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Richard Christiansen: The Torchbearer
BY CARRIE L. KAUFMAN
"Come on in, the curtain goes up in 15 minutes."
That’s what Richard Christiansen wants to hear St. Peter say to him in heaven, if it exists.
That was the last of the "Inside the Actors Studio" questions asked of Christiansen in a videotaped interview at the Theatre Building Chicago a few weeks before he officially retired. The answers to the other "Actors Studio" questions?
Favorite word?: "Onward."
Least favorite word?: "Backward."
What turns him on?: "A feeling of elation over something that gives me a big kick. If I have a wonderful conversation with a friend or if I have a great dinner or if I see an absolutely transporting show, those are happy moments."
What turns him off?: "Attitude and mean spiritedness. One of the nice things about Chicago theatre is that there’s an amazing generosity of spirit."
What job other than yours would you like to try?: "I would like to have been enrolled in the noblest profession, which is teaching."
What job would you hate to have?: "Being a professional babysitter. Wouldn’t that be awful–you have to be so nice all the time."
But Richard Christiansen IS nice all the time. Consider his answer to the most telling of James Lipton’s questions.
What’s your favorite curse word?: "Curse word? You mean naughty word? Oh, the f-word, I think." He was told he could say it. "Oh, no," he replied, "Not in front of a lady."
Richard Christiansen was born August 1, 1931 and was exposed to theatre as a child. Like most people who end up working on the periphery of the stage, Christiansen dabbled in acting in high school, "knowing full well that I didn’t have the personality or the talent for working in theatre."
He reviewed his first show when he was 27. He will review his last (Goodman’s Long Days Journey Into Night on March 3) at the age of 70. Along the way he has exposed the world to Chicago theatre, and helped it grow with the attention he paid it.
Christiansen discovered theatre writing as a career because he was a good reporter. He worked for the Chicago Daily News writing obits, covering fires and accidents. He then spent a good deal of time on the re-write desk. There, he said, he "got a lot of stuff flung at [him]" and learned to write fast. He would sometimes have less than a half-hour to turn around a story.
He has carried those close deadlines throughout his entire career. If a show ends between 9:30 and 11 p.m., he generally has until midnight to do his reviews. That’s something his successor Michael Phillips, expressed surprise at during PerformInk’s live interview in January.
"A lot of theatre critics don’t do that anymore," says Christiansen. "I was brought up on deadlines in the days where newspapers had three or four editions a day and you had to bang out stories."
It was his need to bang out stories once he "infiltrated into the features department" that led him to what was to become off-Loop theatre.
"I was a young kid at the time, very hungry and eager to find things to write about," he says. In 1963, he became intrigued with the goings on at Hull House on Broadway, where a young man named Bob Sickenger had just been brought in from Philadelphia to produce plays.
"Instead of finding just a rather ambitious community effort, I walked into a performance that was fully professional in technique and presentation and which could stand a test of anybody’s viewing," he remembers. "It was still a hell of a show and it excited me and moved me."
It moved Actors Equity, too, who called his editor and asked why he was reviewing an amateur production.
His answer? "It worked well no matter what you called it–community or professional or whatever."
"That really opened the doors in my mind to the possibilities of Chicago theatre," he says. It’s when he became passionate about the theatre and knew that he was covering something that would have a huge impact.
Christiansen insists Sickenger’s productions would stand up to any small theatre production today. In fact, he says, the old Hull House shows might be superior to some of today’s fare.
"Some of the shows that you see among very very young theatres now are not, how shall I say, well-prepared in terms of technical matters," he says. "They are sometimes made up of a small group of actors, directors and designers who are just working together as a unit, so there’s not much breadth in casting, which Sickenger did have."
That’s not to say he hates ensemble. To the contrary, it is an ensemble that has given Richard Christiansen his most exciting nights in the theatre.
It is widely thought that Richard Christiansen nominated Steppenwolf for their Tony Award in 1985. He demurs, saying he doesn’t really remember. The troupe was only seven years old, but they had already made an impact on New York with transfers of True West, And a Nightingale Sang and Balm in Gilead.
Christiansen makes no bones about it. He thinks Steppenwolf in the 1980s was the best theatre ever to hit Chicago. Period. His body becomes animated when asked what it was about them that was so good.
