Hedy Weiss sits in her office fronted by a glass panel facing the Sun-Times newsroom and surrounded by three white walls. They are completely bare. On all three sides of wall are desks and a bookcase, which don’t all match. The bookcase is filled with books, but so are the desks—hundreds of them, stacked almost neatly in rows of twos and threes, with the frequent book facing forward or leaning on its compadres, looking to the corners of the ceiling. Almost all of the books are on art. Shakespeare. Dance. Reference. Weiss said she likes to fact check things that she often can’t find on the Web. She also admits that the books (both in her office and in her home) “will unquestionably be my undoing.” She has only been in her office space for a year. In ten years, one gets the feeling the stacks of books will come teetering down upon her, like the cartoon “Shoe,” which runs in a rival newspaper.

Her computer looks much like her office. She writes on an old I-Mac, one of the first of Apple’s colored boxes, with files and application icons strewn all over her desktop like a virtual game of 52 Pick-Up. There appears to be no order, and she doesn’t seem to have a connection to a network. The Sun-Times IT guys must love her. While she accepts technology, she doesn’t embrace it. As I set my digital recorder on the table for our interview, she remarks that she doesn’t trust recorders and relates a story Studs Terkel once told her of losing an interview on cassette tape with the then 90-year-old Martha Graham. She and Studs, Weiss says, still do it the old fashioned way: they take notes.

Hedy Weiss has been taking notes on theatre for the Chicago Sun-Times for over 20 years. And, she says, she loves her job.

“How can you do this job if you didn’t love it? It would be hell. If you hate theatre, it’s hell. And I know people who think it’s hellish.”

She loves sitting in dark rooms six to seven nights a week, watching people tell stories through theatre or dance. She loves watching actors doing it because they love their craft, not because they’ve been “bought in,” as many New York actors are. She loves following artists over a period of time, watching them grow. She thinks the people who do the work she reviews are “special spirits.

“I’m in awe of the dedication of the people who work here—not just of performers, but the people who work backstage, the people who design, the people who sew costumes in their bathrooms.

“They’re great idealists,” she says, then pauses for a second before adding, “They’re either demented or idealists.”

As a dancer in New York, Weiss experienced the demented idealism that makes people give up everything in order to perform. And, while she stuck with it until her late 20s, she was pleased at the happy accident that landed her in Chicago in 1980, when her then boyfriend moved here for a job. She got work at the Theater School at DePaul, teaching movement to actors and choreographing.

“I never thought I’d leave New York,” laughs Weiss, who had only planned to stay in Chicago for two years.

Much of what Weiss says about theatre and life in Chicago is in relation to theatre and life in New York, which doesn’t fare as well.

“The dance world [in New York] is such a crazy, insane world that you become insane and your sense of possibilities really shrink,” Weiss says. “You know you’re going to be living in this horrible apartment for the rest of your life and you can’t leave it because you can’t find another one that you can afford, and you don’t have a car and you’re totally trapped and your life starts to close in.

“If you’ve grown up in New York, you’re so beaten down.”

So she stayed in Chicago, she says, “because it was the land of opportunity.”

Weiss doesn’t think of herself as a “Chicago Critic.” She is still disconcerted by highway signs giving mileage north to Milwaukee, rather than Boston. She goes back to New York every once in a while to see theatre. Yet, she seems quite protective of Chicago theatre—mostly its actors and dancers, whom she thinks are among the best in the world.

In a recent review of Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s Much Ado About Nothing, Weiss noted that two of the Canadian actors cast in the production (which was directed by Marti Maraden of Canada’s Stratford Festival) could have easily been played—perhaps even played better—by Chicago actors.

And, when she sees theatre in New York, she says she is often disappointed.

 “Everybody is ‘acting out’” in New York. “They’re not acting with each other.” In Chicago, by contrast, “there really is a sense of connection among the actors.”

“What makes theatre so strong here is that we’re resistant to hype. It’s not about stars, it’s about people who like to go to the theatre; it’s a habit…it’s relatively easy to get a ticket…it’s something to do.”

While Weiss loves performers, she doesn’t write for them. She writes for the people who need something to do, something to take them out of the drumbeat of daily life—even for just a few minutes.

“My idea about reviewing comes back to one thing, which is that most people, even theatergoers, will not go to see the show.”

She has a point. Hedy Weiss doesn’t even have time to see all of the produced shows in Chicago. And critics and Jeff Committee members are pretty much the only people who even try.

