If you stay in community theatre long enough, you’ll eventually sit through an adjudication. Usually with a notebook in your lap, a knot in your stomach, and somebody (likely me) whispering, “Well… here we go.”

I have mixed feelings about adjudication, and I suspect I always will.  I have sat through many – as an actor, director, and audience member – and candidly, they almost never deliver the value the adjudicating body is striving for.

At its best, adjudications can be genuinely useful. A thoughtful adjudicator can offer an outside eye when you’re too deep inside the machinery of a production to see clearly anymore. They can spot storytelling issues, pacing problems, or moments where the production may be fighting the play instead of serving it. They can offer insights that sharpen your craft.

However – and far more commonplace – adjudication can become about the minutia of what went wrong – this prop was not true to period, that relationship wasn’t clear, the design choice was distracting – on and on and on.  Sometimes you sit there listening and think… did this person notice anything that did work?

The honest truth is that what a production gets right—the chemistry, the emotional truth, the risk-taking, the storytelling that moved an audience, the hundreds of choices that landed — is barely acknowledged, if at all.  And as much as people want to worship the value of “constructive” criticism, that kind of feedback is extremely damaging to a production team.

Confidence is fragile.  Especially in community theatre where people are volunteers, often balancing jobs, families, exhaustion, and still showing up night after night to make something together.  You would think adjudicating bodies would empathize with this, and train adjudicators on how  to actually deliver criticism constructively (the entire HR industry is literally based on it).  But that kind of nuance is almost always absent.

When an adjudication focuses overwhelmingly on what the adjudicator perceives as flaws, it lands less as guidance and more as judgment.  And an entire cast and crew can take a massive confidence hit because of it.  I’ve seen it happen.  It’s happened to me.

A company can be riding the high of a strong audience response—people laughing, weeping, standing at the end, talking about the show in the lobby—and then walk into an adjudication and leave feeling like they’ve failed.

That’s a massive problem.  Audiences matter.  WAY more than any adjudication.

If audiences are connecting deeply with the work, that is not some sentimental footnote to be brushed aside because an adjudicator disliked a transition or wanted a different acting choice.  That connection is the point.  And yet, adjudication can sometimes create this strange distortion where one person’s critique of one performance starts to outweigh the lived response of hundreds of audience members.  That’s a dangerous place to sit, because people start believing the scorecard over the experience.  They start confusing criticism with truth.

Worst of all, they can begin making art defensively – trying not to be criticized instead of trying to tell the story.

How utterly boring.

In my view, a good adjudication should do a lot more than identify problems.  It should recognize strengths.  It should name what is working with as much rigor as it names what isn’t.

Artists need to know what to keep doing, not just what to fix, otherwise adjudication can become less mentorship and more autopsy.  

In my experience, adjudicators largely seem to forget the weight their words carry.  For a roomful of people who have just dedicated 12 weeks of their lives lovingly creating art, a careless imbalance toward criticism can flatten a room while a thoughtful balance can lift one.  For an adjudicating body that holds the support and nurturing of community theatre as their highest priority, this should be a pause for reflection.

As much as it may not sound like it, I still believe in adjudication; I just believe it should be deployed with much greater care by adjudicators, and held much more lightly by production teams.  Take what serves the work. ignore what doesn’t, and never let one adjudication override what you know in your bones about the show you made—or what audiences are telling you night after night.

Sometimes an adjudicator is insightful, and sometimes they’re just wrong.  Sometimes they’ve identified a real issue, and sometimes they’ve simply told you what they would have done, and those are not the same thing at all.

In the end, I think adjudication works best when it remembers that it is responding to art, not grading homework, and when it remembers that artists do not grow only through being told where they fell short, but also by being told where they soared.

If an adjudication leaves a cast feeling smaller than they were before they walked in – even after they’ve made something audiences genuinely loved – then something in the process has gone badly wrong.