Washington Post Eliminates Chief Theatre Critic Amid Massive Staff Cuts

The Washington Post’s sweeping February 4, 2026 layoffs—widely described as eliminating roughly one-third of the organization—land in Washington as both a major media-business shock and an immediate cultural loss. For local theatre, the most consequential detail is straightforward: the paper eliminated its chief theatre critic role and laid off Naveen Kumar, leaving serious uncertainty about whether the region can expect consistent, staffed theatre criticism from the city’s most influential daily news brand.

Kumar had been appointed in 2024 to succeed longtime critic Peter Marks, and his tenure was, by any measure, brief. The significance isn’t just one byline disappearing; it’s what that byline represents in a market where coverage is already stretched thin. The Post’s theatre critic has historically functioned as both a public guide for audiences and a high-visibility record of what’s being made on local stages. When that voice goes away—especially without a clear replacement plan—smaller companies lose a major platform for discovery, audiences lose a trusted signal amid crowded calendars, and the region’s theatre history becomes harder to document in real time.

The reporting around Kumar’s exit also points to a broader hollowing-out of arts infrastructure inside the newsroom, not simply a single position being cut. The picture that emerges is of arts editors and other culture staff being swept up alongside him, which matters because editors are the connective tissue that assigns, shapes, and sustains coverage over time. Without that layer, even freelance reviews can become sporadic, inconsistent, or limited to only the biggest commercial events—leaving the deeper ecosystem (new work, smaller venues, experimental companies, culturally specific programming) with far less oxygen.

Zooming out, these layoffs were framed internally as a “strategic reset,” and the operational changes described across outlets amount to a redefinition of what The Post will prioritize. The cuts reportedly included shutting down the stand-alone Sports section, dismantling Books coverage, and suspending the “Post Reports” daily podcast, alongside reductions in international reporting and significant changes to local Metro coverage. In other words, arts did not get singled out in isolation; it’s part of a wide retrenchment that touched many of the sections that traditionally make a newspaper feel like a comprehensive civic institution rather than a narrowly focused news product.

For theatre specifically, the worry isn’t just fewer reviews—it’s the loss of continuity. Consistent criticism requires time to understand a region’s artistic landscape, to follow companies across seasons, to recognize patterns and risks, and to build reader trust that coverage will be there whether a production is a buzzy import or a small premiere. When a chief critic role disappears, theatre coverage can quietly shift from being a regular civic service to an occasional feature, and “occasional” tends to mean coverage that skews toward the most obvious, highest-profile shows. That’s a structural disadvantage for the kind of local theatre that thrives on word-of-mouth, community engagement, and sustained attention.

All of this also arrives at a time when Washington’s arts sector is navigating broader instability and public attention is fiercely contested. In that environment, major outlets narrowing their scope can have outsized downstream effects: fewer previews that help audiences plan, fewer critical responses that extend a show’s life beyond opening weekend, fewer cultural reporters available to connect theatre to education, neighborhood life, local policy, and the funding realities that shape what appears onstage.