Toby Zinman and her critics

When I first met Toby Zinman in 2006, three Philadelphia theater directors had recently mounted a campaign to have her fired as an Inquirer drama critic. They felt (surprise!) that her reviews had vilified their shows unfairly, and in keeping with a heavy-handed theatrical tradition that dates back to the Shubert brothers on Broadway at the turn of the 20th Century, they had responded in kind.

The angry directors launched a website where some 300 bloggers denounced Zinman as "a biased biting bitch," "a "big stupid head," "a boil on the beautiful ass of our community" and similar subtle witticisms of the sort you'd expect from modern-day disciples of Shakespeare, Noel Coward and Tom Stoppard. They took out newspaper ads suggesting, "If you hate Toby Zinman, you'll love this show!" Eventually the whole uproar was chronicled by Philadelphia Magazine under the headline, "The Bitch of Broad Street."

How should a journalist respond to such a campaign? Well, a seasoned pro instinctively understands several things:

— Just as you should never grind personal axes, you shouldn't take any criticism personally either.

— Never take an audience for granted. If people read your work and respond to it— favorably or not— that's cause for celebration.

— If you've been granted a pulpit from which to pronounce judgment before an audience of 400,000, it behooves you to acknowledge that you do indeed possess some power, and therefore when people angrily dissent from your judgments, it behooves you to smile graciously and let them vent.

First meeting

Thus I reacted to the "Bitch of Broad Street" campaign with envy. Zinman had somehow managed to attract the sort of attention that most journalists would kill for. So when I first met her at a theater performance that year, my first word was, "Congratulations!"

To my surprise, Zinman was not in a celebratory mood. She seemed genuinely upset that I had mentioned the controversy at all. "I'm very uncomfortable talking about this," was how I recall her ending the conversation.

Arts critics usually fall into one of three categories: journalists, academics and groupies. Toby Zinman, the Inquirer's current lead drama critic, defies such easy categorization, as her recent BSR interview with Nathan Skethway makes clear. (Click here.)

As Zinman describes her career, she never consciously set out to be either a professor or a critic; she just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and "one thing led to another."

Like Ann Landers

This refreshing refusal to be pigeonholed or to take herself too seriously is surely to her credit. In many respects Zinman is to drama criticism what the late advice columnist Ann Landers was to journalism.

Ann Landers (real name: Esther Lederer) lacked any journalistic training and often got into hot water because of her cluelessness about the fine points of journalistic ethics. But she instinctively grasped— more so than most journalists— the best traits of the profession: curiosity, candor, courage, common sense, an open mind, an ability to get to the point, and a facility for two-way communication.

The fact remains: A lack of formal grounding can cause great pain when you're suddenly thrown into the pool without it, as Zinman learned seven years ago.

Home alone, weeping

At that time, Zinman told Skethway, "I spent weeks walking around the house weeping." Part of the problem, of course, was that as a freelance writer (then and now) she lacked the level of institutional support that the Inquirer's full-time arts writers enjoy. (To be sure, freelancers enjoy the sort of freedom from institutional constraints that salaried journalists lack.) She also seems not to have appreciated, back then, that some of the targets of her barbs may have spent weeks walking around their houses weeping, too, after reading her reviews.

As an author of books worthy (in my unbiased judgment) of Thucydides and Gibbon but whose place in the Western literary canon has been questioned by critics who are unworthy to lick my boots, I sympathize with actors and directors. It's no easy thing to stand up on stage and subject yourself to an audience of yokels who fail to appreciate your hard work, not to mention your advanced degrees from prestigious drama schools. But then, it's no easy thing to be a yokel paying $50 or more to see a play that wastes a precious night of your life when you could be home watching re-runs of "Law and Order."

The bottom line in this debate must be the right of everyone— critics, directors, audiences— to communicate, wisely or foolishly, with whomever they please.

Free expression, for some

That said, I must point out, as I've done before in this space, that theater people seem dismayingly quick to claim the right of free expression exclusively for themselves.

The website of Brat Productions, an experimental troupe in Philadelphia, boasts that "Brat takes you out of your comfort zone. We cause a stir. Our shows get you talking about what you've just experienced."

That sounds very much like the mission of Broad Street Review. Yet two years ago, when I tried to provoke discussion by expressing some not-fully-thought-out ideas about rape, Brat responded by banning me from its productions.

"Plays can express all kinds of ideas," explained Brat's artistic director, Madi DiStefano, "but a journalist should do homework before making naive assumptions about why rapists rape and giving dangerous advice to readers." In other words: We have the right to experiment and make mistakes, but you don't.

(To be sure, around the same time, and for the same reason, Zinman stopped reviewing New York plays for Broad Street Review. This free-expression business does get complicated.)

Salvante's novel theory

Many theater producers have long subscribed to the (to me) loony notion that the media and the theater community are symbiotic partners, and consequently the media must serve theaters (presumably by posting reviews that will help sell tickets). Margie Salvante, the last director of the late lamented Philadelphia Theater Alliance, often advanced the bizarre theory that theater critics are accountable to the theaters we write about.

"How?" I asked Margie at our first (and only) meeting. "Do the theaters pay our salaries? Have they invested in our publications?"

"Well," she replied, "if it weren't for us, you wouldn't have anything to write about."

By this logic, crime reporters are accountable to the Mafia, political reporters are accountable to politicians, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are accountable to liberals, and gossip columnists are accountable to Lindsay Lohan and Donald Trump.

All of which is reason to give thanks that Toby Zinman survived her "Bitch of Broad Street" baptism in 2006 and developed a tougher skin in the process. The theaters she writes about are better off for her survival and personal growth too, even if few of them may admit it.♦


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