Gail Burns of GailSez
Covering Berkshire Theatre Since 1997
By: Gail Burns and Charles Giuliano - 01/08/2012
Theatre critic Gail Burns launched GailSez in 1997.
At about the same time that she started writing theatre reviews for the North Adams Transcript in 1997 Gail Burns founded the on line website GailSez. Since moving to the Berkshires several years ago we have known her from brief encounters during press openings. From time to time we have exchanged e mails about shows we have reviewed and differences of opinion.
During the off season we recently found post Holiday time to engage in a dialogue about the craft of criticism. Other than print media it is not readily obvious why many on line writers are qualified as credible critics. Mostly we are critics because we say we are. It is a conundrum which is exacerbated by the precipitous demise of print media. As former readers find other ways to seek news, information and reviews the revenue and circulation of newspapers has eroded alarmingly. On the other hand anyone tweeting on a cell phone during a performance thinks of his or her self as a critic.
Charles Giuliano Were you a theatre major in college?
Gail Burns Yes and no. No one majors in anything at my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College. The only Bachelor's Degree the College grants is in Liberal Arts. But I have enough credits to claim a double major in both theatre and early childhood education. More important than what it says on my diploma though is the fact that I had the privilege of studying with the late Wilford Leach, former Artistic Director of La Mama ETC and two-time Tony winner for Best Direction of a Musical ("The Pirates of Penzance" in 1981 and "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" in 1986), and with Shirley Kaplan, one of the founders of the Paperbag Players. (I can still make just about any prop out of cardboard!) I also studied Shakespeare with Louis Barrilett, who gave me the most beautiful facsimile of the First Folio as a wedding gift.
CG Did you ever perform or have some non critical relationship with theatre?
GB When I was 14 I announced one day that I wanted to write a play. My mother gave me a yellow legal pad and a pen and said "Do it!" So I wrote and produced and directed and starred in my first play, along with whoever else I could con into appearing with me, in that summer of 1971. It was dreadful! I had NO idea what I was doing and I am the world's worst actress. But I loved it and so did the other kids, so every summer from 1971-1979 I wrote and produced and directed an original show in the tiny town of Cornwall, Connecticut. After the first the rest were all musicals, and yes, I wrote the music and lyrics too. And I'm happy to say that my ability as a playwright improved - and I developed the good sense to stop acting.
Even though I was working on a very small scale, we were performing for a paying audience and I learned everything about how to cast and design and direct and promote a show from this experience. I still direct and do PR, but my urge to write for the stage has died. I am frequently called upon to write songs for special occasions though - once they had me write the song for the birthday boy and then didn't invite me to the party! That sucked!
But from the time I was 14 I have been a serious student of the theatre - I think I had read all of the plays in the tiny drama section in my school library by the time I was 16, which was an odd and musty assortment of Victorian and Edwardian drama. We had wonderful Shakespeare teachers at my school, but a dismal drama department, so I studied theatre with Elinor Renfield (currently Chair of the Directing Department at The New School) and dance (ballet and modern) at the 92nd Street Y.
I was born and educated in Manhattan, and Broadway tickets were affordable back then - if I saved up my babysitting money I could buy a seat in the nosebleed section and see a show every week. There was also a wonderful company in walking distance of my home called the Light Opera of Manhattan (LOOM) which performed all 13 extant Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and student seats were only $5!!. My family was close friends with the head of the Theatre Development Fund (TDF) and he often got us in to see really great shows that were technically "sold out" - like Peter Brook's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
CG When and for what publications did you start your career as a critic?
GB I wrote my first review when I was sixteen for my school paper. So when I went to college I "offered my services" to the college rag as their critic. To prove my mad skills I went to a production of O'Neill's "A Long Day's Journey Into Night" and submitted the most dreadful piece of critical writing EVER!! I realized right then and there that I was waaaaaay too young and stupid to be a theatre critic (I was not even 20!) I thought "You have to be really old to be a theatre critic, maybe even 40!" And the year I turned 40 I was offered a paying job as the theatre critic for the North Adams Transcript.
The icing on cake came in the summer of 2010 when I was invited to address the annual conference of the American Theatre Critics Association at the Monte Cristo Cottage - Eugene O'Neill's childhood home. I told the story of that awful review and said that if the Cottage were suddenly struck by lightning or washed out into Long Island Sound by a tsunami we would all know that it was O'Neill exacting his revenge. But the Cottage is still standing!
I reviewed for the Transcript from 1997-2000 and for the Chatham Courier from 2001-2008. But I started GailSez shortly after I started reviewing in print, so the site represents the full body of my professional work. I have always considered the Web as my primary outlet - after all, a newspaper lines the cat pan the next day, but my Web reviews have never suffered that indignity!
CG Your comments on that first attempt at criticism as a twenty something was revealing. That plus the remark that it takes until at least forty to have the critical mass of experience to write theatre criticism.
