In Memoriam: Eric Bentley (1916-2020)

[Readers of Rick On Theater have seen numerous references to the drama critic Eric Bentley, who died on 5 August 2020 at the age of 103.  These include two full articles (“Eric Bentley – An Appreciation” by Kirk Woodward, 4 December 2012, and “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” by Kirk Woodward, 3 December 2015), as well as citations in pieces on subjects as varied as Black Mountain College, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, Agatha Christie, The Glass Menagerie, and William Shakespeare.  

[Bentley wrote extensively about theater for a period of about forty years (later concentrating on writing plays).  Many consider his criticism indispensable for understanding  drama, and the following two pieces give some indication why.  The first is Bentley’s obituary in the New York Times, and the second, from American Theatre, is a personal view by one who became a friend late in Bentley’s long life.  

[The best way to experience Bentley’s importance, of course, is to read his criticism, which continues to sparkle and illuminate.]

“ERIC BENTLEY, CRITIC WHO PREFERRED BRECHT TO BROADWAY, DIES AT 103”

by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

[The New York Times obituary for Eric Bentley was published online at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/theater/eric-bentley-dead.html on Wednesday, 5 August 2020, and updated on Friday, 7 August 2020.]

Mr. Bentley, who was also a playwright, was an early champion of modern European drama in the 1940s but had little use for American plays.

Eric Bentley, an influential theater critic — as well as a scholar, author and playwright — who was an early champion of modern European drama and an unsparing antagonist of Broadway, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 103.

His son Philip confirmed the death.

Mr. Bentley was among that select breed of scholar who moves easily between academic and public spheres. His criticism found its way into classroom syllabuses and general-interest magazines.

And more than dissecting others’ plays, he also wrote his own and had some success as a director. He adapted work by many of the European playwrights he prized, especially Bertolt Brecht, whom he first met in Los Angeles in 1942.

The English-born Mr. Bentley variously walked the corridors of Oxford, Harvard and Columbia, where he taught for many years with faculty colleagues like Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, literary lions in their own right.

At Columbia he became engaged in leftist campus politics during the volatile 1960s and surprised everyone when he quit — in part, he said, to experience life as a gay man, having divorced his second wife.

But it was as a critic that he made his first and most enduring impression.

The critic Ronald Bryden, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, said that Mr. Bentley’s 1946 essay collection, “The Playwright as Thinker,” “did for modern drama what Edmund Wilson in ‘Axel’s Castle’ had done for modern poetry; it established the map of a territory previously obscured by opinion and rumor.”

Mr. Bentley published one admired collection of criticism after another, among them “In Search of Theater” (1953) “What Is Theater?” (1956) and “The Life of the Drama” (1964) — “the best general book on theater I have read bar none,” the novelist Clancy Sigal wrote in The New Republic.

Mr. Bentley’s book “Bernard Shaw” (1947) prompted Shaw himself to say that he considered it the best book written about him.

Mr. Bentley argued that the great serious drama of the modern era had been written in Europe. He pointed to the operas of [Richard] Wagner and the plays of [Henrik] Ibsen, [August] Strindberg, [Anton] Chekhov, [Federico] García Lorca, [John Millington] Synge and [Luigi] Pirandello as well as Shaw. And great drama was still being written, he said in the 1940s, referring to Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sean O’Casey.

“Experimentalism in the arts always reflects historical conditions, always indicates profound dissatisfaction with established modes, always is a groping toward a new age,” he wrote in “The Playwright as Thinker.”

Mr. Bentley discerned a new naturalism in the modern voice. “What is it we notice if we pick up a modern play after reading Shakespeare or the Greeks? Nine times out of ten it is the dryness,” he wrote, distinguishing that from dullness — “the sheer modesty of the language, the sheer lack of winged words, even of eloquence.”

Mr. Bentley was less enthusiastic about American playwrights — even, at first, Eugene O’Neill.

“Where Wedekind seems silly and turns out on further inspection to be profound,” Mr. Bentley wrote of the German playwright Frank Wedekind in the notes to “The Playwright as Thinker,” “O’Neill seems profound and turns out on further inspection to be silly.”

