Scarywarhol said: "I don't think she's saying Brantley and Green are, like, mustache-twirlingly out to get women. But I also don't think it's unfair for her to say that they helped close the plays down, and I believe the implication is that there is a real lack of diversity in high-profile criticism. There is, and that is going to manifest in some way. And unless you believe that there is an objective measure of quality (that for some reason all these white guys seem to be the arbiters of), I can see why this would be upsetting.
For the record, I do think Brantley has shown a streak of genuine casual misogyny in his reviews lately. "
You've hit the nail on the head, I think. In our culture overall, stories about women that are told by women are often dismissed in some way, whether or not they are objectively "good." It's also telling that Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel are two of the most well-known and lauded playwrights of the 20th century, yet it's taken them until this year to be produced on Broadway. Lucas Hnath, on the other hand, is very young and his play was fast-tracked to a Broadway opening without any out-of-town or off-Broadway productions at all. I don't know that I've ever seen that happen with something written by a young and relatively inexperienced female writer. The fact is that our experiences as people overall influence our perceptions of the artistic work we see, and white men (both gay and straight) are very accustomed to seeing themselves represented onstage. When that doesn't exist in a piece of work, it's pretty easy to brush it off as inconsequential, whether or not they're critics and supposedly "objective." All of this is something you know, or begin to understand, if you're a woman-identifying artist working your way through this world, and it's even more palpable for queer women and women of color.
I found Brantley's review of Venus to be troubling, not because he didn't much like the production; that's his prerogative. What I found unsettling was the less-than-subtle racism and sexism that peeked through while writing a review of a play written by a black woman about real events which deliberately and unapologetically takes on these issues. This has been present in a lot of reviews he's written lately; he also lavished praise on the both sexist and racist Honeymoon in Vegas without once addressing its problematic elements, mostly because, it seems, he didn't notice or care.
All of this is to say that I think Vogel is right to call them out, and should continue to do so. There need to be more diverse voices in theatre criticism, and barring that, the people in those positions should maybe examine their own privilege and reevaluate how they look at the work of people who represent and write about marginalized communities.
