(August 9, 1913 - Feb. 23, 1998)
The drama critic at The New Yorker for 31 years said in a 1992 interview, "Off Broadway was the love of my life. I was young enough to be all over town, four or five nights a week. The thrill was Harlem in the 60's, for the music and the theater."
Edith Oliver (nee Goldsmith) was born in New York City to a "stage struck" family. She studied at Smith College but did not graduate.
However she studied acting privately with
Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Frances Robinson Duff and worked as an apprentice at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, MA, becoming an assistant director between 1932 and 1933. She was a fan of the novelist, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and began using the name Edith Oliver as a stage name in her early 20s. An aspiring stage actress, she landed small parts in radio plays which included Gangbusters, Crime Doctor and the Philip Morris Playhouse (frequently using her low-pitched voice to portray gun molls). After casting for the Biow Advertising agency, she wrote and produced several radio quiz shows.
She began working part-time for The New Yorker magazine in 1947. During the 1950s she wrote short pieces and book reviews which ran without a by-line. In 1961 she officially joined the staff, reviewing movies for five years and then theater for 32 years. ---always off-Broadway, but occasionally Broadway. Known for her toughness and her love of theater, she became "among the most influential voices covering off-Broadway theater. She was the first reviewer to recognize and champion such playwrights as David Mamet, Christopher Durang, and Wendy Wasserstein and Sam Shepard.
Thornton Wilder wrote to her, "Your immense usefulness did not proceed from your 'championing' the new theater, beating the drum, 'torch-bearing', but simply from your writing so well,--quietly, firmly, faithfully reporting what you saw. There is no persuasion equal to that fidelity."
Edward Albee said of her: "She was tough, she was honest, and she didn't write her reviews before she saw the play. She had an agenda, but hers was really quite simple. If you were any good at all as a playwright, if you were honest, if you were tough, and you realized that a play had to be more than decorative, and have something to say, no matter how badly you said it, she was on your side...Woe unto you if you consciously did less than she knew you were capable of."
She was a dramaturge for 20 seasons (1975-1995) at the National Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut. George C. White, chairman and founder of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center remarked: "She was packaged like the quintessential elderly lady that a Boy Scout would help across the street, except that she drank martinis, smoked cigarettes and could, on occasion, have a mouth like a sailor. She could be tough and would brook no banality, but she truly loved playwrights and loved the theater."
In 1996 she was presented with the Lucille Lortel award for "Lifetime Dedication to Off-Broadway" by the Off-Broadway League. The Eugene O'Neill Playwrights' Conference renamed their outdoor theater after her; it became known as "The Edith." Currently, the O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics Institute, directed by Dan Sullivan, awards a full scholarship to "a young critic, preferably female, whose copy reflects some of the shrewdness and kindness that marked every Edith Oliver review."
At a critics' roundtable in Manhattan, she described her approach to her work. "I think of myself as a member of the audience and I try to maintain that attitude until the curtain comes down. I don't want to deprive myself of any surprises."
Resources: Wikipedia, Notable Women in the American Theatre. ed. 1989
Gayle Austin
NY Times Obituary, Feb. 25, 1998 by Rick Lyman
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