As for commercialized Broadway, he judged it to be anathema to artistic theater, a view many readers regarded as tantamount to an attack on American culture. “Condescending and misanthropic,” Cue magazine said.

The drama critic Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, said that “Mr. Bentley does not believe in a popular theater” and feels that “the audience is incapable of valid judgment in aesthetic matters.”

Broadway’s defenders reminded Mr. Bentley that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Shaw had, above all, been popular. To which Mr. Bentley rejoined, “To be popular in an aristocratic culture, like ancient Greece or Elizabethan England, is quite a different matter from being popular in a middle-class culture.”

He eventually became more favorably inclined toward American dramatists, but he never let up in his goading of American theatergoers to pay more attention to Europeans like Brecht. For a time he even wore his hair in bangs like Brecht.

While at Columbia Mr. Bentley turned out a twin series of anthologies, “The Classic Theatre” and “From the Modern Repertoire,” which became standard reading in drama curriculums.

In the turmoil of the 1960s, he was a founder of the DMZ, a cabaret devoted to political and social satire whose subjects included the war in Vietnam, and he criticized Columbia’s handling of student political demonstrations on campus. In 1969 he quit his teaching post, shocking his friends and colleagues.

Many thought he had done so in protest, but he later said that he had simply realized that he wanted to be a playwright. “I always dreamed myself the author when I translated,” he said.

There were also personal reasons for resigning. He had decided to leave his second wife and live openly as a gay man, he said, and he thought his Columbia colleagues would not have tolerated that.

Around the time he began moving away from academia, the theater reporter Pat O’Haire of The Daily News depicted him in his 12-room Riverside Drive apartment, its walls and shelves dense with theater memorabilia:

“Away from campus, or the confines of teaching, Bentley can only be described as a sort of combination establishment-guerrilla,” she wrote. “He goes barefoot and wears jeans, but his shirt, though colorful, is a traditional Brooks Brothers button-down. His hair is long and flecked with gray; he wears a beard that is neatly trimmed in a Captain Ahab style, with the upper lip shaved. It seems as if he is straddling two worlds.”

Eric Russell Bentley was born Sept. 14, 1916, in Bolton, a northern industrial town in Lancashire, England, to Fred and Laura Bentley. His father was a respected local businessman. His mother had wanted Eric to become a Baptist missionary.

Mr. Bentley was a scholarship student at the prestigious Bolton School, where he studied the piano. He then went to Oxford on a history scholarship; C.S. Lewis was one of his teachers. Yet as a merchant-class student surrounded by upper-class swells, he felt out of place.

Shaw became an early hero, Mr. Bentley told The Times in 2006, because he seemed to be a fellow outsider. “‘Pygmalion’ is a great classic in my book because it’s an Irishman’s recognition of the basics of class-ridden Britain,” he said.

He emigrated to the United States after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Oxford in 1938 (he was naturalized in 1948) and received a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale in 1941.

On the strength of his early books, Mr. Bentley was appointed in 1952 to succeed Harold Clurman as drama critic for The New Republic, a position he held until 1956. He also wrote for The Nation, Theatre Arts, The Times Literary Supplement in London and The New York Times.

When he wasn’t writing in the 1940s, he taught and directed at the University of California, Los Angeles; at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and at the University of Minnesota. From 1948 through 1951 he traveled in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, directing plays. In 1950 he helped Brecht with his production of “Mother Courage and Her Children” in Munich. He also directed the German-language premiere of O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh.”

By then his regard for O’Neill and other American playwrights had risen. His earlier criteria for artistic merit, he conceded, had been “puritanic” and even too “Brechtian.” His celebrated book “The Playwright as Thinker,” he conceded, “reflects more my academic side — a certain degree of excessive authority, even arrogance, you could say.”

In 1952, after his return to the United States, Mr. Bentley took over Joseph Wood Krutch’s course in modern drama at Columbia. The next year he was appointed the Brander Matthews professor of dramatic literature at Columbia, where he stayed until his resignation in 1969, with time off in between as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard in 1960-61 and as a Ford Foundation artist in residence in Berlin in 1964-65.

