“NOBODY outside of New Orleans gives a hoot about Ewing Poteet,” claims Ewing Poteet, a smiling, rumpled ex-fiddler, as he goes about his business of trying to whirl the excitement of theatre into the heart of New Orleans. He plies one of the odd American trades. About 1,500 miles from Broadway, Poteet, drama critic for the New Orleans Item, covers the waterfront of theatre — the amateur clubs, the touring companies, the college shows. He covers the stuff few give a hoot about.

No one seems to care if Poteet dulls or excites taste for theatre. No one cares if he is foolish or brilliant, if he upholds theatre or sneers at it, if he knows how to write. Yet most Americans turn to writers like Poteet when they want news and comment about theatre. At least 140,000,000 Americans do not read Brooks Atkinson every morning. The words of the New York Times drama critic or his Broadway colleagues make no impression on millions who, by harsh chance, live outside metropolitan New York.

The forty-four-year-old Poteet, in his seventh year as Item critic, is more than just his newspaper’s theatre man. Most non-New York critics are the drama-music-movie-radio-television-nightclub-book-phonograph-art editors of their outfits. While Poteet does not dabble in all these beats, he does have an added chore: he spends half his journalistic hours covering the civil courts of New Orleans.

Fifty per cent courts, 25 per cent music, 25 per cent theatre make up the 100 percent Poteet. You can’t blame the Item or any other newspaper for cutting up its culture man. There just isn’t enough theatre in cities outside New York to fill the forty-hour week of a reporter.

When Poteet applied to the Item in 1949, he was a musician without a job. Concertmaster for the New Orleans Summer Pops Orchestra, Poteet, who had played with the Cleveland, St. Louis and Kansas City symphonies, failed to make a winter orchestra connection that year. With no previous writing experience or college education, Poteet approached editor Clayton Fritchie, now top man of the Democratic Digest, for a job as critic. Fritchie asked for samples. Poteet returned home to Kansas City, reviewed every concert, play, movie, book he encountered, and mailed reams to Fritchie, who promptly hired him.

FOR three years, Poteet’s work was 50 per cent movies, 25 per cent theatre, 25 per cent music. But the film houses complained, for Poteet had discovered that not all movies were better than ever, and the managers had discovered that some New Orleanians hearkened. The Item shifted Poteet to the courthouse and installed the city hall reporter as part-time film critic.

The transfer of Poteet spotlights the way American publishers find critics and criticism expendable. Poteet, easily the most respected New Orleans critic, does not always get appropriate courtesy from his own newspaper. “The Item never puts my review in more than one edition,” says Poteet. “And it’s just slapped wherever they feel like putting it.” But the Item does slap it somewhere, giving New Orleanians a chance to mull over the musings of a responsible theatre critic. But what good do these musings of Poteet and other non-Broadway reviewers do for the American theatre?

In general, Poteet will agree with Roger Dettmer, drama critic of the Chicago American, who says that “in the realm of professional theatre... non-Broadway critics — with such exceptions as Chicago, San Francisco and possibly Los Angeles — do nothing for theatre. Most cannot write, few speak with more authority than patent prejudice, most serve as publicity agents in the sense that their review may be considered ‘space’ for free. Mediocrity is fostered as art; amateurism as something gloriously more; a gift as developed talent or even mature artistry.” Poteet hastens to add that he is not one of those Dettmer has in mind.

BUT Poteet does use a sliding critical rule. “I have two standards, one for local college and amateur groups and the other for touring professional companies,” he explains, “When the professionals come and ask you to lay an awful lot of money down, you ought to expect something pretty good. In turn, the professionals should expect Broadway reviewing.”

Even with this double standard, however, Poteet does not politely glance the other way when an amateur show cracks. “Briefly and baldly,” he wrote after seeing a local group in the Ruth and Augustus Goetz adaptation of The Heiress by Henry James, “Mr. Cahlman (the director) does not seem to have read his script with all the attention it deserves.”

Poteet is not always convinced the failure of a well-known play is the fault of New Orleans actors. He did not, for example, like the amateur version of Calder Willingham’s End As A Man. But he quickly exonerated the acting; the play itself was at fault. “Unless this production conceals all its virtues, which we do not believe,” he wrote, “End As A Man is not a play at all, but almost literally a charade — a charade that spells out in large block letters the author’s bitter resentment of some of the more pathological features of military school life... In three acts of turbulent whoop-de-do, nothing really happens.”

The professional version of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial came to New Orleans right after local amateurs had done the show. Unfortunately William Bendix, like a sick Riley, mumbled through a Captain Queeg role he apparently had not fully memorized. The pros put on a terrible show; the amateurs had been excellent.

Poteet commented calmly on the condescension of professional companies that tour the outposts of American stepculture. “All we know,” wrote Poteet, “is that the professionals deserve little of either audiences or their sponsors along the way when their road performances reek of the backward elocution class’ spring recital. The greatest lack of [New Orleans] theatrical life is a healthy, flourishing professional theatre, not to supplant but to be complemented by ‘tributary’ nonprofessional groups. But if we thought The Caine Mutiny Court Martial was the best professional theatre can do we'd say let’s shut up shop and stick to the amateurs.

“We want professionals,” he added. “We want them sorely. But we want them only on terms of mutual respect.”

PERHAPS here is our key to Poteet, a discerning, responsible non-New York critic. His job gives him only limited time to worry about theatre. His experience contains no background of theatrical problems. Yet he must make palatable to a television-and-movie-trained audience the amateur stuffing of local artisans and the professional doles from a charitable, snobbish New York. As far as Poteet can see, the New Orleans amateurs often prepare a tasty dish; the professionals often stumble on the way. Between New Orleans and New York there is no mutual respect.

Poteet’s cry for mutual respect, if America is ever to have real theatre outside New York, is vital. Professionals must concern themselves with the tastes of their far-from-Broadway audiences. They must understand the men who help mold these tastes. They must give a hoot about Ewing Poteet.

STANLEY MEISLER, newsman in the New Orleans bureau of a wire service, at one time reviewed plays for the Middletown, Ohio, Journal. Harold Clurman, The Nation’s regular theatre critic, will shortly return to these columns.