When longtimeWashington Post theater critic Peter Marks announced in December 2023 that he accepted a buyout and would be leaving the paper after more than 20 years, artists and audiences took to social media to thank him for his service to D.C.’s theater scene. Several months later, when the paper announced that it had selected Naveen Kumar, a New York-based critic, to fill the vacancy as a “frequent visitor to D.C.,” many of those same people met the decision with outrage (despite Marks having been similarly based in New York for the latter half of his tenure). How, they asked, could the critic for our hometown paper cover the region’s 89 professional theaters if he lived more than 200 miles away? Were there no local writers capable of filling the only remaining full-time theater critic position in the Washington metro area, itself one of the country’s last such staff positions?
For many, that wound remained unhealed when Kumar was one of the hundreds laid off by the Post on Feb. 4. The move decimated the paper’s arts and culture desks. The next day, Theatre Washington, the local industry’s advocacy organization, condemned the layoffs and joined a national chorus singing a requiem for arts coverage. More than a month has passed since the Post published a theater review, signaling that its apparatus for assigning and publishing criticism has been obliterated.
In the aftermath of the layoffs, I, a local theater critic for City Paper and DC Theater Arts, asked my readers and colleagues the same question I did when Marks left the Post in 2023: What are D.C. theaters and their administrators doing to foster the local critical ecosystem? The suggestions I put forth the first time—link to our work, use critics’ names, and help us and our outlets build trust among audiences seeking reliable voices—have still gone largely unheeded two years later…