Guthrie Theater communications director Melodie Bahan emailed to ask if I'd focus on arts writing for a moment. Even though I got my start as a movie reviewer (hired by none other than Brian Lambert), it's not really my area of expertise.

Then I saw Bahan's pitch: she takes a hard poke at local theater critics — publicly.

In a piece for Minnesota Playlist, Bahan implores them to stop writing "hastily-written, ill-considered snapshots of an opening night performance and [focus] instead on actual journalistic coverage of the arts."

Bahan doesn't name names, though Graydon's, Dominic's and Rohan's ears must be burning. I'll include their responses in another piece; for now, I'll help Melodie get gums flapping. By the way, she says she showed the piece to Joe Dowling and her immediate boss, Trish Santini, before it ran.

Because of Bahan's outreach, I'm going to give you a little longer excerpt than usual, though I encourage you to read the whole thing. Her overall point is that theater writing, especially for a daily, needs to be interesting to more than just theatergoers. As an exemplar, she invokes the name of sainted New York Times theater reviewer Frank Rich — who, she pointedly notes, left the beat in 1993:

Let’s face some hard truths about the reviews printed in our daily newspapers.

Reviews in the Twin Cities newspapers don’t accomplish what critics and editors insist they do, which is provide a service to their readers. I would argue that the readers of the two major daily newspapers in this town would be better served by forgoing hastily-written, ill-considered snapshots of an opening night performance and focusing instead on actual journalistic coverage of the arts. I’m not against theater reviews; I’m against theater reviews that are poorly written, thumbs-up-or-down laundry lists of actors and designers that don’t do anything to illuminate the production or give readers a real sense of the experience. Maybe it’s not fair to compare our local critics to Frank Rich, but I think there’s a solution: Stop writing reviews and start writing news.

Local theater critics are journalists first. Journalists are storytellers, and there are thousands of stories in this large and active theater community that just aren’t being written. Features about theater are often glossy, shallow puff pieces that are indistinguishable from reviews. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone say to me, after reading a feature story about a show that hadn’t opened yet, “Wow, great review in the paper today.” And the very sporadic stories that do get reported are disproportionately about money — or the lack thereof — and therefore focus on only the large theaters. Plus, because these stories are so sporadic and lacking in context, complex issues are boiled down to one line conclusions.

Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s story is one example. It takes a long time to build up a debt as large as the one that killed Jeune Lune, but I can’t recall reading a story about their troubles until 2008, the year they announced they were disbanding. Our theater community is large, but hey, it’s not that big. How could our reporters miss something like that? When the Playwrights’ Center or the Guthrie or Mixed Blood gets a grant, the papers run a paragraph culled from a press release announcing the grantor, grantee, amount and purpose. And then…? Our critics don’t have time to follow the money to see how it actually creates art because they have to write reviews of the six shows that opened this week, an interview with an American Idol reject who’s appearing in a touring production of Grease, another profile of that really gorgeous actress they’ve profiled twice this year, and a Valentine’s Day poem.

In this performing arts community, there are personalities and huge egos and unsung talent and incredible artistry and gossip and bad blood and conflict. Readers are being denied those stories because our writers are spending their time writing reviews that won’t be nearly as interesting, vital, or even as accurate.

Comments welcome, and, again, I'll get the pros' perspectives as soon as I can.