Each time I cover a theater or venue closure, my brain cycles through the same stages of grief: Shock, even if I feared the news was coming. Sympathy, for leaders who had to make tough decisions. Selfish sadness, about the art that won’t happen, or at least not in the same way.

Then, if I’m being honest with myself, a pang of guilt. I wonder what more I could have done, as a critic and journalist, to keep a company afloat.

I don’t want to overstate my importance here. I know that large-scale financial concerns ledExit Theatre’s Eddy Street venue,PianoFight,Bay Area Children’s Theatre,TheatreFirstandStage Werxto shut down this year. The granular coverage decisions of one arts writer would not be high on anyone’s list of immediate causes.

At the same time, I know my writing — or choice not to write — about a company can affect its bottom line. Whenever I frantically report on anotheremergency fundraising campaignor more doors shutting, I also pick apart those past decisions, wondering if I should have reviewed or featured a company more or differently. Then I ask myself whether, as so many theater companies grapple with continuing pandemic-related challenges, I should reconceive my role. What ought arts criticism look like when the art can feel like it’s barely hanging on?

Bay Area theaterisn’t alonein reeling from an onslaught of sad news.Chris Jones,theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, has counted at least 30 theater closures since 2019 in his area.

“There’s been a shrinking of the sector. I don’t think that shrinking is temporary; it’s the new reality,” he told me, adding that truncated seasons, shorter runs and small-cast plays are further symptoms of the economic malaise.

要务实,批评家需要一个健壮的西娅ter scene in order to have something to write about. When a comparison of September 2023 with the same month four years ago reveals many fewer opening nights on my calendar, I sometimes despair at how much longer my job as a theater critic will be relevant.

But an email conversation withCharles McNulty,theater critic at the Los Angeles Times, helped set me straight, reminding me that, even if I review fewer plays today, I’m somehow juggling more story ideas than ever.

“As a long-time survivor in the field of theater criticism, I have learned to separate the maddening business of journalism from the value of my profession,” he wrote. “I don’t question the value of theater critics any more than I doubt the necessity of playwrights. We are both viewing the world through the lens of an ancient art form that has been a source of instruction and inspiration for millennia.”

And going easy on theater won’t reverse the shrinking. “I have an obligation to tell the truth,” Jones said. I myself have often thought that the reader’s trust is the bedrock of criticism; lose that, and you lose everything.

If an art form can’t openly reckon with its weaknesses, it can’t evolve.

“A critic can say those things, and take on the haters, that the theaters themselves can’t say,” Jones said.

Indeed, that role is sacred. While others in the ecosystem might temporarily act as whistleblowers or testifiers, they also, however subconsciously, must weigh journalistic truth against other interests such as their careers, grudges or their company’s finances. Critics are the only ones whom the public can consistently rely on to be independent — to find news for news’ sake, and not their own.

But our newshounding isno robot’s task.When we critics witness shows, we are ruthless observers of our own feelings, so it would be disingenuous to carry on as if we weren’t affected by reporting grief upon grief.

“We all have loss in our lives,” Jones said, “and good critics build that loss into their writing.”

One answer, then, appears to be to simply write better. Damn it. I hate it when that’s where my ruminations on my profession lead me, as these roads always seem to. I hate it, and yet I love it. Why embark upon this career, with its wild, sine-wave swings of emotion, if you don’t want to open yourself ever wider to artistic possibility, if you don’t want to comb yourself for prejudices and limitations and (try to) metamorphose them?

Every obstacle or travail is an occasion to redouble our efforts. We must renew our search for the more truthful, more piquant turn of phrase. We must banish crutches and shortcuts. We must seek the forms of theater that don’t even call themselves theater; we must devise forms of criticism that equal our subjects’ ingenuity.

We must write as if our art form, our region, depends on us — because they do.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com