What felt different when you started with the North Adams Transcript? From 1997 that would now make some 15 or so years of covering theatre in the Berkshires. During that time we assume that you saw and wrote about major changes for what were then struggling companies. Shakespeare & Company was then at The Mount. With Barrington in South County before taking up a permanent home in Pittsfield. Berkshire Theatre Festival was well established in Stockbridge and now merged with the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield. As a Williamstown resident of many years, having raised a family there, we assume an intimate relationship with a formative era of Williamstown Theatre Festival. You have been a witness to the frequent change of artistic directors (an average of three year contracts) at WTF in the past decade plus.
Can you give a sketch of the state of Berkshire theatre when you started writing in the late 1990s? Editors can make a great difference. Who were your working with and how did that shape your development? What did you view as your mandate as a critic? How did you relate to and feel responsible to the reader? Particularly when working with an editor? How did you define your job and contract with readers? What were you bringing to your seat in the theatre and how was that conveyed in what you were writing?
GB The Transcript hired me to cover Williamstown in 1992. At that time the three local papers – Eagle, Transcript, and Advocate - were independently owned and in competition with one another for readers and advertisers. The Transcript had an Arts Editor on staff, and she covered the WTF productions. I covered EVERYTHING ELSE in Williamstown (politics, schools, sewage, etc.), which included high school and college productions and anything else the AE didn't want to bother with. Remember that MoCA wasn't open yet, so the arts scene was quite different in the 1990s. At one point there were five theatre companies in Williamstown - the WTF, Starlight Stage Youth Theatre (which my family runs and therefore I have never covered), Calliope, Berkshire Ensemble Theatre (BETA), and Thespis/Williamstown Community Theatre - I would have to do a little digging to remind myself of when the latter three closed. The paper also sent me to cover high school and amateur theatre in the rest of their coverage area. They liked my work and that was how I was offered the solo theatre critic gig after the AE left.
Once I became the critic for The Transcript I expanded my coverage area, and theirs, to include the Theater Barn, Mac-Haydn, and StageWorks (which was in Kinderhook then) in Columbia County, and Oldcastle and Dorset in Bennington County, along with the WTF, BTF and Shakespeare & Company. Barrington Stage was a new group way down in Sheffield and I was discouraged from covering them, although I went ahead and did anyway.
After two seasons a new editor came on board at The Transcript and announced that he would be not only the Editor in Chief but also the theatre critic but that he would allow me to go back to covering just the community and college productions. Of course what he was proposing was an impossible load of work for one human and very insulting to me, so I quit. He only lasted about eighteen months at the paper, but by then the Transcript, Eagle and Banner were under the same ownership and so the element of competition had vanished. There were only two critical voices being heard - Jeff Borak at the Eagle and Ralph Hammann at The Advocate (that paper was acquired later).
I had GailSez up and running and so amateur groups were still happy to have me come and review, but the two major companies who stuck by me were Shakespeare & Company and the Mac-Haydn. They basically said "We like your style and we like your Web site and we want you to keep writing about us." No one had ever heard of an independent Web critic in 1999, and while it was much, much more difficult to build and maintain your own site back then, it was still obviously possible for anyone who knew HTML to put up a page and ask for press seats. I thought very carefully about how I would market myself and what I could offer beyond my reviews that would add value to GailSez. I was already doing calendar listings and decided to add audition notices and broaden my coverage area to the two hour driving radius from Williamstown that it is today.
But I was bothered that the mainstream media was only allowing two critical voices to be heard. I felt strongly that my readers should have access to every piece of information available on the Web about a given production, and so I started linking to other critics reviews and to preview articles and press releases. Eventually I started posting the releases too. And of course I linked back to the theatre Web sites so that people could see photos, buy tickets, get directions, etc. I wanted GailSez to be one-stop-shopping for people interested in attending or participating in theatre in this region. I would love it if I had the time and energy to do the wonderful interviews and preview articles that you and Larry (Murray of Berkshire on Stage) do, but there is only one of me and I have to earn a living too, so I have restricted my original writing just to reviewing and used links to my colleagues' work to fill in the rest.
As the years went by more and more theatres invited me to review their seasons. I never actively marketed myself as a critic, I always waited for the companies to invite me. I had a falling out with the PR director at the Berkshire Theatre Festival from 2001-2006, and Nicholas Martin suspended by press privileges at the WTF in 2010, but otherwise I have maintained cordial relations with more than a dozen theatres in Massachusetts, New York and Vermont for the past fifteen years. I've done it by working hard and being scrupulously professional. I know you guys tease me for never even taking a free canape from the buffet table on opening night, and I agree that having a complimentary nosh isn't actually going to compromise my objectivity, but in the beginning I never wanted to be perceived as just doing this to get free seats or eats. Since no one knew what to expect from a Web critic, I wanted to set the bar high and prove that I was worth the cost of a pair of press comps.