Equitable Theatre Criticism: An Overview

Karen Fricker*, and Nathaniel Hanula-James**

Abstract

In the wake of the global racial reckoning in 2020, a renewed surge of calls to action, initiatives, and training programs have emerged that aim to make the practice, institutions, and demographics of theatre criticism in North America more equitable, with a particular focus on anti-racism. Drawing on examples from Canada and the United States, this article works to define the practice of equitable theatre criticism. It articulates four major goals for equitable theatre criticism: increased access for equity-seeking groups; education in histories of inequity; promotion of cultural competence in criticism; and expansion of what constitutes a valid critical response. The article ends with an acknowledgement that, to achieve true equity in North American theatre criticism and beyond, an increase in data, research, training, and career opportunities must occur at every level of the field.

Keywords: anti-racism, creative response, cultural competence, education, equitable theatre criticism, intersectionality, objectivity

Introduction: A Call for Change

In July 2020, the activist collective “We See You, White American Theatre” published an extensive list of demands of the U.S. theatre industry, addressing systems that have led, in their powerful argument, to a “culture of fear poisoned by racism and its intersectional oppressions” (WSYWAT). Among subject areas including cultural competency, working conditions and hiring practices, and artistic and curatorial practices, WSYWAT’s demands include specific clauses for the press, starting with the assertion that writing about BIPOC productions (that is, productions created by Black and Indigenous people, and people of colour) “must be written through the lens of anti-racism.” The document further demands that theatre institutions and commercial producers invest in critic training programs and fellowships for BIPOC critics; and that theatres divest from publications that do not have at least 50% BIPOC writers, amongst other stipulations.

These demands are part of a small but growing movement in North America addressing concerns around equity in theatre criticism. The movement includes academic research projects and scholarly writing, courses and training initiatives, funding programs, and shifting practices at mainstream and independent publications. The authors of this piece are variously involved in such programs and are therefore writing, to some extent, from within the movement. Most recently, we collaborated with cultural critic Jose Solís to create Youareacritic.com, a free, online, open-source course introducing the principles of equitable theatre criticism, to which we will return later.

Our goal with this article is to lay out the background and circumstances that led to calls for theatre criticism to undertake what American Theatre editor Rob Weinert-Kendt calls a “diversity upgrade,” to outline activities already happening to render the theatre criticism landscape more equitable, to articulate the four goals that we understand equitable theatre criticism seeks to achieve, and to assess the extent to which these goals are being met. The path to a more equitable theatre criticism landscape involves, first of all, engagement with existing publishing, theatre, and educational systems to provide training for existing and emerging critics alike and to increase participation of historically underrepresented populations in writing about theatre. It also involves working outside such systems by fostering modes of response to theatre beyond modern reviewing.

To begin, we offer an overview of key terms.

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion

In North America, the term equity often appears in association with the terms diversity and inclusion as the acronym EDI or DEI.[1] Although formal EDI initiatives in educational, corporate, and cultural institutions have existed in North America since at least the 1960s (Oliha-Donaldson), the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 sparked a new surge of commitments to EDI initiatives worldwide. In Canada, the context in which we are writing, the death of the 29-year-old Black-Indigenous woman Regis Korchinski-Paquet during an encounter with Toronto police, also in 2020, contributed to this increased focus on EDI (Special Investigations Unit).

Interlinked as equity, diversity, and inclusion may be, however, the three terms are not synonymous. To move towards greater diversity and inclusion means to broaden who can participate in a field such as theatre criticism “regardless of background or identity” (Cornelius-Hernandez and Clarke 2); but this broadening does not, on its own, guarantee that everyone who participates will be treated fairly. Equity, on the other hand, means “the fair and just treatment” of all those who participate, “ensuring that everyone has access to [the same] opportunities, resources, and outcomes, regardless of their background or circumstance” (1-2). “Background and circumstance” may refer to “biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, religion, disability, abilities,” (2) class, race, number of dependents, food security, and more.

It is important to note that achieving “access to opportunities, resources, and outcomes” does not imply that every individual or group must arrive at that access by the same means. Rather, equity must involve “tailored treatment… based on assessments of an individual’s needs and situation or… based on diagnosis of systemic conditions of disadvantage and exclusion” (Minow). Equitable treatment must also take into account intersectionality (Crenshaw 140), or the way that different systemic conditions and “dimensions of identity [may] intertwine and overlap” (Samie) to shape an individual’s needs.

