So forgive me if these notes on the impact of arts coverage seem raw and personal. They are straight from the center of a heart that’s breaking at the thought of losing the career I’ve loved at a paper that, ever since I began reading it regularly nearly 40 years ago, has defined for me what the role of a critic and arts journalist could be for the community, and that also introduced me to the most exciting theatrical experiences of my formative years and beyond.
They are also from a brain that is exhausted from trying to figure out how to cover as much as possible as we (temporarily, I hope) cut down on the freelancers who have always been so vital to the breadth and depth and diversity of our work. Last year, the Reader published 311 theatre reviews. None of that happens without the many freelancers who bring their special knowledge, passion, and grit to covering work from all over the Chicago area.
This workplace crisis is happening at the same time that independent media and grassroots artists (the ones we’ve covered at the Reader since its birth in 1971) are more needed than ever. I don’t know that art or scrappy independent journalism can actually save us from fascism, but I do know that we need both to tell the stories that will, at a minimum, remind us that we’re not out of our minds to feel existential doom descending. (In terms of timing, Chicago’s Blank Theatre Company was right on the nose with their revival of Tony Kushner’s drama about the Weimar Republic, A Bright Room Called Day, in December.)
As Samuel Beckett once said, by way of explaining why there are so many great Irish poets, “When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.”
So here are some verses, if you will, to sing the song of the Reader and other alt-weeklies and the irreplaceable role they’ve played in fostering theatre communities across the nation. I hope they won’t be a swan song.
As I wrote in an essay for our 50th anniversary, “If a show fell, er, opened in Chicago and a Reader critic didn’t cover it, did it actually happen?” Our archives are a repository that helps keep alive this most ephemeral of art forms. By covering as much as possible, without regard to whether or not a company was “the next big thing” (we’ve never been big on the starmaker/starbreaker role for critics), we laid groundwork that, even if we don’t survive as a publication, should certainly serve as a blueprint for keeping the conversations among audiences, artists, and critic/journalists alive in whatever the times to come will look like.
The Reader freelancers are often practitioners as well as critics. The late Jack Helbig, who died suddenly last month (another reason for my raw heart, as I knew him for nearly 35 years), wrote librettos, including a collaboration with Urinetown composer Mark Hollmann. Many current Reader contributors, including Sheri Flanders and Wanjiku Kairu, perform sketch and improv around town. Our longtime award-winning dance writer, Irene Hsiao, also creates dance. I think that having that background gives their writing warmth and insight (not to mention an inside track on breaking stories).
Practitioners or not, the best Reader critics aren’t writing from the perspective of the “objective outsider” whose aim is to tell audiences what they should or should not see (boring!). They’re trying to help us all see how a piece comes together (or perhaps doesn’t) and where it fits in the cultural and civic landscape. Do that well, and audiences can make up their own damn minds about what’s worth their time and money.
The Reader has always covered the homegrown theatrical forms and events that helped define Chicago as a performance capital, whether by covering sketch and improv at iO, Second City, and Annoyance (Helbig was particularly good at it), “close-up” Chicago magic, the growth of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, or the groundbreaking Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival. (We covered a dozen shows from the latter this past year—far more than any other outlet, per their publicist.)
I can only hope that we’ve helped audiences gain a deeper appreciation of the role the city has played in fostering work beyond the next Broadway-bound playwright or Oscar-nominated actor. Every city has something unique in its theatrical landscape that should be celebrated and contextualized for its own time and the times to come. We’re not all sitting around waiting for the touring Broadway hit (though there’s nothing wrong with that!). Local, local, local should be the mantra for any theatre coverage that truly wants to reflect its community. And discovering that community means that neither audiences nor artists can rely solely on the four-star review from the daily paper to define the value of the work being created.
As former Reader theatre editor and George Jean Nathan prizewinner Albert Williams noted in a 2002 address to the American Theatre Critics Association, later reprinted in the Reader: “We don’t set up any artificial distinction between the ‘readers’ and the ‘artists,’ because we recognize that many of our readers are artists.” At the Reader, we trust our audiences, even if they hate what we write. (Believe me, I hear about it when they do.) I think that dovetails with what I’ve seen happening in theatres across the country in the last 15 or so years, where, as Dr. Jen Benoit-Bryan wrote for this series, they are recognizing a need to “meet audiences where they are.”
Something I’ve dipped my toe into is the idea that theatre coverage doesn’t need to come from theatre journalists. I recognize that so many shows reflect issues that can only benefit from reporters with subject-matter expertise writing about them. Dilpreet Raju, who specializes in writing on health, environment, and underserved communities, has written features for the Reader on theatre by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, plays on climate change, medical racism, and harm reduction via Narcan. Just as theatres bring in community activists and specialists in various subjects for both rehearsals and post-show panels, so too should arts coverage tap into the knowledge and insights of journalists who cover the issues that define our times.
I don’t know what will happen with the Reader (or our country) in the days to come. I do know that we need storytellers who aren’t afraid to be messy, raw, urgent, and immediate. We don’t need gatekeepers right now. We need people who will join together to crash the gates that maintain false systems of hierarchy, whether in media or theatre. I hope I’m around to share in that from my side of the aisle. Even if not, I hope that what the Reader has done over the past 50-plus years will still be a beacon for what comes next.
Kerry Reid (she/her) is the theatre and dance editor for the Chicago Reader.