He was later the Cornell professor of theater at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland.

Mr. Bentley was known to perform songs from the theater in nightclubs, accompanying himself on the harmonium.

As he concentrated more on his playwriting, he found his subjects in those who had rebelled against established society. He took up the causes of the left in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958,” first produced in 1972; the astronomer Galileo in “The Recantation of Galileo Galilei: Scenes From History Perhaps” (1973); Oscar Wilde in “Lord Alfred’s Lover” (1979); the sexually inconstant in “Concord” (1982), one of a series of three plays in “The Kleist Variations”; and homosexuality in “Round Two” (1990), a variation on Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde.”

Mr. Bentley discussed his sexual orientation in 1987, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I generally avoid the word bisexual,” he said. “People who call themselves bisexual are being evasive. They don’t want to be regarded as homosexual — or they want to be regarded as supermen, who like to sleep with everything and everybody.

“Nevertheless,” he went on, “if one can avoid these connotations, the word would be applicable to me, because I have been married twice, and neither of the marriages was fake; neither of them was a cover for something else; they were both a genuine relationship to a woman.”

Those marriages were to Maja Tschernjakow and to Joanne Davis, a psychotherapist. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second in separation (they never divorced). In addition to Ms. Davis and his son Philip, he is survived by another son, Eric Jr., and four grandchildren.

For all his laurels as a critic, Mr. Bentley carried a nagging regret: that his plays were not appreciated as much as his criticism.

“Brecht once told me that he left unpublished a lot of his poetry,” Mr. Bentley said in the 2006 Times interview, “because, he said: ‘If they regard me as a poet, they’ll say I’m not a playwright, I’m a poet. So I don’t publish the poems, so they’ll say I’m a playwright.’

“I feel at times that I should not have written my criticism,” Mr. Bentley continued, “because when I write a play, they say, ‘The critic has written a play.’”

[Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a former senior book critic for the Times, died in 2018.  Julia Carmel contributed reporting.

[A version of this article appears in print in the New York Times of Friday, 7 August 2020, Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: “Eric Bentley, Critic Who Preferred Brecht to Broadway, Is Dead at 103.”]

*  *  *  *

“MY CONVERSATIONS WITH ERIC BENTLEY”

by Nathaniel G. Nesmith

[Nathaniel Nesmith’s personal memoir of Eric Bentley appeared on the American Theatre website (https://www.americantheatre.org/) on 7 August 2020.  AT is a monthly publication of the Theatre Communications Group covering the non-profit theater scene.]

My relationship with the great theatre critic began with a wary interview but soon gave way to a lifetime of anecdotes, confidences, and laughter.

In the late 1980s, I was working on my MFA in playwriting at Columbia University when the chairman of the program, Howard Stein, invited Eric Bentley to be a guest speaker in our class. To say the experience was awesome for me would not begin to capture the spirit of the occasion. Eric Bentley was a rock star in the theatre world for us emerging theatre artists.

A decade later, after I had worked in the literary departments at various theatres (ranging from Playwrights Horizons to the now defunct Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays), I returned to Columbia to pursue a Ph.D. in theatre. One day, out of the blue, I had a stray notion unrelated to any of my classes: to sit down and have a conversation with Eric Bentley. This thought impelled me to send him a letter requesting an interview.

Given that well-established writers and scholars are often reputed to be eccentric, overbearing intellectuals, ego-driven charlatans, or talented creeps with insecurities galore, I did not feel put off by Mr. Bentley’s reply. He no longer gave interviews, he wrote, though he was curious to know why I wanted to interview him.

I wrote him back straightaway, highlighting how every aspect of his career had added to my intellectual growth: his scholarship, his involvement with Bertolt Brecht, and his own playwriting. In his reply, he asked what questions I would want to ask him. Using my research skills, I created 25 questions, which I sent him posthaste.

My industrious effort did not win him over. Only three questions, in his judgment, would  “engage a good conversation.” In his handwritten reply, he referred me to the places where I could locate the answers to my other questions—in one of his many books or articles.

