Edge of the aisle seat: the case of the theatre critic who becomes a sleuth

My first professional theatre review appeared in print in the spring of 1998. An editor at the Village Voice had assigned me a play called Nog, an unseasonal comedy about a young man coming out to his family. I don’t remember much about it, except that I spent roughly 20 of my 200 allotted words writing that the lead actor was so wooden, he could have been a body-double for the Christmas tree. I also remember that the byline misspelled my name three different ways.

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I was 21 then, still a college student, wanting to show off. It must have worked. That assignment led to another and then another and a few months later, just after graduation, I had a job more or less secured as a copy editor and part-time theatre critic. I continued reviewing all through my 20s and 30s, through marriage, childbirth and completing a PhD, also in theatre. Four or five nights a week, though less once the children were born, I would sink down into an aisle seat in some theatre, on Broadway or far from it, and settle myself with notebook, programme and pen. And then, as the lights fell, I would begin to write. The notes were often impenetrable (my handwriting, even in decent lighting, is appalling), but each line was a record of what I’d felt, thought and noticed.

Those thousands of nights and millions of scribbled words informed Here in the Dark, my novel of psychological suspense. It follows Vivian Parry, a young theatre critic at a New York City magazine. When an acquaintance goes missing, Vivian puts down her pen and finds herself applying her critical faculties – observation, analysis, suspension of disbelief – to a real-life drama.

I don’t know that a critic makes a great hero. I don’t even know that a critic makes a good person. There is something at least a little weird about spending so much of your life in dialogue with art that can’t see you, can’t hear you, can’t love you back. Most of the things I’ve learned about the world I’ve learned at some remove, watching other people pretend to experience them. Can this be entirely healthy?

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Likely not. Though I am grateful to have spent these decades in adjacency to so much art, to life distilled, it might have been better to have spent more of those nights at home. (I might still be married then.) But proximity to so many imagined lives and stories is valuable, too. A critic’s work is necessarily vicarious: feeling rather than doing, seeing rather than being. Still there is, at best, a sense of service and devotion that accompanies it. The critic can act as a conduit for all the people who can’t experience the art firsthand.

In creating Vivian, I imagined a troubled woman who makes very bad choices. The good ones, the safe ones, are not as interesting to write about. It’s possible to read her as someone who embodies the worst of critics – someone unfeeling and savage. But I like to think of her as someone who actually feels too much, someone so absorbed by a comedy or drama that the boundary between the play and the world dissolves entirely. And there are reasons for her savagery, but I won’t spoil them here.

Earlier this year, after about 25 years as a critic, I gave it up. A job as a reporter at the New York Times had opened up. (An American girl’s best friend? Health insurance.) I still go to the theatre, though less often. Some weeks I don’t go at all. I like to think that as a reporter I’m more present, more invested in our actual, physical world than in invented ones. And I don’t mind going to sleep earlier.

But there’s a part of me that misses the work, the routine, the impossible luxury of being asked to consider a work of art and then being paid for it. Nothing quite replaces that feeling of sitting, poised in the dark, waiting for the curtain to rise, not knowing what I might find on the other side.