A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

For most of its history, TIME has had only two drama critics: Louis Kronenberger (1938-61) and T.E. (Ted) Kalem (1961-85), who died of cancer this summer. Their successor is Associate Editor William A. Henry III, who this week inaugurates the new theater season with his reviews of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Song & Dance and Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot. Henry also wrote a critique on the "Festival of India," a series of events in the U.S. celebrating that ancient civilization's arts and culture.

Since his debut as a dramatist at the age of eight in North Plainfield, N.J., in a one-act drama starring himself, Henry has had two "abiding passions": the theater and writing. He reviewed plays for his high school paper and then for the Yale Daily News. He also took a few turns on the boards himself, acting in productions at the professional Yale Repertory Theater and in summer stock. But acting gave way to writing, on both national politics and cultural affairs, for the Boston Globe (where he won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for criticism), the New York Daily News and, since 1981, for TIME. "When I'm writing about politics," says Henry, "I think about how it resonates with what's happening in the rest of society. When I'm commenting on cultural affairs, I ponder how they interact with the prevalent ideas in politics."

Henry, who has just published a book on the 1984 election campaign, Visions of America, has been serving as TIME's drama critic since last winter. "The theater," he says, "is often the quickest of the literary arts to respond to social and political trends. At least in smaller-scale productions, there is more room for art for passion's sake."

Reviewing drama for TIME, with its worldwide readership, is very different from a local newspaper's theater beat. Says Henry: "Every review has to answer the question, Why is this important enough for us to tell our readers about it? At TIME we tend to limit ourselves to events of great literary significance, those involving very famous people, or on rare occasions, those we find simply irresistible fun." For every show he reviews in print, he estimates, he sees seven or eight more, on Broadway and off, across the country, in Canada and Europe.

There is the further obligation to write in a way that will stand the test of time: "This magazine is looked upon as an archive, by theater people and others," says Henry. "Thanks to Kronenberger and Kalem, TIME has an extraordinarily rich tradition of theater criticism. It is an immense challenge to live up to it."