Princeton prof wins CU-administered Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism

The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for the 1998-99 season has been awarded to Michael Goldman, author of Ibsen: the Dramaturgy of Fear.

Goldman will accept the prize, his second Nathan award, during a ceremony Feb. 14, from 6 to 8 p.m., at The Players, 16 Gramercy Park South, in Manhattan.

"The award committee had little trouble coming to a decision this year," said Harry E. Shaw, chair of Cornell's Department of English and leader of this year's Nathan Award committee. "Goldman's book is drama criticism of the very highest order, eminently well suited to foster the aim George Jean Nathan had in mind in creating the award, the stimulation of intelligent playgoing."

Goldman, a professor of English at Princeton University, garnered his first Nathan Award in 1976 for a work titled The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama. An author of six books, he received a National Book Award nomination for Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama. Goldman also has published two books of poetry and has served as poetry editor of The Nation.

The Nathan Award is administered by the Cornell English department under the terms of a trust established by George Jean Nathan, author, critic and 1904 Cornell graduate. Given annually since 1958, the award honors the "the best piece of dramatic criticism, whether article, essay, treatise or book," published during the theatrical year. The $10,000 prize is one of the more lucrative and distinguished in the American theater. The winner is selected by a committee consisting of the chairs of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities and an expert on dramatic criticism from each department.

Of Goldman's award-winning work, the committee's citation states: "In his eloquently written Ibsen: the Dramaturgy of Fear, Michael Goldman leads the reader to the edge of the abyss of the later plays, from A Doll's House to When We Dead Awaken. Looking steadily into the depths of cruelty plumbed by many of Ibsen's characters and the pain they inflict on themselves and others, Goldman reanimates on every page the harrowing but fascinating 'contacts' (as in 'contact sports') that the playwright so relentlessly provokes. Above all, this brief but densely packed book celebrates the life of Ibsen's dramas onstage, recapturing in its rigorous selection of crucial details (in that and in other matters so like the plays themselves) the truth that Ibsen is a poet of the theater, by the theater, and for the theater."