In the summer of 2022, 3Views sent out a call for contributors. In our search for more voices, we began to talk about a lack of intergenerational perspectives in our work. That led us to ask, “where are the critics of color from the generation above us? And where are their elders?” We scanned the web, reached out to our mentors, spoke with colleagues across the field, and were fortunate enough to speak with three kind and brilliant Black critics of varying ages:
Jan Simpson (70s) – the critic behind the website Broadway & Me; host of the BroadwayRadio podcast “All the Drama”
Eric Deggans (50s) – NPR’s first full-time TV critic.
Regina Victor (20s) – an artist and critic; founder of Rescripted
Here’s how these three critics found their way to the field and what they see now. The interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
3Views: What were some early doors that opened for you in the field of cultural criticism?
For a brief period, before I was New York Bureau Chief at Time Magazine, I was a general assignment person in the art section of the magazine. Everyone else in the section was assigned a particular subject: TV, music, classical music, books, movies, and so on. I didn’t have a strict beat, so I could write and report on anything. That was my dream job. I told people I was going to die doing that job. In that position, I did a number of stories about theater, which has always been an interest of mine. And then for complicated reasons we could get into, but don't need to, I was named New York Bureau Chief. The new Managing Editor at the time would always ask the senior staff, "What’s your dream job?" And I would say, "Actually, my dream job was the job I had before this one." And he’d say, "No, we're not going back. What would you like to do next?" And I said, "Well, if I can't have that job, I'd love to run the section." A couple of weeks later, he named me the Arts Editor of the magazine. So, I did not take a normal path into arts criticism. I didn't study it in school, I didn't freelance my way into it, it happened in this really atypical way.
When you were enlisted to general assignment reporting, did you just learn on the job?
Exactly.
Who did you learn from? Were there friends you were absorbing information from at the time?
No. I didn't have a particular mentor. I didn't go to someone and say, “how do you do this?” For me, it was really learning by reading. The chorale of arts critics at Time were an excellent group — really, really strong. So I’d learn by reading their work, and the work of others.
I have also always been a very attentive learner. So if an editor made a change, I thought about why that change was made, and I learned from my mistakes.
What did it feel like to have those mistakes made in print?
The old editing process at Time insulated you from making big mistakes. It's not that I didn't make mistakes, but Time had a very layered editing process and things got smoothed out along the way. I might have been embarrassing myself to my editors and my colleagues, but I was not embarrassing myself to the general readership!
That's so lucky.
I know. It was a very different time and a very fortunate time for me.
What doors did you feel were closed, if any, at the time that you were pursuing arts criticism?
I did not think of myself as a critic. I thought of myself as a reporter, as a journalist — as someone who asked questions, gathered information, synthesized it, and then passed that information to my readers. I drifted into more critical writing through blogging. I was the editor on a Time story covering Julie Powell’s latest book and became really interested in what she did. [Julie] was just writing and putting it up on the internet. And I thought, maybe I should try that. And so I saw a lot of theater and started writing about it.
If people go back and look at my earliest posts, in 2007-2008, you’d see I was timider about my critical judgment. I was reporting on the experience, the audience response, what I had when I went out to eat after the show, that kind of thing. As the years went on that I became more confident in my own critical judgment.
What conditions made it possible for you to have a stable life in journalism and the theater?
When I left Time in 2008, I started teaching at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in its first year of operation. I did not go there to teach arts journalism — I was teaching basic reporting and writing skills. At some point, the guy who created the arts reporting program left, so they asked me if I was interested in teaching a course. I said yes and then within three or four years, the director of the program went on sabbatical, and I became the Acting Director. I made a lot of changes during that year. When the Director came back, the two of us co-directed the program. Then a couple of years after that, I became the sole director of the program.
I was doing my blogging all along, but it was, again, a side gig. It was my outlet — something I did because I enjoyed it. It became more serious when Simon Saltzman, who was then president of the Outer Critics Circle, came up to me at a show and asked, "Are you a critic? I see you at all of these shows and I was wondering if you would be interested in joining our organization." So I did. I joined the OCC.
When I first left Time, I took a weekend-long course in producing supported by the Broadway theater community. Composers, writers, directors, and producers came and led seminar sessions. Ted Chapin, who until 2021 was the President and Chief Creative Officer of The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization for 40 years, said in one of our seminars, "There are more ways to be involved in theater than producing." After the seminar, I wrote him a letter that essentially said, "I'd love to talk to you about the other ways to be part of this theater world, if I don't want to be a producer."
He and I went to lunch, and to make this very long story a little bit shorter, he nominated me to be on the advisory committee of the American Theater Wing, and I became a Tony voter. So now, I was voting as an OCC member and voting as a member of the American Theater Wing advisory committee. Howard Sherman, the then executive of the American Theater Wing, asked if I would host ATW’s regular semi-cable, semi-online television show. That give me a certain visibility and people started asking me if I would write for them.
Also, at some point in the eighties, I pitched a story to a publication called TheaterWeek, and John Harris, the editor, took a liking to my work and started giving me regular freelance jobs. These were reported stories, not cultural criticism. And — this is obviously still the case — theater journalism didn't pay a lot of money, so one of the ways that John would show you that he really valued you was by giving you a cover byline, and another way was by making you an Associate Editor. He did both for me.
So there were various ways that I was building visibility in the theater world. And there were not a lot of Black people in that world, that ecosystem, so I stood out.
How did that feel?
