Dorothy Parker's 1920s theatre reviews 

She was an abysmal theater critic. Her review of plays like The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire illustrate this--the former is supposedly about "why those people in Ancient Greece were just like us except they wore togas," while for her the latter mistakenly tried to make great drama of its subject when it should have be a lighthearted comedy about "the war to regain the bathroom!" Parker was a gifted satirist and imminently quotable, but as a theater critic, she was staggeringly idiotic.

Updated On: 11/17/19 at 01:30 PM

GavestonPS said: "But I have to admit Parker's review of Katharine Hepburn--"She ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B."--still makes me chuckle every time I encounter it. (I agree, however, that Parker's remark is the epitome of bad critics who write to attract attention to themselves, not to seriously describe the work of art they witnessed.)"

I've quoted that line myself for years, Gaveston, so I was very surprised to find out recently that she never wrote it. She never reviewed 1933's The Lake (although she did see it) in which Hepburn gave the allegedly offending performance and Parker scholars have never found it in any of her published works. But it is so widely attributed to her they suspect she probably made the remark to friends in conversation.

She Runs the Gamut of Human Emotion from A to B. Dorothy Parker? Katharine Hepburn? Apocryphal?

They were influential enough to get her fired from Vanity Fair.

She could be quite savage. My favourite quotes from her reviews are:

"The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy."

"The only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimpole Street was the play."

Of Dame Edith Evans: "Edith looks like something that would eat her young."

Parker was brilliant. I've been reading and loving her reviews for years. People forget that, as scathing as she could be about plays and books she didn't like, she could be wonderfully enthusiastic about what she did like.