Wolcott Gibbs: A Tribute

For nearly a quarter of a century. Wolcott Gibbs was the most hated dramatic critic in America. Week after week in the New Yorker, for years on end, he told the plain and frequently embarrassing truth about the American stage. There must be at least a dozen dramatic critics in this country blessed with keen minds and capable of displaying admirable taste and sound judgment; but for all their astuteness, they cannot be counted upon to give us consistently what, until his recent death, Wolcott Gibbs gave us, unfailingly and without quibble or shuffle, for so many years: the truth. He was about the only critic of recent times who had the courage and integrity to call a ghastly play ghastly and a dirty play (or musical) dirty, in as many words.

The New Yorker, in its moving obituary notice of one of the last of the remaining greats from its great days, observed that “two important things happened to him about twenty years ago: he fell under the spell of the theatre . . . and he fell desperately in love with Fire Island, where the sun and the wind and the untidy civilization of that relaxed and accessible sandbar supplied him with ingredients missing in Manhattan.” Falling under the spell of something is not necessarily the same thing as falling in love with it, but in Gibbs’ case the two came pretty close to being one. And he probably could not have loved the theater so much had he not loved Fire Island more.

JC

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John Abbot Clark

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For nearly a quarter of a century. Wolcott Gibbs was the most hated dramatic critic in America. Week after week in the New Yorker, for years on end, he told the plain and frequently embarrassing truth about the American stage. There must be at least a dozen dramatic critics in this country blessed with keen minds and capable of displaying admirable taste and sound judgment; but for all their astuteness, they cannot be counted upon to give us consistently what, until his recent death, Wolcott Gibbs gave us, unfailingly and without quibble or shuffle, for so many years: the truth. He was about the only critic of recent times who had the courage and integrity to call a ghastly play ghastly and a dirty play (or musical) dirty, in as many words.

The New Yorker, in its moving obituary notice of one of the last of the remaining greats from its great days, observed that “two important things happened to him about twenty years ago: he fell under the spell of the theatre . . . and he fell desperately in love with Fire Island, where the sun and the wind and the untidy civilization of that relaxed and accessible sandbar supplied him with ingredients missing in Manhattan.” Falling under the spell of something is not necessarily the same thing as falling in love with it, but in Gibbs’ case the two came pretty close to being one. And he probably could not have loved the theater so much had he not loved Fire Island more.