2019t have to be boring. The Lead is the opening sentence or two and is crucial to bring a reader in. Simple facts (names, dates, locations) are really quite boring in Leads. For me, a good Lead is often the most important thing one has to say about whatever is under discussion. The “facts” can be part of it or they can immediately follow the lead. But, if one wants to interest a reader, find something that is important to say in the lead.

Second in this writing paradigm is the letter \u201cI\u201d which stands for Idea. It often takes young or inexperienced writers a while to understand that works of art are, ultimately, about Ideas, and that the core Idea of any work of art is what needs to be identified and understood. And it needs to be discussed early on in a piece. In fact, the Idea may need to be in the Lead or, in fact, is the Lead. In my pedagogy, it is essential that the core Idea at work in any production and\/or in any play (particularly if it is a new play) be dealt with as early in a piece of critical writing as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Don Rubin lecturing in India in 2010<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The E in this paradigm stands for Evoke. Once the core Idea has been discussed, the writer needs to Evoke the production, give the reader a sense of what it looked and felt like. This should not be a catalogue of everything seen. That\u2019s boring. But rather, it needs to be an Evocation of the whole. As an exercise, I would ask my students to \u201cEvoke\u201d the room they were sitting in. Not its size and shape but what it felt like, smelled like, its style, its essential being. Is it functional and cold or is it faded roses and dust.  One cries out here for good writing. One needs to give the reader a sense of what was seen on the stage through Evocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The D is double and actually stands for Direction and Design. Did the director have a particular concept in staging the piece, a particular approach? What was it? Describe it. How did it look and feel? The same for designs? Did the designer(s) have a particular concept or approach? Talk about that as well. Most of the time, this part of the discussion will be directly tied into the Idea.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

R stands for Reveal. The last and most difficult element in the pedagogy. What I ask for here is that the writer Reveal something about themselves encountering this work of art. It is amazing how the reader or listener will suddenly tune in much more deeply, if the writer personally connects to the work as a living, breathing human being. Offended? Angered? Touched? Why? For instance, if the writer is a deeply religious person and the play is attacking religion, does the writer simply stand back and say \u201cwell done\u201d or does the writer have some responsibility to take a more personal position on the issue? I suggest the latter. For me, this connects back to Goethe’s three questions about a work of art and whether it was worth doing.

Let\u2019s say the play under discussion was intended simply to be silly and frivolous. According to Goethe, one must identify that, perhaps as its core Idea. Was it done well? That is, was it truly silly and frivolous? Perhaps it was. Check it off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, then, we come back to that all-important final question: was it worth doing? Perhaps it was for some. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps it was a waste of everyone\u2019s time and energy, your<\/em> time and energy.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that point, one is Revealing oneself\nas a human being, speaking for oneself and no one else. That self is,\ntherefore, on the line. And when readers sense that something personal is on\nthe line in a piece writing, they will read all the more carefully and they\nwill listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact is, I taught Theatre Criticism in this way for some 40 years. And I taught it fairly successfully I daresay, in that I turned out a number of genuine writers and thinkers over the decades; people who wound up writing for newspapers and journals, people who wound up running theatres, people who became theatre scholars themselves, and who all recognized that their writing had improved their abilities in whatever their ultimate field of endeavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, another fact here, as we turned\ninto the twenty-first century, I felt that I had to stop teaching Applied\nTheatre Criticism, because there were virtually no outlets for my students to\nuse it in. For a time, I simply taught my course as Theatre Theory with a\nsingle writing assignment over a semester. And, over several weeks, we looked\nat the LIEDR paradigm as a way of improving writing generally. But the days of\npretending that I was preparing theatre students for careers in theatre\ncriticism\u2014journalistic or otherwise\u2014were all but over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2010, in Canada, there were,\nperhaps, only a half-dozen jobs left for full-time theatre critics. By 2018,\nthat number had dropped to perhaps three. Even my old haunt, the Toronto Star<\/em> had stopped paying for\nfull-time critics. Instead, it was paying free-lancers to offer coverage of theatre\nactivity in the city. And there was a lot. Sadly, there were few complaints\nabout the ultimate loss of career voices across the board. And, online, what I\nsaw mostly was opinion masquerading as thought, opinion without discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which caused me to lose much of my\nown joy in sharing theatre experiences with others. I also stopped going to the\ntheatre so much. I stopped writing about productions. And, last year, I retired\nentirely from teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do miss my students. I do miss the\ndebate and the discussion both in the theatre and in the classroom. For me, I\ncan say without hesitation that teaching theatre and, especially, teaching theatre\ncriticism was a fabulous experience and, ultimately, the core of a terrific\ncareer. Writing about the theatre was a terrific experience. With criticism\nfading as a profession, I am more than a little saddened that so few others\nwill have the opportunities I did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Don Rubin and wife Patricia Keeney at a 2017 York University ceremony celebrating Rubin’s retirement from teaching and the naming of a Lounge and Library in his honor<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And yet, somehow, I maintain a hold\non it all by writing essays like this and through working with journals like\nthis which keep an honorable tradition of rich theatre conversation going. Just\nmaybe, it makes me think, it will all one day come back and that the best of\nwhat genuine theatre criticism can offer will find a new way to speak,  will truly reinvent itself for a new\ngeneration. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\"\"\n\n\n\n

*<\/a>Don Rubin<\/strong> is the former Chair of the Department of Theatre at York University in Toronto. He is a past President of the Canadian Centre of the International Theatre Institute and the Canadian Theatre Critics Association. The Editor of Routledge\u2019s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre<\/em>, he is Managing Editor of Critical Stages<\/em> as well as its Book Review Editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2018 Don Rubin
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don Rubin* Abstract: After forty-eight years of teaching\u2014and some 8,000 or so nights in the theatre\u2014Don Rubin, now a professor Emeritus, recalls how he became an actor, a critic and, then, accidentally stumbled into a most satisfying career in academe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1216,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-by-don-rubin","","tg-column-two"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/19\/2019\/01\/Rubin2.jpg?fit=300%2C417&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pam472-jt","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1622,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}