Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics

Serious Dialogue:Interviews with American Theater Critics is a collection of interviews with, and among, America’s most notable theater critics: Robert Brustein, Stanley Kauffmann, Eric Bentley, Gordon Rogoff, and John Simon. Supplementing these interviews are an introductory critic’s apologia by the author, essays on the work of Stark Young and the recently deceased Richard Gilman, and a guest appearance by former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich, in addition to a bibliography of American theater criticism and a chronology of published criticism prior to the modern period. The book’s thesis is not only the generally accepted one that serious American drama has long been in decline on account of insurmountable competition from television and the cinema, among other technologies. The thesis of Serious Dialogue is also that the decline of American theater in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American theater criticismNot only is there is no book in English that collects interviews with the most noted American theater critics of the twentieth century; there is also no book, like Serious Dialogue, in which so vital, if sometimes vexing, a subject as the current state of American theater and drama is discussed at length. Serious Dialogue: Interviews with American Theater Critics is aimed, then, at those who would be interested in such a subject: the cultivated theater patron and the educated play-reader, as well as scholars, college students, and teachers of university-level courses in theater, drama, criticism, and comparative literature.