The authors of this article subscribe to an intersectional approach, acknowledging that identities have numerous facets that inform each other and cannot be disentangled. That said, given this article’s limited scope and in the interest of a focused argument, we write here specifically about anti-racist approaches to theatre criticism, paying some attention to theatre criticism and gender. In the context of equity, anti-racism means dismantling “discriminatory treatments, unfair policies, or biased practices based on race that result in inequitable outcomes for whites over people of color and extend considerably beyond prejudice” (Smithsonian). Further studies in this area could usefully engage with the ways in which sexual identity, dis/ability, and class intersect with theatre criticism. 

Equity in North American Theatre

Questions of equity, diversity, and inclusion have been central to North American theatre since the late 20th century. Oscar G. Brockett named diversity, specifically questions around race, gender (including aspects of sexuality), and class to be “some of the most crucial issues” in the American theatre from 1986-2000 (42). In Anglophone Canada too there has been significant focus on theatre’s capacity to reflect the country’s multiculturalism since the modern settler-Canadian theatre movement began in the late 1960s (see Knowles, Knowles and Mundel, Morrow).[2] Material and systemic changes to the field, however, have been slow to come. Writing in 2018, the Postmarginal project, a collective of theatre scholars and professionals, noted that despite “seemingly endless panels, discussions, online debates, and other fora” (Alvarez et al. 96) during the previous decade and earlier, progress around diversity in Canadian theatre had stalled, in that calls for the recognition of differences were being repeated without further action.

Calls for changes to the structures and leadership of Canadian theatre accelerated in 2020 in the context of the dual “explosions” (Lynch and Fitz-James 5) of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rapid acceleration of the Black Lives Matter movement following the deaths of Floyd and Korchinski-Paquet. In the summer of 2020, Black and Indigenous artists and artists of colour put pressure on theatre institutions to acknowledge their complicity in unjust systems and voiced their experiences of racism in Canadian theatre. For example, during a 72-hour takeover of the social media channels of the Stratford Festival, Canada’s largest non-profit theatre, Black artists shared experiences of being told they were inadequate for their jobs, or conversely that they were only employed to fulfill quotas; and about technical and craft departments being ill-prepared to make up, wig, and light performers who were not white (See Fricker and Maga; Lloyd et al.).

Recent years have seen BIPOC artists take on leadership positions at a number of historically white-led Canadian theatre institutions including Alberta Theatre Projects, the Belfry Theatre, the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre, Factory Theatre, Soulpepper Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Theatre Calgary, and Theatre Passe Muraille. A wealth of initiatives has sought to increase racial and gender equity across the Canadian theatre sector. For instance, in 2020, a collective of Black artists launched the Black Pledge, “an effort to hold live performance organizations accountable to their promises to address anti-Black racism” (Black Pledge).[3] It is important to note that, while these resources and commitments are important tools for change, the extent to which they will be taken up and disseminated in the broader Canadian theatre landscape is not yet certain.

Theatre Criticism and Equity

Before turning to the current wave of equity-focused theatre criticism, it is important to note that critiques of racial, gendered, and other biases in modern theatre criticism are not new. In “Whose Performance is it Anyway? Performed Criticism as a Feminist Strategy,” Stefka Mihaylova traces the gendered history of the insistence on “the possibility of writing about performance from an apolitical, gender-neutral position” (255) back to the eighteenth century, connecting it to the “western modernist project of objective knowledge” (256). Mihaylova offers the examples of Carolee Schneeman’s performance Interior Scroll—in which Schneeman pulled a long piece of paper out of her vagina and read out the text on it about the difficulties that female artists face in the male-led arts world—and the Guerilla Girls’ actions in the 1980s and ‘90s using advertising and fly-posting to decry the lack of work by women performed in major arts institutions, as embodied forms of critique that assert “the fleshy, gendered body not as a deterrent to critical thinking but as its enabling condition” (256). The highly publicized mid-1990s debate between critic and artistic director Robert Brustein and Black American playwright August Wilson brought attention to questions about the relationship between race and theatre criticism, given Brustein’s insistence on privileging questions of aesthetic quality over “sociological criteria” (Mihaylova 263) in the evaluation of theatre. Around the same time, New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce’s classification of Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here, which was inspired by the real-life experiences of people living with HIV and AIDS, as “victim art” and “undiscussable,” sparked an international debate about the responsibilities and limits of modern criticism. 

