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  • Richard Gilman, American Theater Critic An Appreciation
  • Bert Cardullo (bio)

Together with his contemporaries Eric Bentley, Stanley Kauffmann, and Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman (1923–2006) was a major critical voice—one who, in his two collections of dramatic criticism, Common and Uncommon Masks (1971) and The Drama Is Coming Now (2005), chronicles a major period in American theater history, the 1960s through the 1980s. These were the decades that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, regional theater, nonprofit companies, avant-garde performance (of which Gilman was one of the first acute critics, if not the very first), and interest in plays by women and minorities, as well as in world drama as opposed to plays exclusively of the Euro-American kind. During this period Gilman served, at different times, as the drama critic for Commonweal, Newsweek, and the Nation, three well-known magazines that made his name well known among those interested in the theater and writings about it. In addition he contributed numerous essays and articles to such important publications as the New York Times, the New Republic, Partisan Review, the Village Voice, Tulane Drama Review, and American Theatre.

The pieces gathered in Common and Uncommon Masks and The Drama Is Coming Now are not academic criticism of the kind even scholars are reluctant to read; they are criticism in the belles lettres tradition—deeply felt, scintillatingly reasoned, and beautifully articulated. Gilman had fastidious taste, but he was no prig; he had wide learning, but he did not use it to condescend either to his subject or to his reader. He approached plays with the old-fashioned belief that they should be an imaginative entry into another world rather than grist for the latest theoretical mill. In short Richard Gilman was the kind of critic who is fast disappearing from our cultural scene: unaligned and unafraid, with an interest as much in the life around him as in the life of the mind and the theatrical forms that nourish it. His writing in these books and elsewhere proves, yet again, that criticism is a talent, not something you are automatically equipped to produce just because you have spent the requisite years in graduate school.

Indeed euphoria is what I feel when I find a writer and critic such as Richard Gilman, who used language as if it had never been debased, as if it came shining and newly minted from the best of all possible dictionaries. When I realize, in Wallace Stevens's words, that I will not have to "uncrumple this much-crumpled thing," that an author has freely given me his meaning with all the generosity of which English is still capable, I feel as Robert Frost [End Page 288] did after reading D. H. Lawrence's poems: "I wanted to go to that man," he declares, "and say something to him." In Common and Uncommon Masks and The Drama Is Coming Now, Richard Gilman continues to say something to me. He uses words so exactingly here, with so little spill or waste of significance, that, in reading the latter and rereading the former, I found myself startled again and again into a smile. To see a thing done so precisely gave me an almost animal pleasure. I smiled not just because Gilman had surprised me, but because I felt once again that there is life—robust life—in these odd sounds we emit. Only a moment ago, language seemed so lame, so tired, so thick, and now he makes it perform like a daredevil or a dancer.

But drama was Gilman's subject, not dance and certainly not daredeviltry. And he was a bold, provocative, impassioned, rigorous critic of that drama, comparable to a maverick politician who, knowing he'll never be elected, presents himself as an exhilarating witness to the truth. Like all good teachers—and a critic is a teacher, in print if not in the classroom—Gilman had, in Ernest Hemingway's phrase, a built-in shockproof crap detector. He was forever asking embarrassing questions. Like all authentic artists—and a critic is, in his way, also an artist—Gilman lampooned all who have recourse to the theater...

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