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W W O M E N W H O WATC H A N D H AV E S O M E T H I N G TO S AY B Y J E N N I F E R K R A S I N S K I In late May, I attended an awards show that celebrates the excellence of women in the American theater, during which a well-known playwright gave a speech about how detrimental critics are to the artistic spirit. As a critic, a woman and a feminist (not necessarily in that order), I could barely contain my contempt for this precious, simple-minded show of rah-rah-ism, which lessened the dignity of the occasion by falling for the "us and them" divide between artists and critics. This is nothing new, of course, which is why it's time we understand ourselves not as cultural opponents, but as equal contributors to a continuum of ideas and aesthetics. There can be no real celebration of women innovators in the performing arts without a celebration of women innovators in performing arts criticism. It has been a discipline for some of the most forward-thinking and extraordinary female intellectuals in American letters, a platform for women to witness culture and say something about what they've seen. The first theater critic I read with relish was Mary McCarthy, having discovered in my college library a collection of the reviews she wrote between 1937 and 1962 for the left-wing journal Partisan Review, in a column titled "Theatre Chronicles." McCarthy didn't write theater criticism because she was interested in the dramatic arts; she wrote because she was, to the marrow, a critic. She was given a column because, to the good old Marxist "boys" who ran the Review, theater coverage was more or less deemed woman's work and therefore something she could do. The journal paid for her tickets to avoid the impression of criticism-as-promotion, and timeliness took a back seat to the time a writer should be given to write. 6 www.peakperfs.org

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