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Los Angeleno David Rambo had been writing plays for many years, but in early 1999 he was not quite yet a playwright. He was a former New York actor and musical accompanist, a lifelong theatre enthusiast, and–professionally, at least–a real estate agent.

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And then, suddenly, Rambo hit his mark, debuting a thunderous human comedy called God’s Man in Texas in March of 1999, at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville (ATL). The play was a success, not only with audiences and with ATL’s influential then-artistic director, Jon Jory, but also with the city’s most prominent theatre reviewer, Judith Egerton at the Courier-Journal.

"I was really, really looking forward to her review," says Rambo now, illustrating the psychic need with which theatre artists often look to their notices. "I was desperate for some validation. I wanted someone to say 'this is a wonderful play.’"

Egerton didn’t go that far, but she did offer a mildly enthusiastic review, writing that God’s Man in Texas is "a sensitive, funny script" that "may not be groundbreaking theatre [but] holds together well." For Rambo, Egerton’s piece was proof positive that he had been launched–he was officially a real playwright.

"Here’s what it meant," Rambo recalls with a laugh. "It meant I didn’t have to sell real estate anymore."

Last issue, PerformInk considered the theoretical function of theatre writing, and theoretically, Egerton’s piece on God’s Man was a straightforward reaction to a play. It described the plot, lauded the "impressive" performances and "flashy staging," and suggested to Courier-Journal readers that they might want to go check it out.

In the real world, her review was much more. It was part of an economic engine, helping to propel Rambo’s work as a commercial enterprise–the play has had 11 subsequent productions since Humana. And like all reviews, it was also a dance of egos, affirming an artist’s sense of self-worth, while allowing the critic to further assert her own place in the Louisville theatrical community, her cleverness as a writer ("yes," she wrote of Rambo, "that’s his real name") and her analytical savvy.

The novelist and playwright Joe Meno is a sensitive creature, like all artists, and he took it to heart when Nick Green wrote an unflattering–and in Meno’s opinion, unduly pretentious–notice of his play Terror in June in the pages of the Chicago Reader.

"[Green] used this one line, he said something about 'hubris’ and 'solipsistic.’ He used those words in the same phrase, and a nerve in my head just got pinched," Meno recalls. "You’re writing a review, it’s not a dissertation. He was just being so smug, just the stereotypical snotty theatre critic. He could have had a monocle."

Confronted with a bad review, many theatre artists sulk or try to ignore it. Not Meno. He and a friend dressed up as Bugs Bunny and Winnie the Pooh and stormed the Reader offices, distributing fliers charging, among other things, that Green peed sitting down. "We spread these fliers out and then ran like sissies," Meno recalls, betraying a certain embarrassment at his act of reviewer reviewing. "Then I went and bragged about it to everyone."

Certainly, Meno’s reaction to Green’s reaction to Terror in June was one of a kind, but it amply demonstrates the flipside to Rambo’s satisfaction with his Courier-Journal write-up. To the same degree that a positive review can satisfy the psyche, a negative one can be heartbreaking.

"You know, people always tell artists 'don’t take it personally.’ But it’s your work!," says Judith Newmark, theatre reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Of course you take it personally. I know that people have feelings. I’m a mother."

Also conscious of his job’s emotional heft is Chicago’s Lawrence Bommer, who has occasionally strayed from his freelance career to work in the theatre–and not always to great reviews.

"I think the best critics…are the ones who’ve been involved in theatre in some capacity. They know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a bad review," he says with a sigh. "I sure do." Bommer recalls that when the negative review of one production came out, "It was like every Tribune delivery truck, one after the other, was running over my heart."

"Theatre artists are victims of ego," says Tim Corcoran, co-artistic director of New York’s 29th Street Repertory company. "They’re victims of always looking to what the next person says."

Inevitably, this shortsightedness often leads artists into the dark maw of denial. "The bad reviews they dismiss," says Corcoran of some of his fellow directors and actors. "Then the good reviews, it’s 'Look what they said about us! It was great!’"

In the long run, Rambo concludes, an artist has to don a certain psychic armor against outside opinions, even those from professional theatre writers, that might either devastate or create a false confidence. Being reviewed, he muses, "can be a little bit like sex with a stranger. It may be good for the moment, but over the long course of a life–the life of a play–it doesn’t mean all that much."

Their dancing is done on paper and not on stage, but theatre journalists are as much public performers as actors, which means they’ve got their own egos to worry about and their own status to protect. Usually this simply means working hard to be good at what they do. But it can also lead to "blurb whores" writing pithy, eminently quotable reviews so as to see their name in advertising copy; it can lead to reviewers following the pack, anxious not to be the one writer in town whose opinion diverges from the consensus.

And, most troubling from the point of view of the artists, it can lead to the land of the poison pen, wherein writers exercise cleverness, or even cruelty, at the expense of their subjects.

"There are people who come and beat up the children because it makes them feel like a legitimate critic," says Chicago director Shade Murray, suggesting that critics often seem to delight in mocking the inherent flaws of emerging companies. "There are certain things which are inevitable. You go to the back of a coffeehouse [for a show], and it’s going to have shitty lighting. You don’t have to write about that."