As Michelle MacArthur argues, the confluence of the rise of digital media and of anti-racist and anti-colonial activism in the theatre field has brought sustained focus onto the role of theatre criticism “in sustaining inequities, particularly for the lack of diversity among critics with the most power (manifested through visibility and influence) and also for how critics write about marginalized artists’ work” (“Conversations” 5). As with calls for increased EDI in professional theatre, the application of questions of EDI to theatre criticism is primarily happening in Canada and the United States as part of increased recognition of the ongoing effects of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade on these lands. It is notable that the first scholarly study of theatre blogging and its relationship to traditional criticism was written by scholars in Australia, another settler colonial country (see Harvey, Grehan, and Tompkins 2010).

A focus on equity in criticism has not yet emerged in Europe to the same extent as in North America. Since July 2024, Natasha Tripney has published ten first-person pieces in her Café Europa newsletter by European critics discussing the state of criticism in their markets. It is notable that only one of these pieces, by Amina Aziz and Marie Serah Ebcinoglu of Germany’s MISSY magazine, comments on the demographics of criticism in terms of critics’ identity positions, noting that MISSY was founded “to intervene with the male dominated world of cultural journalism” (qtd. in Tripney “Critical Thinking”). 

Scholarly research on the emergence of digital criticism and its relationship to traditional critical practices has focused to a significant extent on questions of power. Because anyone with access to the internet can publish online, digital criticism has been both heralded and derided as a democratized practice. Writing in 2004, Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd welcomed online writing as a “manifestation of the writer seizing the means of production” (qtd. in Radosavljević 17), which Duška Radosavljević calls a “distinctly emancipatory” evolution of writing practices (17). For Mark Brown, by contrast, the digital turn necessitates a distinction between professional critics and “the citizen critic” who is “an amateur, a dabbler, the critical equivalent of the person who can change a light bulb or fix a plug, but cannot and should not be considered a professional electrician” (176). MacArthur, Signy Lynch, and Scott Mealey argue, however, that the terms “professional” and “amateur” no longer “reflect the nuanced power dynamics at play within the blogosphere” (455). In an empirical study of theatre criticism in Canada published in 2021, they found that 53.5% of 103 digital theatre reviewers surveyed earn any money for their criticism, and “only 11.8% of those surveyed make more than 20% of their overall income from their reviews” (463).

Explorations of power dynamics in historical and current criticism practices expose inequalities involving gender. The Western practice of theatre criticism has been led and controlled by white men, as exemplified by the leadership history of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle: Since its founding in 1935, all its presidents have been male, and almost certainly white (“History”). In a 2011 article profiling 12 of the most influential American theatre critics, nine were men, three women, and all seemingly white (Cote “Critical Juncture”). Access to networks of privilege has also proven a key asset to a successful career in Western theatre criticism: There is a direct lineage of influence between leading English critics James Agate (1877-1947), Harold Hobson (1904-92), Kenneth Tynan (1927-80), and Michael Billington (1939-), the latter three of whom attended Oxford University, where they made connections that helped them obtain criticism positions at major newspapers (We trace this history in Module 5.2 of Youareacritic.com, as we further explore below).

An infographic from youareacritic.com that traces relationships of influence and rivalry between James Agate, Harold Hobson, Kenneth Tynan, and Michael Billington that fed their careers and contributed to their dominance of the British critical field in the 20th century.

The domination of the field by a single demographic has limited the range of viewpoints offered on theatre practices and, some have argued, held back artists who are not of that demographic. In 2007, then-artistic director of the Royal National Theatre Nicholas Hytner (who himself attended Cambridge) publicly critiqued the U.K. critical establishment as dominated by “dead white men” who exhibit misogyny in their response to work directed by women (Haydon). For MacArthur et al., the lack of diversity in Canadian criticism “has traditionally upheld a narrow set of perspectives that support the country’s imperialist history of theatre” (458). Writing in 2017, Weinert-Kendt remarked on the continued “narrow demographics of those who write about the theatre” and noted that critics within that tradition base their judgment “on purportedly universal criteria that fail to account for cultural differences in both form and content” (7).

Jill Dolan too challenges what she calls the “myth of objectivity,” the deeply ingrained notion in western culture and criticism that

“to be balanced and fair, a critic needs to erase his or her predilections and prejudices and come to their spectating practices as a ‘universalist.’ I don’t believe objectivity is possible or desirable; instead, it simply masks the biases that any critic, of necessity, brings to his or her work” (5).

