Draft:Jesse Green (theatre critic)

Jesse Green is the chief theatre critic for The New York Times, having started that role in 2017 as co-chief with Ben Brantley. Previously, he was the theatre critic at New York Magazine.

Early life
Green worked on student musicals in high school, acting as Will Parker, Cliff Bradshaw, and Prince Dauntless. He also attended the arts summer camp at Interlochen Center for the Arts from 1967 to 1974.

Green graduated from Yale University with a dual major in English and theatre. He worked in the Broadway theater world after graduating college in various roles, including as "apprentice" to Harold Prince in 1982 and "gofer" for John Kander.

The New York Times
Green began at The New York Times as co-chief theater critic following the firing of the newspaper's second-string theatre critic, Charles Isherwood, in February 2017. Green takes notes during the shows he reviews in a small reporter's notebook. Due to the nature of the theater season, Green will usually see a show only once before he publishes a review. He generally sees more than 100 performances in a given year.

As the lead critic for the city's largest theater section, Green has faced criticism of perceived gender biases. In 2017, after tepid reviews of their Broadway debuts by Ben Brantley, Pulitzer Prize winners Lynn Nottage and Paula Vogel publicly criticized co-chiefs Green and Brantley as representing patriarchal irrelevancies. The online publication 3Views on Theater was established in March 2020 by The Lillys non-profit organization as a way to provide a minimum of three viewpoints on a given production. One of the co-founders for 3Views, Tony-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl, described 2017 as a "particularly awful" year for women playwrights, galvanizing the search for an alternative to the critical establishment that Green and Brantley represented.

In 2018, Green was favorably cited as being respectful of trans and non-binary identity following a controversial review of Head over Heels by co-chief critic Brantley. The Brantley review drew significant criticism—and was later corrected—for dismissing the gender identity of Ru-Paul's Drag Race contest Peppermint, who became the first out trans woman to originate a lead role on Broadway.

A 2021 review of Lauren Gunderson's play "The Catastrophists," was noted for coded word choice like "overwrought" and for unduly focusing on the playwright's personal life—though the play's subject was Gunderson's husband, virologist Nathan Wolfe. In November 2022, actress Tonya Pinkins wrote an open letter to Green, accusing him of "misogynoir" and of misunderstanding the intentions of a reimagining of A Raisin in the Sun at The Public Theater, in which Pinkins played Lena Younger.

In 2022, the producers of the musical KPOP wrote an open letter to Green and the Times, accusing his negative review of the Broadway production of representing an "implicit assertion of traditional white cultural supremacy." The major points of contention were Green's negative view of the musical's emphasis on electronica in the score and his use of the phrase "squint-inducing" to describe the lighting design. The newspaper defended Green's review as "fair," rejecting the allegations of racism. The musical closed on December 11, 2022 after only 17 performances, though the producers denied that the closure was directly related to Green's pan.

Of the 35 new productions in the 2023-2024 Broadway season, 28 were reviewed by Green, while the remainder were reviewed by other staff and guest critics. Of those 28, ten received the positive "NYT Critic's Pick" superlative from Green.

Personal life
Green lives in Brooklyn Heights with his husband Andrew Mirer.