"I hate very nasty reviews. Bashing. I hate that," says Reader chief critic Albert Williams. "Cleverness of writing…is not what I’m looking for in a critic. Using an actor as a vehicle for your vicious but very clever wordplay? That doesn’t help anybody."

"Someone could like a play OK, it’s alright, maybe he’s on the fence about the play. But if there’s a really good tagline which makes [the show] sound like shit, but it’s just a great line, he’ll use it," says Corcoran. "I think that’s what it’s about. It is about words. A lot of them like to challenge themselves by writing things that are witty or whatever."

"I try hard to be sensitive in my criticism, and probably especially in my negative criticism, because I do understand how personal it is," says Damien Jacques, lead reviewer for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. "There is a line I try not to cross: not to be vicious, not to be nasty or just to turn a good phrase."

But Michael Sommers, who writes syndicated notices for the Newhouse News Service, isn’t so sure. "The hardest thing to review is something that’s dull," he says. "[Reacting to a show] is like bouncing on a trampoline, and sometimes there’s nothing to bounce back on. I’m paid to inform and entertain the reader, and sometimes the only way to do that is to make jokes."

Even for the most sensitive writers, joke-making is an occupational hazard, however, as far as Sommers is concerned, the occasional barb is simply part of his style as a writer. "That’s part of the joy of being a drama critic–we say the forbidden," he says, recalling a favorite saying. "If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me."

Then the Hippodrome State Theatre in central Florida brought in God’s Man in Texas 10 months after its Louisville debut, Arline Greer of the Gainesville Sun was there. And, according to the playwright at least, she made a little boo-boo.

"I was there on the opening night performance they reviewed, and in the review they said it ran three hours and 45 minutes," Rambo says. "The play ran two hours, 25 minutes, with a 15 minute intermission. They were just wrong." Aggressively wrong, no less–the headline in the Sun arts section read "Texas is ungodly long, but engrossing theatre."

According to Rambo, that bit of cheek (most likely on the part of the headline writer, not Greer, whose review didn’t mention length until the final paragraph) cost the production mightily. "Gainesville should have been a huge market for the play," Rambo says. "There was a lot of interest in it, I did something like eight radio interviews…but the review came out, and we just felt the phones get quiet. The play did good subscriber business and word of mouth, but it didn’t do what it could have done."

Exactly how much affect a review has on the box office is difficult to assess. It depends on who wrote the review and for which paper and on what day it appeared; it depends on the theatre’s reputation and subscriber base and season thus far. Corcoran says reviews are "real, extremely real," for his theatre’s receipts. On the other hand, Daniel Aukin, artistic director of New York’s Soho Rep, says that "For a theatre our size, it’s very hard to measure. We don’t look forward to a bad review, necessarily, but we have seen shows reviewed poorly do very well."

Even many reviewers aren’t so sure what level of affect they have. "People claim that I have power, but I’m not convinced of it," says Kevin Nance at Nashville’s largest paper, The Tennessean. Others are more convinced; after including a couple of "harsh" lines in a recent review of a major theatre, Nance says, "I got a very nasty note from a person in their office saying I had cost them tens of thousands of dollars…they claim that I have this tremendous affect on attendance."

If so, says Nance, "I don’t choose to think about it." Like most reviewers, he says that any possible affect on the theatre’s financial future "doesn’t make a difference in the way I do my job."

"I don’t discount the importance of a good review in a major newspaper," says Richard Christensen, who–as chief theatre critic for Chicago’s most widely read newspaper, the Tribune–ought to know. "As long as you’re not consciously aware of the fact that this review is going to make or break a show, and just go ahead and write the review, and tell it as accurately and truthfully as you can, then you’re OK."

Rambo and God’s Man were back in Florida in August of 2001, this time at the Studio Theatre in Sarasota, and with better fortunes. "The general audience is Jewish and urban and retired, and my play is about Southern Baptists in Houston, Tex.," Rambo says. "But the reviews were uniformly glowing. They did great, great business."

Delia Taylor, director of business and marketing at Washington, D.C.’s Source Theatre, is contemplating the affect that newspaper writers can have on small theatres–especially in "one-paper towns" like hers, where a single bad Washington Post review can be the end of the ballgame. She says "Performers and producers are realizing that they simply have to combat the single, sometimes damning voice. We’ve got to find a way around that."

Taylor names one route "around it," building subscriber bases and loyal followings, folks "who will come no matter what anybody says." This year, Chicago’s Breadline Theatre Group opted for a more radical solution, instituting a no-critics-allowed policy.

"We’d been paying attention to this the season prior, and we monitored it," says Breadline marketing director Heather Carpenter. "We found that a good review will marginally increase ticket sales, but a bad review will absolutely destroy you."

Carpenter hastens to add that Breadline doesn’t want to "slam critics or anything;" they just feel that as an emerging company specializing in new work, with no subscriber base to fall back on in the wake of a pan, they have too much to lose from being reviewed and not enough to gain. "It’s just not a business risk that we want to take."