She sees her reviews, then, as a translation of the experience of going to a show, a vessel through which those interested in theatre can have a vicarious experience.

“Of course,” she says, “it comes with a judgment or attitude.”

hose who’ve been around Chicago theatre for any length of time know that Hedy Weiss has never been shy about expressing her judgment and attitude. She once wrote that men in drag are always funny, but women in drag are never funny—eliciting the ire or mirth of much of Chicago’s gay community.

In the mid-90s, Weiss wrote a tabloid page long manifesto calling the artistic programming of the Goodman into question, and intimating that artistic director Robert Falls should resign. This was a couple of seasons before Death of a Salesman rejuvenated the theatre and ended up winning Falls a Tony for best direction of its New York revival.

Was she wrong? Does she regret it?

“I didn’t call for his resignation,” she answers. “I said that somebody should be paying attention there. It’s good to challenge somebody who’s entrenched.”

Yet for all of the Goodman’s ensuing success, Weiss still wonders what the theatre is doing.

“It’s a complicated place, they have a lot of missions. I think they’re in a perpetual identity crisis on some level.”

She still questions some of the Goodman’s choices (“Purlie? Did they really need Purlie?”), and she has to reach all the way back to Falls’ first season in 1986 to pick out stand-out works (like Galileo and the Frank Galati-directed She Always Said, Pablo), the likes of which she doesn’t see anymore.

She also wonders why the Goodman is not taking advantage of its status as one of the largest regional theatres in the U.S.

“Why aren’t they getting the first plays of really great playwrights, if they’re the top regional theatre in the country?”

She dismisses the world premiere of August Wilson’s King Hedley II (which launched the new Goodman Theatre space) as not one of Wilson’s best plays. And she says The Light in the Piazza, which the Goodman co-produced in association with Seattle Rep, “was basically a pit stop” for the Goodman.

“I just think they send out very mixed messages in their programming. They’re the top regional theatre, but they also want to be a commercial success and they kind of always have their eye on New York. On the other hand, they take different roads from Steppenwolf, but you kind of know there’s some kind of edgy thing between them.”

Weiss has cautious praise for Steppenwolf, whose current season of all new works she considers “bold.” She thinks that Steppenwolf’s Arts Exchange programming for kids is some of the best work they do.

Who or what else does Weiss like about theatre?

“I love Beckett. He makes me laugh. I don’t think he’s absurdist, I think he’s realistic.

“I love TimeLine’s work; there’s something about it I think is so smart. I don’t always agree with every choice, but I think they do great work.

“I still think about the adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days that Lifeline did [in 2002], which was absolutely charming.

“I think Congo Square and Pegasus Players did absolutely brilliant productions of August Wilson plays [Seven Guitars and Two Trains Running, respectively]—far better than the ones that were done here earlier or on Broadway. They were real and with a certain freshness and a kind of relaxed quality that was just wonderful.”

She gives Lookingglass credit for “always trying new things,” but she doesn’t always like what they come up with.

“I think BJ [Jones] has worked a small miracle up at Northlight and the level of work there over the last several years has been really high.

“I find Caryl Churchill very interesting.

“Stoppard is great to read. I’m not sure if he always plays brilliantly, although sometimes he can really get to your heart. Sometimes.

“Mamet—on occasion—I can be charmed—not always.

“I used to love Sam Shepard, I love him less and less.

 “I’m not a big fan of Paula Vogel, although Next did an interesting job [with The Long Christmas Ride Home], and I think Next is actually an interesting theatre.”

What bothers her most?

“I hate simplistic politics, I hate being lectured at.

“I’m sick to death of political correctness.”

ome might find that ironic. The controversies Hedy Weiss has found herself the center of lately mostly involve the notion of political correctness. But her critics point out that it is Weiss who is adhering to dogma, not them.

She disagrees.

Clearly, though, Hedy Weiss has a bias. Most of her controversial reviews revolve around the theme of Judaism. Weiss is Jewish, and a playwright or theatre company might be forgiven for having trepidation about producing anything that is anti-Israel, or seemingly anti-Jewish—or that even has characters in pin-striped pajamas.

The playwright Tony Kushner was not pleased with Weiss’ May 2004 review of his autobiographical musical Caroline, or Change, in which she wrote that “Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots.” Kushner responded with a scathing letter to the Sun-Times.

Weiss saw similar anti-Semitic themes in a piece that New York’s Pilobolus Dance Theatre brought here in November of 2000. She wrote that the dance troupe’s production of a new work called Davenen was “so offensive…that I left the theatre in a rage.

