Saturday, April 4, 2009

Book: The Collected Works of Harold Clurman, reviewed by Terry Teachout

From the blog of New York theatre critic Terry Teachout:

The Critic Who Got His Hands Dirty

I recently posted a week's worth of almanac entries drawn from
The Collected Works of Harold Clurman, an eleven-hundred-page anthology devoted mainly but by no means exclusively to the drama criticism of a man who is better known as a director.

In addition to co-founding the Group Theatre in 1931, Clurman directed the Broadway premieres of Arthur Miller's
All My Sons and After the Fall, Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy, William Inge's Bus Stop, Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, and Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet.

He was, in short, a first-tier theatrical professional--yet he also spent most of the second of his life doubling as a working drama critic, and his reviews, as I discovered when I read them in bulk last week, are as fresh and instructive today as they were when they were originally published in The New Republic and The Nation between 1948 and Clurman's death in 1980.


Read More at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

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