I sent him a new batch of questions, and this time only two made the cut. We continued in this fashion for months, partly due to the slow method of communicating.

Finally, I wrote to him confirming that our correspondence had led to 15 questions he thought worthy of a discussion. I wanted to know, could I interview him now? I had given it my best and was prepared for the letdown. Fortunately, I got a positive response.

To say the interview went smoothly would understate its success; Studs Terkel would have envied the result. It was not just the content provided by Mr. Bentley; it was that, despite the difference in our class, race, age, and sexual orientation, we got on exceptionally well.

During the interview, Mr. Bentley was at ease, self-assured and not above bursting into laughter. His voice had a British cadence tempered by an American intonation. Most important, there was an insatiable curiosity in his eyes, which corresponded with his body language to search further, to get it right.

Mr. Bentley asked what I planned to do with the interview. I mentioned that I knew editors at several publications and could get them to look at it. He then ended our conversation on a harmonious note, saying that I should come by for lunch at some point. I assured him I would.

Several weeks later, after having sent the transcript to Andrea Stevens, an editor of the theatre section of The New York Times, I got my first call back from her. I had been pitching her unsuccessfully for years, and I thought: Finally I had given her something that she could use.

I was wrong.

Her castigation placed me in the persona non grata category. Ms. Stevens was outraged because she had heard that I told someone that the Times would be publishing the interview, when she had only agreed to look at it. She was quiet on her end of the phone while I had my say: I had no idea where she had gotten that information, but that it was totally false. I agreed with her that one should never alert anyone of a piece’s publication until it is actually headed into print—a lesson I learned the hard way early on in my freelance career. After my straightforward explanation, I think she concluded that I was not at fault.

The piece appeared in September 2000 in the Times [“A Memory Vault Rich in Lore of the Stage,” Sunday, 17 September 2000, Section 2 (“Arts & Leisure”), Page 5 (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/17/theater/theater-a-memory-vault-rich-in-lore-of-the-stage.html)], to mark Mr. Bentley’s 84th birthday [14 September], as well as the publication of a volume of his theatre criticism [What Is Theatre?, 2nd ed.]. To this day I’m not sure what had gone wrong with Ms. Stevens; I surmise that Mr. Bentley had told his publisher that the Times had our interview, and the publisher mentioned that to Ms. Stevens. The incident alerted me to Eric’s craftiness, which would engage and entertain me for decades.

Though this was in the early stages of my friendship with Eric, it was a critical period for me. Completion of my dissertation was the priority. Though he did not read my dissertation chapters, he was on the sidelines urging me forward, always supportive.

As our relationship progressed, I realized that I had more access to Eric Bentley than anyone with the exception of family members and [fashion illustrator] Lamont O’Neal, his dearest and closest associate. A natural byproduct of my association with him included our one-on-one conversations, which had literary advantages for me. Unlike the hurdles I went through for my first interview of him, my next two interviews with him (published in TDR [“Eric Bentley: On Hero Worship and Degradation,” The Drama Review, Volume 46, Number 1 (T 173), Spring 2002] and The Yale Review [“An Interview With Eric Bentley,” Volume 91, Issue 3 (July 2003)], respectively) presented no difficulties.

Jonathan Kalb [theater critic and professor of theater at Hunter College, CUNY] once wrote, correctly, that Mr. Bentley was “considered indispensable to anyone serious about theatre.” Beyond his own scholarship, his criticism, reviews, translations, and playwriting, Eric wrote about, knew, or dealt with many of the major theatrical figures of the early to mid-20th century, from Thornton Wilder to Tennessee Williams, from Arthur Miller to Tony Kushner, from Helene Weigel [actress, wife of Bertold Brecht] to Hallie Flanagan [director of the Federal Theatre Project, a part of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA)].

Over many years and many conversations, I had the privilege of Eric’s sharing insider’s details, ranging from when he and Robert Penn Warren were on the faculty in the department of English at the University of Minnesota and he used his influence to have Warren’s play All The King’s Men (Proud Flesh) [1936] produced there, to his battle with Lillian Hellman over her objection of his using her letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee in his play on that theme [Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been (1972)], to [playwright] Paul Green’s naïveté about how Jews were being treated in Germany during World War II.

