Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Anonymous Review Squad, in which artists review their peers' work. This experiment (which we hope to repeat in other sections of the paper) was inspired by artists who complain that critics are unqualified to hand down judgment because they have never made art.
That complaint is pure bunk, of course, for three reasons: (1) It's a provincial and solipsistic argument that assumes one needs to be a member of a group to say anything intelligent about that group. Which, to pick three random examples, would mean that Alexis de Tocqueville had nothing intelligent to say about Americans, Dan Savage has nothing intelligent to say about hetero sex, and all historians are wasting their time. (2) Many critics first become interested in art by making art and, for whatever reason, later switch to writing about it. (In my case, I learned in college that making newspapers was more exciting and rewarding than making plays.) (3) All good critics are students of the arts: They watch closely, ask questions, research finances, read art history, and are on familiar terms with artists and administrators, big fish and little fish. Good critics, by not being stuck in one little weed patch of an arts ecosystem, have a bird's-eye view of the whole. They have perspective.
However! That artists-know-more-than-critics complaint is stubborn—so why not run an experiment to see if it's even partly true? Why not give the people what they want?
And here we are.
The inaugural ARS is: Jerry Manning (director and producing artistic director of the Seattle Rep), Allison Narver (director and former artistic director of the Empty Space Theatre), Kirk Anderson (actor and drummer for the theater-garage-art-band "Awesome"), Jennifer Zeyl (designer, director, founding member of the Washington Ensemble Theatre, and Stranger Genius Award winner), Mandie O'Connell (actor, writer, codirector of Implied Violence, Stranger Genius Award winner). Any one of those five could have written any one of the three reviews running this week.
Anonymity carries liabilities: A critique is less credible when it isn't attached to a name. But theater is a tiny town, and we wanted to give these artists a critical voice without the attendant fear of professional reprisals. Reporters grant their sources anonymity when what they say might jeopardize their physical or professional well-being. Artists who criticize artists have a reasonable fear of jeopardizing both.
What will happen? Will artists be all empathetic to and soft on their fellow artists (at the expense of the audience)? Will they go at each other with hatchets? Will they show up our paper's critics as know-nothing blowhards?
Read the first-ever Anonymous Review Squad and find out. 
