Makers & Breakers

In 1935, disgusted with the custard softness of the Pulitzer awards for drama, Manhattan's play critics decided to make an annual award of their own. In the next three years they chose, as best U. S. play of the year, Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, Maxwell Anderson's High Tor, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

When the New York Drama Critics' Circle gathered last week to vote this year's award, Broadway knew the choice lay between Robert E. Sherwood's eloquent Abe Lincoln in Illinois (the favorite), Lillian Hellman's biting The Little Foxes. So violent was the partisanship on both sides that neither play could muster the twelve out of 15 votes necessary to win. After ten fruitless, disputatious ballots,* a weary Critics' Circle decided to make no award. Final score: The Little Foxes, 6 votes; Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 5; Clifford Odets' Rocket to the Moon, 2; William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands, 2.

Chiefly self-made experts who slid fortuitously into their roles, Broadway's critics wield a power shared by no like number of men in any other art.

Best-known among Broadway's newspaper critics (not including magazine critics such as Robert Benchley, George Jean Nathan, Joseph Wood Krutch, who are also members of the Critics' Circle):

Slight, bespectacled Brooks Atkinson (Times), a reserved, dryly humorous Yankee who writes books on travel and Thoreau. As the Times's critic, he has by far the greatest single influence on box office. Cultivated, impishly able to carve a "turkey" with the best of them, he is now & then a sucker for high-toned emptiness, sometimes recoils from the sweaty and disagreeable. His perfect dish: Our Town.

Moonfaced, blue-shirted Richard Watts Jr. (Herald Tribune), was formerly the H. T's cinema critic. Boyish (Broadway's loudest heigh-hoer of good-looking actresses), he is also thoughtful (Broadway's briskest champion of social-minded plays). Often acute, Watts chiefly errs in being too rhapsodic about what he likes.

Tall, dashing John Anderson (Journal & American) is Broadway's supreme critic of bad plays, with a great gift for wise cracking down on them. ("[Jeremiah] may be entered ... as prophet and loss"; "Twenty years is a long time, except be tween wars.") Anderson was No. 1 Hellza-poppin-hater. Though murderous with fanciness and fake, he is sometimes too clever and cynical at the expense of a serious play.

Tall, curly-haired John Mason Brown (Post) is, at 38, the youngest of the newspaper critics. Probably the ablest all-round of the lot, he combines journalistic dash ("Most Hamlets look like the original interior decorator") with analytical skill. With Anderson, he has the highest critical boiling point; brought in a plausible minority report on Abe Lincoln in Illinois. He lectures far & wide, has led Variety's boxscore for best-guessing hits and flops five times in the last nine years.

Kindly, near-sighted Burns Mantle (News) is, at 65, the oldest of the news paper critics. Nationally known for his annual The Best Plays of 19--, he is often sound, almost always dull. His best advertisement is his trick of rating plays by stars. Tops (* * * *) he gave this season only to the revived Outward Bound.

Slight, professorial Richard Lockridge (Sun) is intelligent, fluent, sometimes astute, curiously colorless.

Small, thin Sidney B. Whipple (World-Telegram), Broadway's newest critic, wrote a life of Charles M. Schwab which will remain locked in a safe until Schwab dies. A polysyllabic Pollyanna, Whipple likes good clean fun, loves good clean seriousness, is Broadway's defender of the family, the fireside, the flag.

Against the critics' power, theatre people time & again react violently. (For years the Shuberts locked Walter Winchell out of their theatres, but once he sneaked in, wearing a beard; last year Playwright Jack Kirkland took a poke at Critic Watts.) But the critics' power, though great, is far from absolute. Biggest hits the theatre has known (Abie's Irish Rose, Tobacco Road, Hellzapoppin) were trampled to pieces by most reviewers. Greatest complaint of the general public is that critics are too hard on shows. Often the critics are too soft. In no other art would judges so often react so excitedly to the merely pleasant (On Borrowed Time), pathetic (My Heart's in the Highlands), patriotic (The American Way). The critics saluted in dithyrambic terms Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a timely and fervent chronicle but not much by way of drama. Words like "luminous," "magnificent," "masterpiece" are poured out of their mouths, the way a small boy pours syrup on wheatcakes.

Except when newspapers fold or merge, critics are seldom fired. Most of them hang on like Supreme Court Justices or, like Heywood Broun and Alexander Woollcott, gain enough reputation from their jobs to soar higher. Pay for critics (who get the summer off) is generally good, with John Anderson's $17,000 about tops. Notable fact about Broadway's daily reviewers: not one has ever had a play of his own produced on Broadway.

* Eleven were needed for the selection of High Tor for 1936-37.

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