Appreciation: Theater critic Gordon Rogoff found the most artful language to capture acting greatness

“For the most part, playwrights represent recordable theatre history while actors, forlornly in the wings to the end, stand for unrecordable history.” Theater critic Gordon Rogoff, who died last week at 92, made this observation in a 1966 essay on the state of British theater in the indignant wake of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.” His criticism, collected in two anthologies, “Theatre Is Not Safe” and “Vanishing Acts,” is the perfect rebuttal to his point. And he influenced generations of theater artists and critics, including myself, through his unorthodox teaching, which he pedagogically defended as the “exposure of sensibility.” Rogoff’s theater criticism was long a mainstay of the Village Voice, often appearing beside the work of his gifted former Yale student Michael Feingold. Rogoff noted that in making the protagonist, Garry Essendine, “quite naturally more dimensional in every way than Coward or his imitators would ever be, bringing to Garry a physical bulk, a fullness of spirit, and a weight of emotional history,” Scott rescues the play from being “mainly about Garry’s dressing gowns and the telephone.” Reviewing Kathleen Turner in a stage production of a play he didn’t think much of, Pam Gems’ “Camille” at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, he reflected on what made Turner so gripping on screen: “More substantial, more soiled than Garbo, she nonetheless treats the camera in the same way — a friendly eavesdropper on her floating consciousness. She’s large, but never so proud that she can’t be intimate.” In his eulogy of Geraldine Page, he recalled the Actors Studio standard bearer’s “surprising voice, with its panpipings suddenly interrupted by great, flat baritone wails.” Mourning the great roles the American theater failed to provide her, he called her “that rare actor in America or anywhere else, the impish clown who, given half a chance, could blow the gods off Olympus.” His high esteem for Ingmar Bergman’s stage productions had as much to do with the Swedish auteur’s boldly rigorous readings of classic texts as with the director’s concern for the human center of these plays.