“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic,” said Oscar Wilde.
For the better part of the last decade, I was a freelance theatre critic in Atlanta. I spent many nights and weekends in the aisle seat watching stories unfold onstage and then participating in musings about what I’d seen with strangers.
That decade also highlighted for me the stories I wasn’t seeing: about poor people, people of color, people living with disabilities, or transgender or nonbinary folks.
That is part of what motivated me to write The Wash, about the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881. During this important but often overlooked event in American history, Black laundresses in Atlanta refused to wash clothes until they were granted the power to set their own rates and control their wages. They faced resistance from their customers, the government, and within their own ranks. But they ultimately prevailed, growing from a few dozen women on strike to more than 3,000 in less than three weeks.
My other motivation to write The Wash, which took me six years on and off (with a lot of time off) to finish, is that I have often rolled my eyes at the tendency of theatres to depict Black life as past life. But for me this story resonates so much with the present, speaking to the labor movements currently gathering strength in the auto, service, and theatre industries. (The Wash is currently in the midst of an eight-week run in Atlanta, co-produced by Synchronicity Theatre and Impact Theatre. In 2025, the play will be at the Black Rep in St. Louis, March 12-30, 2025, and co-produced by Perceptions Theatre and Prop Thtr, October 2025.)
Stepping from critic to playwright has been an exhilarating and terrifying experience. I was only half-joking with a mentor when I said that if the play was bad I’d have to move to a different state and live in anonymity. In all seriousness, the process of developing this world premiere play has shown me that playwrights and critics have more in common than they think. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about playwriting from theatre criticism (and vice versa):
1. You have to have a strong pitch. In journalism, whenever a writer pitches an editor, the editor usually asks, what’s the angle—what’s the hook? Why this story now? I’ve heard that Tarell Alvin McCraney often asked students at Yale Drama School, why is this a play? When it came to The Wash, I knew that I could never get an assignment from a daily paper to write an article connecting a largely forgotten labor strike to labor movements of today while also putting the world of 1881 in its proper context. The story needed more space; it needed the intimacy and immediacy of theatre. I can summarize the play in an elevator, but I’m hoping the experience of the play stays with people far longer.
2. People have to care about who the characters are before they care about what they do. As someone whose journalism education was primarily in magazines, I developed the habit of writing longform pieces early. But as the speed of information has increased rapidly in the last decade, many news outlets have stopped publishing long pieces. These days, reviews are 400-600 words if you’re lucky. Still, I’ve learned that people will read long if the characters are compelling. The same is true for theatre and other media. TV creator Shonda Rhimes often talks about starting with characters who make strong choices. If you can make people fall in love with a person, they’ll read (or watch) till the end.
3. The story you start out telling and the one you end up telling may not be the same. The best storytellers are the curious ones. I can’t tell you how many times I went into an interview or a review expecting one thing and leaving with something altogether different. New discoveries are a part of the joy of connecting through stories. When I started writing The Wash, I resisted it being an ensemble piece, but it is one. I think playwrights especially are best served when they focus on the writing and let the story be what it’s going to be.
4. Everything is better with editors. Dramaturgs never get the credit they deserve, so let me shout out the teams at Essential Theatre and Hush Harbor Lab as well as my dramaturg for The Wash, Antonia McCain, for helping me make the 110-page article I started out with into 94-page script. The director Brenda Porter and producers at Synchronicity Theatre challenged me repeatedly to answer the question, what are you trying to convey here? I’ve noticed that playwrights like Lucas Hnath give you all the mitigating circumstances in the first 10 pages, then we spend the remaining time untangling them. The same is true for journalists: Your first two paragraphs have to tell people the whole point. You can’t meander or be too precious about the words. Editors (and dramaturgs) are there to help you see that.
5. The community you build will be the audience you have. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve heard theatre leaders make is to think they’re competing with Netflix. In my opinion, the real competition for live theatre audiences is third places: coffee shops, bars, local hangs, parks, houses of worship, and other spaces where people feel a sense of home and community. Earlier in my career, I did marketing and community engagement for nonprofit theatres, and I figured out quickly that the show has to be more than a show to really engage a community, and that engagement has to be constant. I carried that knowledge into my journalism career, where I didn’t just go see shows I was reviewing; I saw as much as I could.
For The Wash, it was important for me to collaborate with theatres that understand the importance of community engagement. Synchronicity Theatre does pay-what-you-can performances every Wednesday. Impact Theatre offers a senior matinee as well as a free event in their neighborhood that people can attend whether they’re seeing the show or not. In addition, for The Wash, our sound designer Kacie Willis Lauders tapped into her network to host entrepreneur nights for folks to meetup before the show.
During one pay-what-you-can performance, we donated a portion of ticket sales to the Tiny Blessings Foundation, a local nonprofit that provides care packages to new mothers who are unhoused. We also hosted an event called Indigo Night, where we invited local, up-and-coming chefs to sell food in the lobby an hour before the show. They didn’t have to pay a tabling fee or share profit with the theatre, and audience members didn’t have to think about dinner.
All of these events were successful because we had already built the relationships to make them so. When you show people that you’re invested in their thriving, they’ll reciprocate and become invested in yours. That’s a lesson I take with me into all my work, on the page or the stage.
Kelundra Smith (she/her) is the managing editor of American Theatre.
