The environment for women theater critics just got even less welcoming. Newsday’s Linda Winer, the only female theater critic in the New York City area, will be leaving her post May 12. Per American Theatre, Winer announced her resignation in an email to her colleagues, writing: “I still love reviewing but chose not to go in Newsday’s inevitable new directions.”
Newsday’s resident theater critic since 1987, Winer is adamant that she is not retiring. “She’s instead stepping down in protest over (or surrender to) the apparent collective indifference of readers to arts criticism,” American Theatre details. “After nearly 50 years on the aisle, Winer made clear, groveling for clicks is not how she wants to spend the rest of her life.”
In an interview with American Theatre, Winer details her career as a critic and her resignation. Citing her desire to “do more satisfying writing,” she comments that she isn’t fond of contemporary online journalism. “There’s a lot of item listing, hot stuff, and New York City picks and flash and buzz, photo galleries and listicles, and all that,” Winer observes. “I have nothing but wonderful feelings about Newsday — have had for 30 years, and continue to have them. But newspapers have to go in a different direction, and I actually don’t want to go in that direction. I hope I’m still going to be able to do reviewing, but I don’t know.”
“I embrace the web,” she says. “I’m not saying that I don’t. I just didn’t want to become a list maker.”
The gender disparity amongst cultural critics likely also influenced Winer’s decision to leave Newsday. About a month ago, the New York Times replaced its retiring male co-chief theater critic with another male critic, Charles Isherwood. Last month, American Theatre interviewed Isherwood, writing: “A lot of folks were fervently hoping, and openly advocating, that the Times not make their next theatre critic another white man.” However, the source made this point with no mention of the lack of women critics in the field.
The irony was not lost on Winer. “My head began to spin off,” she says, taking American Theatre to task. “From 1980 until Elisabeth Vincentelli came on at New York Post in 2009, replacing Clive Barnes, I was the only female first-string critic in New York. I was the only woman at the New York Drama Critics Circle for years and years; I was like the mascot. Reading your piece, I felt that I had been erased.”
Despite the sad state for female theater critics in New York — which will be even sadder come May 12 — Winer does believe that women are making strides in the field. “I do think that in terms of women, things are getting better. But it’s slow, very slow,” she opines. But she’s not blind to the gender inequality: “There have been a lot of Off-Broadway critics who are women. The general feeling has been, ‘It’s arty, so the girls can do it.’ And there are a lot of female dance critics, because it’s men in tights and girls en pointe; that’s okay. But when it’s an $8 million musical on Broadway? That’s about money, so just send the men. That’s my theory, anyway.”
News of Winer’s departure comes less than a week after the Globe’s artistic director, Emma Rice, announced her plans to step down next year. “I chose to leave because, as important and beloved as the Globe is to me, the Board did not love and respect me back,” Rice wrote in an open letter. “They began to talk of a new set of rules that I did not sign up to and could not stand by.”
We hope that Winer finds another creatively-satisfying position — it’s always a disappointment when a confident female voice is silenced, especially one who openly acknowledges the rampant sexism in her profession. We’re also keeping our fingers crossed that Newsday is aware of the dearth of female critics in New York and hires another accomplished woman writer to succeed Winer.
