Richard Gilman, Theater Critic, 83
DGH
Richard Gilman, the drama and literary critic whose elegant,
contentious voice resonated through four decades in American letters,
earning him both admirers and enemies of partisan fierceness, died
Saturday, October 28, 200, at his home in Kusatsu, Japan, at the age of
83.
His death, after many years of illness, was announced by his daughter
Priscilla Gilman, who said he was originally found to have terminal
lung cancer in 1997.
Mr. Gilman, a professor at the Yale School of Drama and the author of
five books of criticism and a memoir, resisted pigeonholes, both in
describing himself and the playwrights he wrote about.
In an article in The New York Times in 1970 - an account of his
experiences directing a play at Yale - he wrote: "I don't think
of myself as a critic or teacher either, but simply - and at the
obvious risk of disingenuousness - as someone who teaches, writes
drama criticism (and other things) and feels that the American
compulsion to take your identity from your profession, with its
corollary of only one trade to a practitioner, may be a convenience to
society but is burdensome and constricting to yourself."
That elaborate sentence, with its self-conscious detours and its jump
from the personal to the didactic, is vintage Gilman. The novelist D.
M. Thomas described him as "one of the least self-effacing critics
one could imagine." Mr. Gilman was indeed, as he suggested, something
of a hybrid, and not only in his profession. His distinctive style as a
writer was poised between academic erudition and popular journalism.
His greatest fame, however, undoubtedly came from his association with
the theater and his combative definitions of what it should and
shouldn't be. As a drama critic at Commonweal and later at Newsweek,
he typically championed the iconoclastic and the cryptic: the directors
Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin and Peter Brook; the playwrights Harold
Pinter and Peter Handke. And he consistently dismissed the more
naturalistic, commercial fare found on Broadway.
"People still go to the theater to identify with characters, not
having been apprised of their death," he once wrote, with sardonic
wonder, of mainstream theater audiences. Plays, he said in "The
Making of Modern Drama" (1974), his most ambitious and arguably his
finest work, should be "enactments of consciousness" that free the
mind from traditional perceptions. What he opposed, he said, was "the
turning of dramatic art into culture - something to use as a
storehouse of 'higher' feelings and recognitions."
Mr. Gilman was one of a breed of philosopher-critics, including Robert
Brustein and Eric Bentley, who came to prominence in the 1950s and
'60s. They located in modern drama the elements of abstraction,
alienation and absurdity that had long been at the core of discussions
of other forms of art and literature. For many of these writers, the
essential history of the theater since the late 19th century was, as
Mr. Gilman wrote, "a record of attempts to work free from the morass
of illusions."
But few of Mr. Gilman's peers were as extreme as he in insisting that
the genre transcend the representational. Rather than imitate reality,
he said, theater should offer alternatives to it. Art, Mr. Gilman
argued, should put its audience "in the presence of a life our own
lives are powerless to unearth."
This search for the ineffable was more than a professional pursuit. In
his most personal work, "Faith, Sex, Mystery: A Memoir" (1987), the
Jewish-born Mr. Gilman wrote eloquently of his conversion as a
27-year-old from atheism to Roman Catholicism. He left the church after
eight years, though he refused to reduce this episode in his life to
psychological solutions.
"The point about the spiritual that I both start with and want to
inquire further into is that it isn't coterminous with the
psychological, it isn't simply an archaic term for it," he wrote.
"Something mysterious spills over."
Mystery, he believed, was also what most defined greatness in art, and
that insight inevitably led him to write as much about what a work
wasn't as about what it was. He said, for example, that Georg
Büchner, the 19th-century German playwright and author of
"Woyzeck," "gave form and expression to what had not been allowed
to happen, what still remained to be said."
Chekhov, he wrote, "stripped art of all purposes of consolation and
exhortation."
Richard Martin Gilman was born on April 30, 1923, and grew up in
Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jacob Gilman, a lawyer, and Marion
Wolinsky Gilman. After graduating from James Madison High School in
Brooklyn in 1941, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. From 1943
to 1946 he served in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific, rising to
the rank of staff sergeant, then returned to Wisconsin to complete his
studies and graduate in 1947.
In the 1950s, living in Greenwich Village [Manhattan, New York], he
wrote literary criticism and reviews as a freelance writer before
joining Commonweal as a drama critic, a profession he said he had never
aspired to. "I had no background in theater, nothing but an amateur
perspective," he recalled later.
NY Times -- BEN BRANTLEY