In a month, I am going to be 72 years old.* I come from a generation of people who were the first and onlys in lots and lots of spaces. So that was not a new experience for me. It just was not. It's weird because I think in a way it's more difficult now.
In what way?
Because I think the expectations are different. I remember being at something journalism-related. I can't remember exactly what the event was, but I remember that I was so impressed. There were like 4 or 5 Black people I didn’t know in a room of 50 or 60 people. I walked out thinking, “Wow, there are so many of us now!” And I overheard someone who was maybe 10 years younger walking out later saying, "Where are we? Why weren't there more of us there?" The expectations were just different.
Do you feel like that's happened fast?
Oh, goodness. No. No, it didn't happen fast.
Were there any other critics of color in your peer circles? Where are they now?
There weren't a lot of people that I knew who were doing criticism because there was more urgency around political coverage. I think they felt that writing about the arts was indulgent and that we should be writing about education, politics, healthcare, and about legal and social issues. There was certainly a really valid argument for that, so most of the Black and Brown artists and journalists that I knew were doing that kind of writing.
The few people that I ran across who were writing about arts or culture were at Black publications, like Essence Magazine, or at the online publication, TheGrio. There weren't people in mainstream literature until I came across Veronica Chambers.
Veronica is maybe 10 or 15 years younger than I am. And I'm not sure where she is now. She is a force of nature — she wrote lots of books and collaborated as a ghostwriter. She spent time as the Senior Associate Editor at Premiere Magazine, which was a publication that covered movies.
She worked with John Singleton, the director. And she worked at The New York Times for a while then she went to Newsweek as a Culture Critic. The last time I saw Veronica was around 2018 or 2019. She was at The New York Times, going into their archives, looking at their coverage of people of color, and trying to find ways to integrate what had been missing from the time.
They stopped doing the series during the pandemic, but occasionally they were doing these belated obituaries of significant African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, whose deaths had not been covered. They were writing obits sometimes a hundred years later.
I don't know why Veronica left her work writing about pop culture but she was a voice that I came across.
Oh, and of course, Margo Jefferson. It would be interesting to talk to her because in her tenure at The New York Times, she started as a Book Critic and then moved over to theater, but her time as a Theater Critic was short.
You may have heard about it but Columbia University had an arts journalism fellowship for a number of years where mid-career writers would come to Columbia for a year to work on a project. They would also have guest speakers come in. Margo — this gives you some ideas of the way the world worked — unbeknownst to me, Margo and I applied the same year. The head of the program took me to lunch to explain that they could not invite me because they were inviting her.
It never occurred to them that we were different people and that just because we were both Black women, they couldn't have had us both. It was a program that had about 10 fellows a year. So it wasn't like there were 2 spots or something like that. If you talk to the people at the Columbia, they may be able to tell you about other people in other years who went through that program. And then of course, there is the critics training program that they have every summer at the O'Neill Center that Chris Jones now runs. The only friend I had who went through that was a white guy, so I don't know what kind of representation they had.
Is there anything that you feel you want to talk about that I haven't asked about yet?
This is going to sound off-track, but I don't think it is. I was reporting a story for TheaterWeek, and I was interviewing Anne Cattaneo, who at the time was the Dramaturg for Lincoln Center.
Anne was talking about when she was at the Yale School of Drama she was seeing that classmates and people who were recent graduates were doing really new, fresh work. She was there with Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein and their peers. The critics were mainly middle-aged white men and they weren't getting what her friends and the people in her generation were saying through their work. She thought, “I'm going to switch over because there need to be critics like me who are conversant in the language of today.” I think for a very long time, there was not a critical mass of Black voices or brown voices, or to be honest, female voices, so that people who might have wanted to write and respond to that work were drawn to it.
I got to a point a few years ago, and I think I might even have written about it on the blog, where I was really, really tired of plays about young white hipsters having problems. It took a while for people to start bringing in different voices. I always think of art as being a conversation between the artists and the people who are receiving it. Both the general audience, but also the critics who are receiving it. It's a conversation. The artist is saying, “this!” The critic is saying, “this is what I heard” — it's a conversation. And if you don't feel as though you're being spoken to, then you're not as eager to respond.
At Sarah Lawrence College instead of calling our advisors, advisors, we they were called Dons. So everyone at Sarah Lawrence has a Don and my Don for three years was the short story writer, Grace Paley. I was really awed by Grace. A few years after she died, someone had completed a documentary on her. Unbeknownst to me, Grace had just started teaching at Sarah Lawrence the year before I arrived. She was talking about teaching at Sarah Lawrence and she said, “when I got there, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.” Everybody starts somewhere. You're learning by doing. You're learning by doing.
I found that particularly women feel — and it's understandable because women are often judged differently — but women feel as though we have to know everything before we can do it. Men don't feel that way. I remember being at meetings where a guy would say, the sun is blue and he would just make that assertion. Someone would say, well actually no, it's yellow. The guy would say, yeah, that's what I said. It's yellow. No, “excuse me.” No shame, no anything. Whereas if I were going to say the sun is yellow, I would have come to that meeting with so much research to back me up.
And so men, because they're judged differently, they just assert themselves. They make declarative statements. If they're wrong, they just — not all, but for the most part — they shrug it off and keep going. And people do make mistakes. So whereas if a younger female critic like Brittani** were to make what she considered to be a mistake, her go-to might be to say, "It's because I'm not good enough. It's because I don't know enough." And that's not so. It's a learning process.
*This interview was conducted in July of 2022.
**Brittani Samuel is a freelance critic and co-editor of 3Views