In her award-winning Feminist Spectator blog, Dolan writes about theatre, film, and television, with the goal of “interven[ing] in mass entertainment from a feminist perspective” (9). Such an approach participates in a tradition of feminist theory and writing that “encouraged women to challenge prevailing forms and norms” (McEvoy 291). As William McEvoy argues, this approach does not understand meaning to be “inherent in the text, waiting to be found” but rather “sees meaning as derived from the encounter between spectator and performance” (293). Moving away from a critical practice “engaged in the hermeneutic quest to decode meaning” towards a relational approach opens up criticism “to modes of writing that are creative, affective or in other ways questioning about their own form” (291).

Radosavljević includes several such alternative responses at the end of her 2015 edited volume Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes, including a prose poem, a performance script, a review written as a children’s picture book, and a review entirely in emojis (309-327). Such responses reflect the fact that, with the digital turn, using writing as the mode of response to performance becomes “not a given, but an option” (Bammer and Boetcher Joeres 10). Scholars and artists across fields of visual and performing arts argue that alternative forms of response are a “de-hierarchization of the social relations governing the making of meaning” in the arts (Rogoff 104), putting artists and critics on a more even playing field than when a critic offers a published written evaluation of an artwork. Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley argue that such modes of creative/critical response do not necessarily “lack critical distance, but it is achieved through a mode of openness and generosity, rather than a detached perspective (if there indeed is such a thing)” (18n76).

These lines of thought and practice offer a potentially progressive narrative of a revitalized digital criticism landscape in which emergent practices are disrupting existing power relations and offering innovative pathways for further exploration. Noting that all the non-traditional responses she includes at the end of her book were by women, Radosavljević asks,

“What is the relationship between creativity and emancipation?… Could it be that the digital paradigm shift has also inadvertently redressed the power imbalances of the previous centuries, resulting in a long-awaited triumph of the previously repressed?” (29)

It is important to underline, however, that such changes have been gradual, and that a more representative and formally adventurous critical landscape is still emergent. Hilevaara and Orley’s edited volume The Creative Critic emerges out of a UK academic context in which it remains a fraught struggle for creative work to “count” as scholarly output; their particular contribution is to document and advocate for alternative forms of response to creative work (including writing about one’s own practice) as legitimate critical practices. MacArthur et al. warn that it would be inaccurate, or at least premature, to credit the advent of digital technologies as enabling a more equitable landscape for theatre criticism: familiar “power differentials still exist despite the best efforts of the repressed to intervene in critical discourse online” (29).

Equitable Theatre Criticism: Four Goals

In this context, and based on the above definitions and discussion, we suggest that an equitable approach to theatre criticism operates with four goals in mind:

  • Access to training, mentorship, and career opportunities in the theatre criticism field for members of equity-seeking groups;[4]
  • Education of current and emerging theatre critics about histories of inequity in the field;
  • Promotion of cultural competence in critical responses to theatre;
  • Expansion of what constitutes a valid critical response beyond the traditional review form.
Goal One: Access

As noted above, creating an equitable playing field means ensuring access to “opportunities, resources and outcomes” for everyone (Cornelius-Hernandez and Clarke 1-2). Inviting in and supporting people whose perspectives are not currently represented in theatre criticism is an essential first step towards making the field more diverse, inclusive, and equitable (see MacArthur et al., Weinert-Kendt, WSYWIT). Since 2017, a number of new equitable training initiatives in the United States and Canada have worked to address this goal. Chicago-based artist, producer, and writer Regina Victor founded ReScripted in 2017 in response to a critical landscape in Chicago that was “inhospitable to work by artists of color, trans folks, women, and a litany of other under-recognized voices” (“Decomposition”).[5] ReScripted is a publishing platform for reviews and other theatre writing, and it ran The Key, a young critics mentorship scheme, for three sessions between 2017-19 (“The Key”). Victor announced in 2024 that she was ending ReScripted because “cultivating change” through the platform was no longer productive for her, but did not foreclose the possibility for future related endeavors (“Decomposition”). This points to the challenges of working independently, and underlines the need to render critical training and mentorship programs sustainable. Often, interventions such as ReScripted are fuelled by the passion of a single or small number of individuals, whose energies remain so focused on establishing and maintaining core activities that they lack capacity to create stable administrative and funding infrastructures.   