Many of these conversations with Eric were priceless, and they were not always cerebral. They were often rich with earthy humor. One example: Eric was visiting England when he had a job interview with Shakespeare scholar John Russell Brown. During their meeting, Prof. Brown was called out to deal with an important matter. Before he left the room, he showed Eric a hidden cabinet where he kept his Scotch and told Eric to have a drink. The meeting kept Prof. Brown away longer than he had anticipated, and when he returned, Eric was obviously drunk.

In addition to the memories of our many conversations, there were events in Eric’s life that I will also always remember. Three stand out. First, though I had visited Eric in the hospital and shared lunches with him when he was bedridden with broken hips, I was unprepared when I went to visit him at his home and was part of an emotionally wrenching moment in which he had to be rushed to the hospital—he had suffered a minor stroke. What was uncanny about this experience, when death could have been imminent, was how calm Eric was.

Second: On Nov. 4, 2008, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, the first African American elected to that office, he had received a vote from Eric Bentley. Eric was 92 and walking with a cane; he had entered the phase of life where he could no longer manage certain things by himself. It was a major task for him to get to the voting booth, but he was determined and asked me to accompany him. When we arrived, Eric was prepared to stand in a long line. Fortunately, because of his age, he was escorted to the head of the line. He was very pleased and felt honored that he had the opportunity to vote for Obama.

Third: Before the tribute concert in honor of Eric’s 100th birthday at Town Hall in New York City in 2015, featuring a list of artists and scholars with a performance by soprano Karyn Levitt, a small group of guests gathered to celebrate Eric’s birthday privately at his home. I was honored to be among them. After the event was over and during my next visit to Eric, I remember telling him that the celebration was the first birthday party for someone who was 100 that I had ever attended. He stared at me to indicate that it was not only unique for me—it was a first for him as well. Eric had not only outlived many, he had also survived a number of legendary friends.

One of them was Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun, who was very supportive of Eric during his time at Columbia. Barzun died in October 2012 at 104.  Shortly after Eric turned 100, I mentioned to Eric that he could live as long as Barzun had. Eric roared with laughter. (He would have been 104 in September.)

There were times when unexpected laughter in our conversations led to me learn [sic] about aspects of Eric’s career of which I was completely unaware; for example, his audition for Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of La MaMa. He was singing and [composer and poet] Brad Burg was accompanying him on piano, and from the next room he heard a voice pitch in freely and frequently from the next room, “Fuck you, brother.” Ms. Stewart liked the audition and decided to produce the play, The Red White and Black, a Patriotic Demonstration, at La MaMa in 1971. The voice from the next room? That was Ellen Stewart’s parrot.

One time Eric mentioned that he and [Harlem Renaissance poet] Langston Hughes were at a gathering, and Hughes playfully tugged at his socks in a signal to Eric that he was also gay. Another time he recalled a gathering at Ralph Ellison’s [novelist, author of  Invisible Man (1952)], at which he had the chance to chat with Ellison’s wife, Fanny McConnell Edison. Eric said he found her far more interesting than Ellison. Eric also noted that though he was responsible for getting Amiri Baraka [formetly LeRoi Jones, poet and playwright, author of Dutchman (1964)] a job at Columbia, he later regretted it, as Baraka’s attitude, behavior, and politics grew to infuriate Eric.

Many of our conversations were laden with historical significance. For example, in one of our last conversations, we offhandedly started to talk about HB Studio. Eric had a tremendous amount of respect for its co-founder, Uta Hagen, but had parted ways with her husband, Herbert Berghof, after he cut 20 minutes from an early version of Eric’s play, The Recantation of Galileo Galilei [1973], at HB Studio, without the playwright’s consent.

At times these conversations were proof positive of John Guare’s six degrees of separation (or fewer). For example, it came to my attention that Eric was one of [film critic, essayist, fiction writer, and poet] Phillip Lopate’s professors at Columbia; in turn, Lopate was one of my professors when I was a student working on my MFA at Columbia. And playwright William Branch, whose Times obituary I wrote last year, had been [a] student of Eric’s at Columbia; Eric had recommended Branch for a Guggenheim Award in the late 1950s.

