Theatre Critics Don’t Know Much About Their Subject. Why Is That OK?

“If you flip the dial around to reality and competition TV shows, you’ll see chefs and restaurant owners commenting on food, fashion designers sitting alongside fashion editors checking out new designs, interior designers celebrating the designs of others, famous models telling wannabe models how to model, etc. In the newspaper, you can read poets’ reviews of new books of poems, and major fiction writers describing the merits of the latest big novel. … Why aren’t more theater practitioners critics?”