It was next to impossible for me as an audience member to get past the fact that those responsible for the production did not seem to care about my being entertained or to question the quality of the work that they were presenting. Fortunately, a cooler head than mine prevailed and my one sentence summation did not run. This attitude, however, expressed in the late Seventies by a disgruntled playwright across the pond, doesn't seem to hold true in pre-millennium Austin. You have the desire to both piss them off and win their approval. In Austin, the criticism could be even more critical.
Critics are people who get paid for their opinion.
A critic can only talk about what he or she got from the theatrical experience and how it fits into a larger rubric, not what the participants got out of it. Sometimes, we're wrong. Not wrong in the sense that we added two and two and got nine, but wrong as in, we made a judgment that, upon further reflection, was too harsh or too kind. Reviews in most local publications are written within days, sometimes hours, of seeing a production, which does not always give the writer enough time to digest an experience fully. Unfortunately, the logistics of newspaper production generally don't allow a critic the opportunity to go back and change an initial opinion.