One on the Aisle

Just before the final curtain at a Broadway opening one night last week, the theater critic of the New York Times, a mild, slender, unassuming man with steel-rimmed spectacles and a grey mustache, slipped inconspicuously out of the Lyceum Theater and walked two blocks back to his paper. He settled into his chair on the third floor of the Times building on 43rd Street, and following the practice of years, spread out the theater program, a dozen freshly pointed pencils and a legal-size pad of lined paper. Then, writing by hand, one paragraph at a time--each snatched immediately by the impatient copy desk--he delivered his judgment ("inherently hopeless'') on Goodbye Charlie, the comedy he had just seen. Within an hour, the Times's presses were reproducing an appraisal that would be read respectfully, not only by those directly involved in the show, but by everyone connected with the American theater.

To Get Free Tickets. On nights when a Broadway production is baptized, none of the New York critics speaks with more effect than Justin Brooks Atkinson, 65. Part of his effect stems from the fact that he is the Times critic and part from his own reputation built through the years. "Half our lives,'' says Broadway Producer David Merrick (Fanny, La Plume de Ma Tante), "depend on a good review from Atkinson." Says Producer Alfred de Liagre Jr. (J.B.): "In terms of influence, Brooks is worth any four of the other critics." These awed testimonials go to a man who shifts uneasily beneath the burden of his influence ("Power bothers me; I'd rather not have it"), and who says he got into drama criticism for purely mercenary considerations: "I got interested in the theater mainly, I'm afraid, because you got free tickets when you wrote about it."

Once interested, Harvardman ('17) Atkinson fixed his sights on an aisle seat in New York. Getting there involved five years of apprenticeship on two Massachusetts papers and a brief digression as English instructor at Dartmouth. By 1922 he was within strolling distance of Broadway, editing the Sunday book section of the Times; and three years later, when the Times's Drama Critic Stark Young resigned, Atkinson took Young's place.

Allegiance to the Theatergoer. A reporter at heart, he has always felt a stronger allegiance to the theatergoer than to the theater. A man of many interests, he has published seven books, mostly collections of casual, contemplative essays, is a chronic bird watcher and boat watcher, a part-time farmer (he owns 153 acres in Durham, N.Y.), and an amateur woodworker. When World War II broke out, he insisted that the Times send him abroad as a correspondent, spent two years in China, followed that up with a ten-month reportorial stint in Moscow that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

In his primary role as theater critic, he writes reviews that are at times labored, but are almost always based on calm and accurate judgment. They are sometimes memorable ("Saroyan," he once wrote, "does his writing with a Roman candle"), and so just, even in censure, that his victims cannot long harbor offense. Last year, in an unprecedented display of affection, 130 actors, playwrights and producers threw a surprise party in honor of the Times critic at Sardi's, the after-theater hangout, where Brooks Atkinson, a chronic stay-at-home, met Katharine Cornell, Thornton Wilder, and several other stage luminaries for the first time in his life.

Bleakness on Broadway. Last week tributes far more unsettling than the soiree at Sardi's came flooding into his little shoebox office at the Times. For years he had been thinking that 65 was a good time to give up his seat on the aisle, and months before reaching that milestone in November, he confided his decision to his editors. He seemed to agree with some of his critics who thought that he was not up to his old form. "I've gotten unfresh," he said. He would finish the season, then stay on the staff as a sporadic contributor, perhaps writing leisurely essays for the Sunday magazine, perhaps wandering around Europe with his wife Oriana in search of a new and absorbing theme. When the Times last week belatedly announced his decision (in a two-inch item at the bottom of page 55), all Broadway felt the loss.

"I feel pretty bleak this morning," said Walter Kerr, New York Herald Tribune drama critic, "and the theater should feel bleaker." Said Author and onetime Fellow Aisle-Sitter John Mason Brown: "I feel as if St. John the Divine had been bombed." The subject of this extravagant praise accepted it with characteristic humility. "I've never felt I was the master of my field," said Brooks Atkinson.

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