Ben Brantley, the influential New York Times theater critic, will leave the job next month. “This pandemic pause in the great, energizing party that is the theater seemed to me like a good moment to slip out the door,” Brantley said in a statement.News of Brantley’s departure was announced on Twitter by the newspaper’s theater reporter, Michael Paulson.Brantley joined the Times as its second-string theater critic in 1993, taking the chief critic job three years later.