Albert Williams, chief theater critic at the Chicago Reader, is the winner of the 1999-2000 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The $10,000 prize, administered by the Cornell University Department of English, is one of the most generous and distinguished in the American theater. Williams was selected by a committee consisting of the chairs of and experts from the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities.
"The Nathan committee was pleased to award the prize to a working journalist, someone very much in the tradition of George Jean Nathan himself," said Harry Shaw, the Cornell English department chair who led the Nathan Award committee.
The Nathan committee selects a winner based on surveys and nominations of works by authors, critics and reviewers who are U.S. citizens and whose works are published in print, radio or televised media.
In its award citation, the committee says: "Williams writes the kind of criticism for which the George Jean Nathan Prize was designed -- incisive, thorough, confident in the intelligence of its readers and convinced that the theatre makes a difference to the city in which it occurs "
Williams has been writing for the Chicago Reader since 1985. His 1999-2000 reviews covered a wide range of plays, from early and late O'Neill and the revival of the '60s rock musical Hair to a contemporary farce about Sigmund Freud and the latest installment of the Second City revue. In addition to his duties at Chicago's leading alternative weekly, Williams is an artist-in-residence at the theater department of Columbia College in Chicago, where he cofacilitates the musical theater performance major and the Betty Garrett Musical Theater Scholarship.
"I am deeply honored by this award and see it as an opportunity to focus attention on the important -- but too-often ignored or disrespected -- role of criticism in the theater, on the legacy of Mr. Nathan and on Chicago's vital place in American theater, something which Chicagoans themselves sometimes seem to take too much for granted," said Williams.
George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) graduated from Cornell in 1904 and went on to preside over the American theater scene during its formative development, approximately 1910 to 1950. As author and critic, Nathan had an influence on American drama that was wide-ranging and profound. He brought new sophistication to American dramatic criticism through a widely syndicated drama column published in Smart Set and American Mercury, which he founded with H.L. Mencken.
For Nathan, the critic was the essential link between the ideal of drama and the vagaries of the living art form, and it was his hope to keep the ideal thriving under the terms of the trust he established. Designed to "stimulate intelligent playgoing," the $10,000 prize has been awarded annually since 1958 to drama critics who exercised their powers to that end.
Past recipients of the Nathan Award have included Walter Kerr (1963) and Mel Gussow (1978) of The New York Times, Kevin Kelly (1992) of the Boston Globe and Alisa Solomon (1998) of the Village Voice.
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