“The sum total of the work,” she wrote, “is to create a group of brutes, perverts and demented worshippers. This is hardly mitigated by the fact the men wear striped pajamalike pants suggestive of a concentration camp.”

(The creators of the piece were so taken aback that they added program notes for the New York production, explaining that the dance was a meditation on prayer, starting with Klezmer music and adding in “The Joys of Yiddish,” the “Cabala” and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Satan in Goray.”)

Weiss also saw concentration camp themes in Wicked, which prompted a letter from the show’s director, Joe Mantello.

And, a couple of weeks ago, Weiss’ review of Somebody Foreign at City Lit cast the play as a celebration of Hamas, the terrorist group that recently won the Palestinian elections. She didn’t give any examples from the play to support her assertion.

Weiss is clearly bothered by Kushner’s and Mantello’s vociferous criticisms. When I bring them up, she let’s out a gasp of “Oh, God,” and braces herself for my questions. Yet she stands by her reviews.

“The truth is that book [for Wicked] really was a political allegory of the rise of Fascism,” she points out. “Either you mean what you’re saying in the show or you don’t mean it.”

Weiss also feels that Mantello’s response—perhaps because he knew it would get her goat—flirted with anti-Semitism. He referred to Weiss as “showing all the critical acumen of a Brandeis University sophomore.” Are we to infer that the critical powers of Brandeis students are less than those of students at Harvard or Wesleyan or Northwestern? Why would he choose the one institution that is thought of as a “Jewish school?”

Weiss’ argument with Kushner started a couple of years before Caroline, when the playwright was on a panel at Northwestern in conjunction with Steppenwolf’s production of Homebody/Kabul in 2002. Kushner, who has both declared his love of Israel and called the founding of the state of Israel “ethnic cleansing,” departed from the themes of his play and, Weiss says, “got on a soapbox” about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Weiss says the rest of the panel, which included Frank Galati and Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey, was silent, as was the audience of students and theatre fans.

“Nobody offered an opposite view and I thought it was pretty astonishing for an intellectual situation where there was no countervailing view,” Weiss says.

To be fair, she didn’t offer one that night, either, although she and Kushner had a phone conversation about it later. Mike Miner quoted Martha Lavey in The Reader as saying some people walked out during Kushner’s anti-Israel statements. And Chris Jones wrote a piece in The Tribune quoting what Kushner had said and noting that the audience was clearly uncomfortable. Weiss wrote a short column that itself reads much like a soapbox, arguing with Kushner’s assertions, though she never told readers what Kushner had actually said.

Then a year later, she saw Caroline, or Change. Weiss says she “felt hugely uncomfortable during the scenes that had to do with the Jewish family. Everything bad was his Jewish family and everything good was the Black world beyond.”

So Weiss could have criticized the play for having a too black-and-white, too easily categorized view of the world. But self-loathing?

“That, to me, suggests a certain self-loathing,” she says. “Do you have to denigrate one at the same time you ennoble the other?”

Kushner pointed out that Weiss was the only critic who wrote that Caroline was anti-Semitic. And the main assertion in both Kushner’s and Mantello’s letters is that Weiss seems unable or unwilling to back her criticisms up with examples from the play. That, perhaps, is the crux of the problem.

Leon Weseltier, writing in The New Republic about Kushner’s screenplay for Munich, says that the playwright “is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out.” Hedy Weiss is a critic who never speaks, but only writes out. When she makes an accusation that something is anti-Semitic or pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel, she rarely tells us why she thinks that. If she gave examples, we might disagree, but we could see where she’s coming from. But Weiss prefers to give readers her conclusions, rather than lead us to our own.

Despite her critics, Weiss won’t back down from any of her reviews. And she’s not likely to anytime soon. Hedy Weiss is so entrenched at the Sun-Times that even when she took a year off in the mid-90s to live in Europe, her job was held for her when she got back. She is one of the paper’s star columnists, and editor in chief John Barron was the entertainment editor for many years and has stood behind her, even when he has publicly disagreed with her (as he did her Wicked review). Hedy Weiss is their top theatre and dance reporter, period.

One gets the feeling, also, that Weiss enjoys taking on movers from the New York theatre scene. After years of being battered around by the confrontational culture of arts in New York, she seems satisfied to be able to turn it around and finally tell them what she thinks—and she will be doing it for a long time to come.