In 2020, Jose Solís founded the BIPOC Critics Lab and to date has run six Labs, five in the U.S. and one in Canada. Solís started up the first Lab by posting an open call on Twitter, working outside structures such as training institutions and criticism organizations which have previously been unwelcoming and inaccessible to people from equity-seeking backgrounds. With 8-10 participants each, the Labs involve weekly Zoom sessions with Solís and guest instructors, offering training in areas including developing one’s critical voice; pitching; taking edits; and working in audio, video, and other non-text-based formats. For most of the Labs, Solís partners with major theatre organizations which agree to commission writing/digital content from the participants. In Canada, critical training initiatives have included Critical Futures, a nine-month-long program for emerging IBPOC reviewers run by Neworld Theatre in Vancouver; and an iteration of the IBPOC Critics Lab run by Intermission Magazine, the Stratford Festival, and Solís in 2023.[6]

A tweet from 2020 by Jose Solís celebrating the first session of the BIPOC Critics Lab

Grants and awards are another means through which emerging critics from equity-seeking backgrounds gain access to and profile within the field. Funded by the Ford and Nathan Cummings Foundations, Critical Minded, “a grantmaking and learning initiative that supports cultural critics of color in the United States,” has been active since 2017. The American Theatre Critics Association’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism, founded in 2022, is earmarked for reviewers, critics, and journalists from under-represented groups. While the Canadian Theatre Critics Association (CTCA)’s Emerging Critic Award criteria do not include identity-related markers, all of the winners since the award’s establishment in 2019 have been members of equity-seeking populations. CTCA Emerging Critic Award winners are given a mentorship from Intermission Magazine that also brings publication opportunities, an acknowledgement of the need for ongoing training, mentorship, and writing experience in order to establish oneself in the critical field.

Goal Two: Education

The second goal is to educate current and emerging theatre critics about histories of inequity in the field of theatre criticism, to avoid replicating these same barriers in present and future practice. It is important for current practitioners to understand how networks of privilege operate in the criticism field, in order to dismantle them and establish less exclusionary channels in the present day.

This pedagogical principle underlies Youareacritic.com. While a number of Canadian universities include courses in criticism as part of undergraduate theatre degrees, the intent of this course is to reach potential critics who do not have access to higher education, and to be a resource for arts and community organizations interested in fostering equitable critical discourse, as well as offering a potential supplement to existing criticism courses and training programs. The asynchronous, six-module course teaches the building blocks of theatre criticism, including the traditional review form, and encourages the learner to consider how their own positionality affects their critical practice. The course explores the white, patriarchal, and colonial history of western theatre criticism as well as counter-histories of criticism from the perspective of equity-seeking groups, and touches on critical traditions in the Global South which are rarely mentioned in Western-narrated histories of the field. An expanded and advanced version of the course would include more extensive engagement with critical histories and cultures beyond North America and Europe, in collaboration with critics and educators from the Global South. 

Goal Three: Cultural Competence

Those who advocate for cultural competence in criticism believe that a critical community more attuned to questions of equity will be able to offer a diverse spectrum of artists the culturally specific responses they deserve. This background informs the third goal for equitable theatre criticism, which extends equity beyond the demographics of who is writing reviews into the practice of criticism itself. Just as the broader principle of equity calls for “tailored treatment… based on assessments of an individual’s needs and situation” (Minow), acts of equitable theatre criticism need to take into account the cultural context of a theatre performance. Criticism that does not take this context into account risks alienating both artists and audiences from equity-seeking groups.

In Canadian theatre, Indigenous artists have led resistance to culturally insensitive criticism and highlighted the need for critics to bring an equity lens to their work. In 2008, the Indigenous company Native Earth Performing Arts chastised the Toronto Star newspaper for its review of A Very Polite Genocide or The Girl Who Fell to Earth, in which critic Mark Selby used racist, derogatory language to describe the play’s characters (Nolan 110). In 2018, the creative team of the play Kamloopa—Syilx and Tsilhqot’in playwright and director Kim Sēnklip Harvey, Algonquin Anishinaabe dramaturg Lindsay Lachance, and Métis assistant director Jessica Schact—eschewed reviews altogether for the play’s Vancouver premiere, instead asking Indigenous women to write love letters to Kamloopa, which went on to win the Governor General’s Award for Drama. Those love letters, preserved on the website Vancouverplays.com, augmented the play’s celebration of the power of Indigenous women. In 2020, the Indigenous-led manidoons collective requested that only IBPOC critics review their production of bug, a piece created and performed by Yolanda Bonnell about “the ongoing effects of colonialism and intergenerational trauma experienced by Indigenous women” (Bonnell), which manidoons framed as ceremony rather than theatre. The collective believed, correctly, that Canada’s white-led critical establishment was largely ill-equipped to write culturally competent reviews of Bonnell’s work (Alvis et al. 101).

