NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Nothing much about the process of reviewing theater had yet changed by March 7, when I set out to see the musical “Six” on Broadway. My husband and I braved the subway from Brooklyn to a jammed Times Square, squeezed our way into the Brooks Atkinson Theater, hugged friends, took our seats and inhaled the atmosphere of joy and anxiety that perfumes every show about to open.

Three days later, when I caught up with “Darling Grenadine” at the Roundabout Underground, the anxiety was of a different kind. Hugs were replaced by elbow bumps — followed by hand washings. Copious coughing during the show was nervously monitored. The packed elevator ride back to street level from the deeply subterranean theater felt like an hour in a petri dish.

And then: pfft. I did not see another show — the old-fashioned, in-person kind — until late October, when I ventured out to a Neil LaBute play in New Paltz, New York. Even then, it was a play without live actors.

There’s a lot that theater lovers, critics among them, have had to adjust to these past nine months. Among the adjustments for me, some are not unpleasant; I no longer have to wear shoes to shows. I’ve saved a fortune in subway fare.

I do still maintain some minor discipline. I neither eat snacks nor check my phone while watching. I even observe a version of my beforetimes five-block rule, not commenting on what I’ve seen until I’m far enough away, which now means the kitchen.




And though I try to hold what I see to the same standards I would have applied were I part of an audience of 1,000 instead of just one, that has sometimes proved difficult. The ease of access that allows me to watch anything by anyone from anywhere — a boon, surely, in getting to know a wider range of artists and work — also admits a great deal that is glitchy, gawky and amateurish.

But at a time when an anonymous newcomer can turn out theater faster than an institutional battleship can, it’s impossible not to feel grateful for even shaggy efforts to keep the art form alive. Consciously or not, I wind up grading on a curve that acknowledges effort from former outsiders.

Or perhaps I’m the one being graded on a curve. As I learn to approach this new material with a new eye, I’ve slowly realized that as much as the pandemic has changed what it means to be a theater critic, it has also changed what I as a critic want and need from theater. When the experience of drama is remote in both senses, when you can no longer feel the damp of an audience quietly weeping together or feel on your skin the report of its fusillades of laughter, something has to replace what’s missing.

For me that something is intensity. Nicely observed little dramas I used to love (and will again) right now seem like beasts of a different era. Musicals without big feelings and the songs to match no longer move me. Intellectual doodles I want to swat away like gnats.

The pandemic and its concurrent plagues, having forced us to absorb a great deal of grief and fury, require a different kind of a theater today: a more concentrated theater, boiled to its essence. So give me the wailers and screamers, on the moor or in the living room. Give me the geniuses of self-amplification and the tragedians of even small things — the ones who understand, as we now do, that every minute matters.

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