"They were talented! Good grief! One exposure to them and you would say, 'Whew!’ They were terrific together…and they had a fierceness, a ferocity in performance that was magnetic."
Of the thousands of shows he has reviewed in his 43-year career, his favorite would be that first production of Balm in Gilead that Steppenwolf did at the old Hull House theatre space.
"That was Steppenwolf in its early stages at its absolute zenith," he says. "It was a true ensemble piece, it was a rediscovery of an American play by an important playwright, Lanford Wilson, and it was John Malkovich’s important directorial contribution to bring that all together."
"There are moments in it which are so transcendently beautiful…"
At this moment, we’ve lost Richard Christiansen. The man who said he doesn’t have a talent for acting has just used sense memory to transport himself back to the night in 1984, sitting in the Hull House theatre and watching Balm in Gilead for the first time.
"There’s a moment when Laurie Metcalf–who plays this poor young thing that comes to the big city and hangs out at this greasy spoon diner where the play is set–is talking about her once boyfriend who is an albino; I think it’s a monologue of about five, six, seven minutes. Just to sit there and watch and hear Laurie unspool that story, it just brought tears coming down your eyes–oh, boy, it was something."
As he talks, drops squirt out of his blue eyes and down his cheeks. He doesn’t seem to notice. Not while he’s still there, back in 1984 watching Metcalf talking to Glenn Hedley.
Then he slowly comes back to the reality of 2002 at the Theatre Building Chicago.
Wiping his eyes, he says: "The whole production of this was so well done, you actually were involved in the swirl of life in this diner."
The swirl of life Richard Christiansen was involved in was that of a big city reporter in the days when cities like Chicago had multiple newspapers with multiple editions. He worked for Herman Kogan (Rick’s dad) for the Daily News’ Panorama section before taking over as its editor in 1965. Panorama was a weekend section devoted not just to openings and reviews of shows but to "general cultural matters." It sounds a bit like a working man’s version of The New Yorker.
"We liked a little bit of history, we liked a little bit of humor, we liked a little bit of literature and fiction, poetry, drawings and so on," Christiansen says. Woody Allen, in town as a young stand-up comedian, wrote a piece for Panorama entitled "Me and Earnest Hemmingway." They ran polls long before polls were the main source of information for most newspapers. They had fun.
"One of the things you have to have in a newspaper is a little surprise," Christiansen says. "Panorama had little surprises."
When the Daily News folded in 1978, Christiansen and scores of other writers went to the Tribune, but Panorama didn’t go with them.
"The Daily News was always considered to be the 'writers newspaper’ and the Tribune 'the paper of record’," Christiansen says. While the writers may have had an influence, the entrenched editorial policy dictated what they wrote and, to an extent, how. And while Christiansen concedes to having discussions with Tribune editors about space, he says they never had anything he would term "battles."
He does, though, have a clear idea of how the theatre should be covered. He almost bristled at the suggestion made by Tribune editor Jim Warren that it be covered like an industry.
"It’s an industry but, more important, it’s a community–if you’re going to fulfill your duty and responsibility as a newspaper man, you’re going to have a desire to have that community do its best to look its best. It’s not a matter of reporting on interest returns on a product but as a community of individuals whose work you are interested in and committed to."
Ah, yes, that is Richard Christiansen’s legacy: commitment to the community he covered. Yet as soon as it is out of his mouth, he reverts back to his customary self-effacement. When asked to finish the sentence, "Oh, Richard Christiansen, he’s…" the retiring Tribune critic says simply: "He’s written for the newspapers for a certain amount of time, he’s enjoyed and loved his work."
He seems uncomfortable with the idea that he might have had anything to do with helping theatre in Chicago to become what it is; that his influence might, in fact, have been integral to the success of off-Loop theatre. "Well I always find that very flattering, and I know in those early days I did a lot of theatre that at that time was not considered viewable because it was outside the limits of conventional theatre," he says slowly, searching for the right words. "People have been very gracious and generous about saying that made a difference and I’m glad about that [but] I don’t think it takes any particular genius to determine good work.
"One of the things that helps is for somebody to come along with a flashlight and turn it on their dark corner and say, 'Oops, look what’s going on over there’," he says. "That’s what the reviews had, they had the ability to turn the light on."
A torchbearer. That’s as far as he will go. He has been a witness to a couple of generations of Chicago theatre. And he’s had a wonderful time.