As manidoons collective made clear, if a production tells the story of, and has been staged by, members of an equity-seeking group, it behooves the critic responding to that production to take into account historical and cultural context that might be relevant to their response. For instance, if a critic reviews a performance of Inua Ellams’ Three Sisters, which adapts Chekhov’s play to the context of the Biafran war, it will be important for that critic to approach the play with some understanding of Nigerian history and culture, Chekhov’s original Three Sisters and its 19th-century Russian context, and Ellams’ career and body of work. If this imagined critic is not familiar with one or more of these subjects, an equitable approach to theatre criticism encourages them to supplement their knowledge with research, to be able to fully engage with this culturally-specific play.

Arguably, researching a production’s source material and context is not a new concept nor exclusive to an equitable approach, but rather an element of responsible critical writing. The exigencies of covering theatre for a mainstream media outlet can limit critics’ time for research, however; and those who approach reviewing as part of a journalistic reporting beat might argue that such research falls beyond their remit, and that their responsibility is rather to approach the show with a layperson’s eye. While the contemporary evolution of criticism away from legacy media towards independent outlets is making it more difficult to earn money from writing about theatre (see MacArthur et al.), it does loosen time constraints, expand potential word counts, and open up opportunities and capacity for well-researched critical writing. 

Crucially, Goal Three works in synergy with Goal One: Diversifying who practices theatre criticism will increase the likelihood that culturally-specific productions will receive a competent critical response.

Goal Four: Expansion Beyond the Review Form

The Kamloopa creative team’s request for love letters as opposed to written reviews resonates with the final goal of equitable theatre criticism: a wider understanding and practice of what counts as a valid critical response to theatre. As Mihaylova has argued, the centrality of the written review form in the modern critical field reflects a value system in which written text, connected to traditionally masculine qualities such as rationality, is valued over embodied experiences, associated with traditionally feminine qualities including emotionality (256). Responding to the complex and layered art form that is live performance solely through the written word introduces limitations “that have rarely been addressed” (Mihaylova 264). Scholars including Edward Said and Nirwal Pumar have exposed the ways in which Western modernity was constructed around the opposition between “the fully human, individual, white male subject” and “the irrational woman, and the wild, uncivilized non-white figure” (Almeida 81). The Kamloopa team challenged the myth of objectivity by actively soliciting responses to their production, not stipulating that the responders have distance from the show nor its makers; and, by foregrounding love in their call for responses, unapologetically leaned into traditionally feminine and racialized qualities which have been previously relegated to the sidelines of modern critical practice.

It is with these histories and legacies in mind that some contemporary theatre critics are exploring forms of response communicated via dance, music, song, poetry, visual art, video essay, or even another work of theatre. Rather than following the written review structure of description, analysis, and evaluation, these forms move toward a more relational approach such as outlined by McEvoy above. Expanding the definition of a valid critical response acknowledges that there are people with important critical perspectives for whom writing a written review may be a barrier. For instance, neurodivergence, lack of access to specific training, or simply a preference for another, non-written medium could all affect a person’s capacity to craft a traditional review.

Two Canada-based equitable criticism initiatives demonstrated the potential of opening up responses to theatre beyond the traditional review form. Seeding the Future invited 21 Black Canadian post-secondary students to create responses to the digital play anthology 21 Black Futures produced by Obsidian Theatre and CBC Arts; and in Taking on the World, eight emerging IBPOC artists created responses to Soulpepper Theatre’s Around the World in Eighty Plays audio drama series.[7] In both instances, the word “criticism” was not used in the calls for participation; rather, the invitation was to offer a response to a given performance. This invitation

“embolden[ed] nearly all participants to move beyond text-based models of criticism and offer responses that were performative, embodied, and innovative. Expanding the bounds of traditional criticism, participants foregrounded their identities and interpretative capacities, and many brought their skills and competencies as performers to bear on their work” (Fricker and MacArthur 23).