Bommer defends the critic’s right to submit an unmitigated pan, even when it means wreaking the kind of financial havoc Carpenter describes. Critics must be willing to absolutely love something, he says–"to be as moved by the action that you’re seeing as any audience member"–and the opposite should be true as well. They have a responsibility, he figures, to protect the community from itself.

"The Board of Health mentality is what I use," Bommer explains. "Sometimes we treat bad plays as if they could infect an audience and we have to nail the doors shut on the place. Bad theatre drives out good theatre… Theatregoers who take a chance on an unknown show and hate it, and weren’t warned about it, will never take that chance again."

Christensen stresses that the power of a theatre reviewer can work in the opposite direction. "The ideal goal of a person who works in journalism is to encourage whatever community you’re covering to be at its best," he says. "If you were covering the state government you would…try to be a force for instigating good legislation and good legislators. In the theatre, it’s basically the same–you’re there to see what’s happening, and to encourage the best in that community."

Travel to any theatre community in the country, catch any young theatre artist when he or she is a bit tired, a bit grumpy, or a bit drunk, and here’s what he or she might say: "The critics here in [name of city] never give bad reviews to [name of prestigious theatre]! It’s not fair!"

They won’t say it for publication, of course, but it is a persistent dark suspicion that reviewers don’t pull punches with the big boys, either to protect the advertising revenue that rich theatres pump into their papers, or to protect their own status with the eminent local artists who work at such institutions.

Martha Lavey, artistic director at one of Chicago’s 500-pound gorillas, Steppenwolf Theatre, has certainly heard the accusation and understands its motivation.

"One of the beefs at younger companies is, 'Look, reviews matter a lot to us,’" Lavey says. "If a younger company gets a big, boffo review it can change the life of the company."

Lavey acknowledges that her theatre–along with, say, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre or New York’s Public–tends to pull a seemingly disproportionate number of "big, boffo reviews," in part from a "fundamental conservative impulse on the part of the critics," an "acknowledgment that those theatres…have certain resources to do certain things, [an] ability to attract the highest caliber artists, and that’s part of our cultural function in the city."

But, Lavey adds, skewed critical perception travels on a two-way street. "There are a lot of theatres that by virtue of their relatively smaller size and the handmade aesthetic can get away with murder. We’ve all read reviews where one of the critics goes mad for some production in a little tiny place, and we go, 'Whaaaa…?’"

Echoing several reviewers–like the Indianapolis Star’s Marion Gormel, who says she judges productions on "three levels of reviewing," based on the resources they have available–Newmark of the Post-Dispatch says that indeed, she’ll tend to be harder on St. Louis’s more established theatres, because "they can take it. If anything, we want to be gentler with people with fairly limited resources."

Often writers are more than "gentle" with small companies and become downright ecstatic; this tendency, say some observers, can be another way a journalist will try to buoy his or her status in the community. Shade Murray has noted such efforts to "deify" a given company or playwright, where "they think they’re the next Steppenwolf, or the playwright is going to be the next Mamet."

"Sometimes one can expect that it’s a function of the critic’s vanity," Lavey adds, this effort to be "the one who designates the next big thing."

And what about the allegation that punches are pulled to satisfy publisher’s concern with advertising dollars? Chicago’s writers, at least, say balderdash.

"In all the reviews I’ve written in Chicago, no one has ever put any pressure on me whatsoever to have any particular opinion," Chris Jones of Variety and the Tribune maintains. "The only pressure is in terms of space."

Chicago freelancer Andrew Patner agrees. "I have absolutely no instructions from the Chicago Sun-Times other than [concerning] word count, and that I be accurate and that I be fair."

Richard Foreman, noted avant-gardist and the artistic director of New York’s Ontological-Hysterical Theatre, thinks that–all the thorny issues of ego and cash flow aside–the real problems with the critic/artist relationship lie outside both groups.

"Really, the problem isn’t with the critics, it’s with the people who read the critics," he says. "Even when I read a critic I know I don’t agree with, and he says that this play is good or bad…that play then exists in my unconscious as a good play or a bad play. We forget that it’s just one man’s opinion, positive or negative."

We forget that it’s one man’s (or one woman’s) opinion for the same reason the artists take their reviews so deeply to heart, the same reason that the journalists themselves can be so concerned about how their writing is perceived–because the darn things are in the newspaper, where thousands or millions of people will read them.

He thinks that newspapers should be required to "make equal space available" on the day a review runs to a second writer, one supplied by the show’s producer and unabashedly partisan to the play. That way, he figures, while the official critic is critical, the other writer can "try and tell people what was good about the play."

"The reader would make up his mind, based on how intelligent the reviews were, how well-written," Foreman concludes. "You would know it was written by the producer’s guy, but it would at least provide a little psychic balance."

Obviously, Foreman’s plan is a pipe dream, but is one with an honorable goal. In the real world, where so many egos and pocketbooks are at stake, balance is a hard thing to find.