Poison Pen?

"I have to find a way to get out to Beverly," a friend of mine said after reading my glowing review of a West Side Story production at the North Shore Music Theatre last November.

You would think this would be music to a critic's ears, being presented with firsthand evidence that you've had a positive effect. Instead, I had visions of my friend sitting in the theater's notorious parking lot from hell for upward of a half-hour fretting about how little sleep he was going to get that night.

Like it or not, and most critics don't, people turn to theater critics more for consumer advice than for wit, wisdom, perspective, or any of the other lofty reasons that are taught in Criticism 101. As time and money become more scrunched, readers are less interested in how Samuel Beckett may have influenced David Mamet or whether August Wilson ever read Eugene O'Neill than whether they should shell out up to a hundred bucks for a theater ticket.

Recently, after a rave review resulted in a local theater's phone line ringing off the hook, the publicist from the theater asked me, "How do you sleep at night?" (The same question, no doubt, is on theater people's minds after a pan.)

What this publicist meant, I imagine, is "How do you live with the power of knowing that a rave review is going to mean the difference between success and failure for a production, maybe even for a season?"

The answer is learning to forget. Any good critic, like any good artist, has to forget the effect one's words are going to have. As a colleague of mine said, "You have to be ready to pan your grandmother when you sit down to write."

Forgetting the effect of one's actions may reinforce the idea of critics as moral lepers, one step up from serial killers and O. J. Simpson's lawyers. One copy editor, in fact, nicknamed me "Eddie the Shiv."

That, though, was in the days when I was a television critic, and I do have to admit that TV critics are even more carefree about what they write and how their words will be perceived. No amount of negative reviews is going to sink something that captures the popular imagination, be it Survivor or The Sopranos.

For the most part, people plying their trade in theater, particularly nonprofit theater, are neither knaves nor fools. That tends to keep the sarcasm-coated shiv sheathed nine times out of 10.

That should never mean pulling the punches, however. If you're floating on air, as I was after the current production of The Threepenny Opera at the New Repertory Theatre, then it's time to rave. If you're angry at dull agenda-driven theater, like Def Poetry Jam, which played at The Colonial, then it's time to let the daggers fly. If you have mixed feelings, that's what mixed reviews are for, even if they are the least satisfying to read or write.

Once you start thinking about how the actors or the directors or your grandmother are going to feel about what you write, your critical goose is cooked, at least until you put Grandma and friends out of your mind again. That means it's essential to keep an arm's-length distance from anyone in the cast or crew to whom you feel you can't give a negative review. (In practice, Grandma's play would be turned over to somebody else to review.)

The one compromise I've made with consumer criticism is that I do make a point of indicating higher up in a review what the verdict is going to be. But even that may have its unintended consequences. Perhaps if people had to read deeper into a review they wouldn't go off to a serious play like Butley -- at The Huntington with Nathan Lane -- thinking they were going to a comedy like The Producers.

Ed Siegel is the theater critic for the Globe.