Critics: The View from Women’s Wear

Martin Gottfried is not one of those New York drama critics who can doom a play with a wince of his pen. Nor can he do much to keep a show running. When he took his seat last week at the opening of Peter Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun (see THEATER), pseudo-savvy first-nighters did not point him out with a knowing air. He is, after all, no more than the man on the aisle for Women’s Wear Daily, trade paper to the women’s fashion industry. As such, he is an oft-forgotten member of that mystically powerful group, the drama critics of New York’s daily papers. But in any ranking, Gottfried belongs with the best.

So far this season, Gottfried has informed his readers that “Arlene Francis has the vocal range of a telephone dial tone,” that Pickwick’s “cast, whether it is singing, dancing, talking or just plain standing around, always seems to be just plain standing around,” and that the Danton’s Death lead, Alan Bergmann, “has a face that not even a fly could twitch—there is not an expression, a glance, an emotion that could cross it (not even, I suspect, a shadow).”

Panning, of course, is by far the easier of the critic’s two tasks. But when Gottfried finds something to praise, he can be almost lyrical in his delight. About last season’s Fiddler on the Roof, he wrote: “To see Zero Mostel dance is to see an angel in underwear. There is nobody else in the world who can shake a belly slowly.”

Frame of Reference. Small circulation (57,000) inevitably limits the impact of such observations, no matter how honed. But the Seventh Avenue community served by Gottfried and Women’s Wear makes up an important swatch of every theater audience; garment manufacturers are traditional theatergoers as well as busy entertainers of out-of-town buyers. And in the smart set that reads the paper for more than its fashion reports (among them: Pat Lawford, Rosalind Russell and Mrs. William Paley), the critic’s reputation has spread cross-country.

“I always write on the assumption that everyone reading me is brighter than I,” says Gottfried. “Often they are. Judging from the letters, I have some real hipsters in my audience.” Gottfried is something of a hipster himself. He got through two years of Columbia law school “before I realized I spent more time in Drama Professor Eric Bentley’s class than in law classes.” After that discovery, he quit school entirely and headed for San Francisco “to find out what was happening. That was the Kerouac era.” After a hitch in Army intelligence, he started his professional writing career in 1960, doubling as the off-Broadway man for Women’s Wear and a music critic for the Village Voice. Three years ago he left the Voice and, at 29, took on the top slot at Women’s Wear, thus becoming the youngest man ever elected to the New York Drama Critics’ Circle.

Back from the Brink. But for all his relative youth, Gottfried brings to his reviews a vital knowledge of the theater’s past and an alertness to the world around him. Says he: “I have to have the largest possible working frame of reference. I have to know about jazz, Viet Nam, what’s going on in Washington, the experimentation and adventures in tonality. If Baldwin or LeRoi Jones uses Harlem argot, I’ve got to know what it means.” His familiarity with music and dance enables him to discuss a musical from book through choreography and score with unusual expertise. “Music is my religion,” he explains. “Where others might go to church when they are on the brink. I just lock myself in a room and listen to Mahler. I don’t know how many times that has pulled me back.”

Such intensity takes its toll. Gottfried does not see anything blandly; he always has a reaction. “A play does physical things to me,” he says. “At an excruciatingly bad play, it is actually physically painful to remain in my seat. Even when I was a kid, as soon as I saw a play, I’d write a review on the program. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t pour all those feelings into a review.”