Like Lopate and Branch, I too was one of Eric’s students. He did not educate me about the theatre in a classroom setting, but he surely must have been aware he was educating me with his anecdotes and criticism. It was not only his conversations I gained greatly from; I also accompanied him or was his invited guest when he [. . .] spoke or served as a panelist at many events. At some point, I was able to return the favor, educating him about current productions I was able to see that he was only able to read about, due to his health.

Each of Eric’s birthday celebrations in recent years has had its own share of awkwardness, as I’ve encountered people to whom I had to explain that, yes, Eric was still among us, still alive. Eric was aware that death was not far away. When I said goodbye during our meetings in the last few years, I always wondered heart-wrenchingly if it would be our last goodbye, but there was always an optimistic look in his eyes when he sincerely stated that he would see me the following week.

The conversations I had with Eric will sustain me for the rest of my life. I did not pry for gossip, nor did Eric tell me his deepest secrets; nonetheless, he shared things with me I wished I could have recorded. Eric was quite clear about carrying certain things to his grave; this is something I intuitively understand.

In one conversation I had with Eric, he talked about George Bernard Shaw, one of his first theatre idols and the subject of one of his books [Bernard Shaw (1947)]. He said he had contacted Shaw and had planned to visit him, but Shaw discouraged him, saying that Eric would be disappointed; he would meet an old man, not the author he expected to see.  [Shaw would have been 91 at the time Bentley’s book was released; the Irish playwright  died in 1950 at 94.] Eric was later quite pleased when he visited the Shaw Museum [George Bernard Shaw Museum in the Shaw Birthplace, Dublin] to see that [Bentley’s] Shaw biography was the only one available in the gift shop. He went on to say that his greatest regret in life was not meeting Shaw. I know what he means: Had I not met Eric, it most certainly would have been one of the great regrets of my life.

Oliver Sacks [British neurologist and author; Awakenings (1973), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985)], who died in 2015, once wrote, “When people die, they cannot be replaced.” He is so right; no one could ever replace Eric.

[I met Eric Bentley briefly one time at a reception for his 70th birthday (September 1986) at Applause Theatre Books on the Upper West Side.  I don’t know why my name was on the invitation list, but I’d been in contact with Bentley earlier that year—we’d never met; it was correspondence only—and that might have accounted for my invitation. 

[In the mid-’80s, I edited two theatrical newsletters, one for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now  “. . . of the Americas”) and the other for the now-defunct American Directors Institute.  ADI organized panel discussions and conferences to promote a better understanding, both among the public and among theater professionals, of what stage directors and artistic directors actually do.   

[In November 1986, ADI held its second conference, Symposium II: The Director’s Vision, and had invited Eric Bentley to give the keynote address.  Bentley turned us down and in two letters, dated 20 June and 12 July, to ADI’s artistic director, Geoffrey Shlaes, explained his attitude toward the profession of stage director. 

[In the Winter 1986 issue of Directors Notes, ADI’s newsletter. I ran excerpts from those letters to share some of Bentley’s provocative thoughts with ADI’s members.  Among his statements, Bentley wrote: “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre. . . .  No director is needed: the function is properly performed by either the playwright (Molière, Brecht) or the leading actor ([Edwin] Booth, [Henry] Irving)” and “A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.” 

[Bentley also declared that “while in technology there is progress, in the arts there is not; otherwise Arthur Miller would be a better playwright than Aeschylus.”  Amidst his disparagement of directors, Bentley also called dramaturgs “Ph.D. gofers” and warned that he’d “remove [dramaturgs] one day before removing [directors].”  ~Rick

[Nathaniel G. Nesmith holds an MFA in playwriting and a Ph.D. in theater from Columbia University.  He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Marymount Manhattan College, City College of New York, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and recently completed his Creating Connections Consortium Postdoctoral Fellowship at Middlebury College.  He has published articles in American Theatre, The Dramatist, The Drama Review, the New York Times, Yale Review, African American Review, and other publications.]