New York’s Top Theater Critics Are Now All Women

It has, in many ways, been a tough time for women in the theater. After years of inching toward parity, last summer there was a series of season announcements that were light on representation of female playwrights. Since then, The New Group announced a three-play season with all-male writers. And I receive a consistent stream of emails from female directors telling me they, too, believe their representation has taken a step backward. But there is one bright spot that has not received a lot of coverage: we now have three female critics as the main critical voices at major New York outlets.

The biggest change from prior years is at The New York Times, where Helen Shaw became the first female chief theater critic at the paper of record earlier this year. Previously, The Times has had plenty of female second-string critics, but the top seat was always held by a man. Emily Nussbaum, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2011 whose reviews were typically about television programs, became the magazine's theater critic in 2026, replacing Shaw. Sara Holdren returned to New York in 2023, joining Jackson McHenry as theater critic, a role she held solo from 2017 to 2019. (Neither of them has the title “lead” or “head”—unlike when Jesse Green shared the mantle with Ben Brantley at The Times—but the press agents I spoke to consider Holdren to be the main theater critic at the outlet, as McHenry writes about things beyond theater criticism.)

This may be a plank on Theseus's ship sort of situation where the change was happening kind of more gradually and so it was sort of maybe harder for me to perceive,” said Shaw, rattling off the names of about ten female theater critics she has been reading regularly for years. “It felt like I was reading women for a long time before anything like what just happened happened. So, I've heard from a couple of people like: ‘Wow, what a crazy moment this is.’ And yet it feels actually like the moment has been going on for a number of years.”

Shaw is right—there has been what seems like steady improvement. Decades ago, there was one or no female member of the New York Drama Critics' Circle. When I wrote about the lack of female critics in 2022, there were five. Last season, there were seven female members of the 23 voting members of the New York Drama Critics' Circle. But with Shaw moving to The Times, it does seem like a special moment of progress.

Perhaps this is all the more so because there are fewer paid critics overall than there used to be. We’re in a tough time for journalism in general and arts criticism in particular.“We're not living in the moment of the sort of Butcher of Broadway,” Holdren—who is also a theater director—stated.

“We're not living in a moment where a single review by a single critic can quite shut down a show in the same way. Although, of course, it makes complete sense that our voices are still perceived as powerful and are still powerful in certain ways. Especially as arts journalism continues to meet with such dire prospects, the devaluing of this vital part of accounting for this art form is really shocking. And the more positions go away, the more meaningful and, some might argue, more powerful each one becomes. So, in that sense, there's a publicness to it, there is a meaning and a sense of responsibility connected to it. In all those ways, I think, the sex or gender of the people in these roles must play a part because you can't sort of unpick the nuance of it all.”

And there is that nuance. There is always a debate about whether the sex of the critic matters. Shaw believes that you cannot tell on a case-by-case basis how the gender of a critic might matter. In other words, female critics don’t necessarily like things by female writers or a specific subject matter more than male critics; it’s not a one-to-one equation. But, she believes, “if you look over the kind of body of criticism of an era, and in that era, there have been very few women critics, you can kind of tell that.”

That is true even when criticism was seen as less personal. There was a time when you’d rarely see an “I” statement in reviews—critics were supposed to speak with a neutral and authoritative voice. But of course, a critic’s own identity necessarily seeped into their work. We all form our opinions because of who we are. It just wasn’t announced. Then a transformation began. Critics began to bring their life experiences explicitly into their work, thus highlighting the gender divide. 

I’ve written about it before because it’s the most glaring example for me—Bruce Weber’s 2002 review of The Smell of the Kill in The New York Times, in which he wrote: “O.K., I'm not a woman and I'm not married, so it's possible I'm just not in tune with a members-only message. (I admired THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES, but I suspect I didn't really get it.)” Several female critics (though not all) did in fact like the show, so Weber gave producers a clear pathway to skewer him, which they did.

“When I started, in—what was it?—2004, it was pretty lonely,” Shaw said. “It felt pretty ghastly that there were only one or two women who were writing, and it felt like we were doing a bad job, therefore, of reflecting the field.”

Since then, we’ve seen added attention paid to the diversity of the critical pool, just like we’ve seen attention to added diversity in all facets of the art form. But there are so few critics that making inroads in terms of diversity has been difficult. When Jesse Green joined The Times as co-chief theater critic in 2017, there were many upset the role did not go to a woman and/or a person of color. Shaw admitted looking at the theater critics in every town at that point in time—when there were more theater critics—and thinking that those that held those roles were “people who look like they could have also had the job 100 years ago.” But, again, it was a small sample size and those that were in the roles rarely left them when young. So, there weren’t many openings to discuss diversity in relation to. Actually, Green was one of the only times in my career a lead critic was seemingly pushed to a different position rather than the position being eliminated and/or the person taking a buyout.

Which brings me to an aside about Jesse Green and the respect critics are given in our industry. I was disheartened to see how many people cheered the announcement that his responsibilities were being shifted and, beyond that, personally attacked him. I was disheartened not because he was my personal favorite critic, or because I agreed with everything he ever wrote, but because he does truly love the art form. If you’ve read his writing for decades and don’t get that, you’re being deliberately obtuse. We need to show grace to people who have given their lives to this art form. And, in general, the industry does not respect critics and seemingly does not want a critical eye on what is, in many ways, a personal art form. I understand that—when film critics weigh in, the artists are done with the film. When theater critics weigh in, the artists still need to go out there and perform every single night. I get that there is an added emotional element to receiving criticism that perhaps does not exist in many other art forms. But we need our critics. They are an indispensable part of the theater apparatus. We have proof of that from regions that have lost their theater critics—theater heads in those places will talk about how the lack of those reviews hurt their attendance.

Given that Holdren is a director, she has had to face criticism in a way that many other theater critics have not, giving her a unique perspective on what some see as an antagonistic relationship between critic and artist.“

We're all vulnerable,” Holdren said of artists. “It's really hard not to be precious. It's really hard not to be hurt. But if the camera zooms out a little bit, I do believe that this is actually a symbiotic relationship rather than a sort of attack-and-defend dynamic.”

She referenced Shaw and a class the pair taught at Yale together on contemporary plays. “Helen, in the class we taught together, made the point that another great feature of theater criticism in particular is that this is an ephemeral art form. And, you know, no matter how many recordings we have in this digital age, that is not the thing. It just never was and it never will be. We are the memory of this art form. There's a responsibility to the plays and to the moment to try to grasp and articulate what they were in their transience in some way.”

And what does it mean to have those recorders be women? It’s hard to pinpoint. I was recently speaking on a panel, and I realized that both critics I listed as my current favorites are women. Is that because they are women? It’s impossible to know. I certainly did not pick them specifically because they are women, but, again, undoubtedly their writing is influenced by their life experiences, and those are life experiences of women. Shaw said she doesn’t read any review she wrote and think “a girl wrote that.” And I’m sure if we were to do a blind test in most cases, absent an overt reference to sex or gender, one would not be able to tell the sex of the critic. But it’s not as easy as all that—one should not take that test result and say that it therefore does not matter if all critics are white men. There is something more at play, even if we cannot put our fingers on it. There is a reason diversity of critics is important. Gender diversity, racial diversity (which we need more of), it’s important. Given that there are so few paid positions, it is impossible for the paid critical pool to fully reflect the world, but homogeneity is not the answer. (Please read my prior piece for more details on this, which I did not want to repeat here.)