For example, Kemi King fashioned her Taking on the World response to Soulpepper’s audio drama version of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman as a YouTube video charting her writing process, including images of her screen as she types and deletes text, a voice-over narrating her thought process, and eventual audio of a phone call in which King asks her Nigerian mother to explain the play’s cultural context (King; MacArthur “Conversations” 5). Rhiannon Hoover’s Seeding the Future response to Cherissa Richards’ postapocalyptic play Omega Child is a video of Hoover performing a dance outside in a snowy landscape, with voice-over text articulating a message of resilience and hope about cleaning up “the mess” left by those who came before (Hoover; Fricker and MacArthur 23). Such responses “blurred the lines between art and criticism” (MacArthur “Conversations” 6); challenged conventions of supposed objectivity in reviewing by foregrounding the responders’ identities and cultural and disciplinary backgrounds; and in the case of King’s response, underlined the importance of cultural competence and potential of dialogism in criticism.

A production still from Rhiannon Hoover’s creative dance-response to Omega Child, one of the short digital plays in 21 Black Futures, as part of the Seeding the Future initiative.
The Future of Equitable Theatre Criticism

While, as noted previously, questions have been asked for decades about the capacity of modern theatre criticism to engage with work by minoritized artists, the current surge of interest in equitable theatre criticism is still in its infancy. Many of the initiatives mentioned above took place in the four years preceding the writing of this article. There has been no linear march of progress toward increased equity in the field, but rather a push and pull between those advocating for change and those who would prefer to maintain the status quo.

Even as theatre professionals grow more vocal in their resistance to culturally insensitive criticism, white establishments have continued to protect critics who have been taken to task for insensitive writing. The petition circulated by the Chicago Theater Accountability Commission, for example, calling on theatres to reconsider giving free tickets to critics who write insensitive reviews, was signed by over 3,700 people; but both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times ran editorials supporting Hedy Weiss, whose review of Pass Over had sparked the petition (Snyder-Young 77-8). Programs such as the BIPOC Critics Lab and awards such as the Edward Medina Prize have only just begun to platform historically marginalized voices in the field, and have not yet proved their staying power. Beyond finite experiments such as Taking on the World and Seeding the Future,[8] no media outlets in Canada consistently commission creative responses in addition to other more established forms of theatre journalism such as reviews and features. It is still too soon to make claims about what lasting effects these initiatives may have on North American theatre criticism communities.

More research is needed into current demographics in North American theatre criticism. In 2021, MacArthur et al.’s research offered an encouraging snapshot of the Canadian theatre criticism landscape. Over half of the survey’s respondents identified as women, with an additional 5% identifying as neither men nor women. A little less than a quarter of participants identified as IBPOC, while almost a third identified as 2SLGBTQ+.[9] At the same time, MacArthur et al. note that Black and Indigenous critics in particular remained underrepresented in the field, and that diversity was not evenly distributed across the country (MacArthur et al. 468). Moreover, reviewers who work for traditional mainstream criticism platforms such as newspapers are more likely to self-identify as “male and as older” (462). The survey did not ask participants to identify as disabled, and did not offer a more detailed breakdown with regard to race, or queer and trans identities. Youareacritic.com offers a new opportunity to gather demographic data about those with an interest in criticism, and we are collecting such information which will allow evaluation of the course’s impact.

An interactive infographic from youareacritic.com that introduces critical histories from Brazil, Nigeria, Egypt, India, China, and Japan. When learners click on a highlighted country on the map, a pop-up box appears with a fact about theatre criticism history in that country. The goal of this graphic is to give learners a sense of how many rich and varied histories of theatre criticism exist outside the western world.

Intermission Magazine, which has collaborated on equitable theatre criticism initiatives including the IBPOC Critics Lab and Taking on the World, continues to diversify the demographics of its reviewers.[10] Over the most recent theatre season in 2023-24, 43% of the magazine’s reviewers were visibly IBPOC, a marked increase from 14% in 2022-23. With that said, the percentage of reviews written by IBPOC reviewers in 2023-24 was smaller than the percentage of IBPOC reviewers themselves, at 30%. Intermission’s attempts to diversify its team of reviewers clearly remains in process, as well as precarious given that this independent outlet does not yet have consistent funding.

If the practice and goals of equitable theatre criticism are to thrive, take root, and spread beyond North America, then more is needed: more research, more data, more courses, programs, awards, and opportunities, at every level of the field.


Endnotes

[1] Other variations on this acronym include DEDI (Decolonizing, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion), DEAI (Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion), and DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging).

[2] The particular history of colonialism in Canada led to the evolution of distinct linguistic, political, and juridical cultures in English- and French-speaking Canada, to the extent that Québec has been recognized as a distinct nation within Canada (CBC News). There is very little interaction between the Anglophone and Francophone theatrical sectors in the country. Given this, we reserve our observations and discussion to Anglophone criticism in this article.  

[3] Other racial equity initiatives include Boca Del Lupo theatre’s Stop Asian Hate Campaigns and culturebrew.art, a Canada-wide searchable database of Indigenous and racialized literary, media, performing, and visual arts professionals” (Visceral Visions). Several theatres in Canada have also begun to offer Black Out Night events for productions primarily intended for a Black audience, a practice originated by playwright Jeremy O. Harris for the 2019 Broadway run of Slave Play. The goal of Black Out Nights “is the purposeful creation of an environment in which an all-Black-identifying audience can experience and discuss an event in the performing arts, film, athletic, and cultural spaces – free from the white gaze” (Lynch; Slave Play Broadway).

[4] Equity-seeking groups “experience significant collective barriers in participating in society” (University of British Columbia). Related terms include equity-denied groups, equity-deserving groups, and Historically, Persistently or Systemically Marginalized (HPSM) groups.

[5] Two controversies around Chicago theatre criticism contributed to the concerns that Victor addressed by founding ReScripted. Two of the city’s most well-established critics, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune and Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times, who are white, negatively critiqued the Steppenwolf Theater for Young People’s 2015 production This Is Modern Art, which “utilized hip-hop aesthetics to argue for the artistic legitimacy of graffiti as a form” because it failed “to define graffiti purely as criminal vandalism” (Snyder-Young 69). A social media furore erupted within the Chicago and American theatre communities including artists involved in the show, with commentators arguing that Jones and Weiss displayed unacknowledged bias about the legitimacy of some forms of cultural expression over others. In 2017, Weiss critiqued Steppenwolf’s production of Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu, which depicts two young Black men “trapped on a purgatorial street corner” (Snyder-Young 74) and antagonized by a racist white policeman, as an inappropriate indictment of “all white cops” (Weiss, emphasis in original) and a “wrong-headed and self-defeating” (ibid.) critique of the contemporary U.S. as a police state. Partially formed in response to Weiss’s review, the Chicago Theater Accountability Commission, made up of five artists of colour, circulated a petition “asking the Chicago theater community to stop offering free tickets to reviewers who routinely review theater through a sexist and racist lens,” (Snyder-Young 76), including Weiss. See Lynch and MacArthur, Snyder-Young, and Tran “Review.”

[6] In Canada, the acronym is commonly styled IBPOC to recognize that Indigenous peoples inhabited the lands now known as Canada before others. Other Canadian criticism training initiatives include the Toronto Fringe’s New Young Reviewers program, active since 2018 (formerly called Teenjur); and Generator Toronto’s Performance Criticism Training Program in 2018.

[7] Karen Fricker, Carly Maga, and Marlis Schweitzer co-organized Seeding the Future, and Barry Freeman, Fricker, and Michelle MacArthur co-organized Taking on the World.

[8] Intermission Magazine published the Taking on the World responses; Seeding the Future participants published their responses on their own social media channels which were amplified by the organizations producing 21 Black Futures and the response initiative.

[9] The 2S at the beginning of the acronym stands for two-spirit, an umbrella term for diverse Indigenous gender, sexual, and spiritual identities in North America (Filice).

[10] The authors of this article both work for Intermission, Fricker as editorial advisor and Hanula-James as staff writer.

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*Karen Fricker is adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University (Ontario, Canada) and editorial advisor of Intermission Magazine. She has written about theatre in New York, Dublin, London, and Toronto, for outlets including the Toronto Star, The Irish Times, The Guardian, and Variety; and is the founding editor-in-chief of Irish Theatre Magazine (1998-2005). Her monograph The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global won the Canadian Association of Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book published in 2021-22. 

**Nathaniel Hanula-James (he/they) is a theatremaker whose work encompasses dramaturgy, playwriting, administration, and performance. Together with Karen Fricker and Jose Solís, he co-created youareacritic.com, an open source, free online introduction to equitable theatre criticism.  Nathaniel is a graduate of McGill University’s Drama and Theatre Studies program (B.A. 2016), the National Theatre School of Canada’s acting program (2019), and Humber College’s Arts Administration and Cultural Management program (2021).

Copyright © 2024 Karen Fricker and Nathaniel Hanula-James
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
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