The above of course oversimplifies the history that lies behind this website. I maintained an earlier blog that enshrined a decade and a half of my columns and reviews – but also a lot of other things. As my writing has refocused, though, it’s time to do the same with my blogging. This site, then, is strictly for my reviews and my plays – which I find are not always that separate in their concerns. All my writings address human desires and aspirations with a reverence for facts and principles. You can’t run a society or write a play well without candor, consistency, or a sense of humaneness and decency. The critic and the creator: both of them are guard dogs protecting these values.

When you’re the age I am now (70 at this writing), a life is complicated to summarize. But here are some nuggets. I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature. I thought that teaching would provide an easy on-ramp into a writer’s life – but teaching itself didn’t happen, jobs being vanishingly scarce. Instead, I did some freelance journalism, until I blundered into law school, which surprisingly turned out to be a great fit and a great time, and the entrée to a wonderful law career. But even with a full-time practice, I never really stopped writing, whether it was book criticism for the old Baltimore Sunday Sun, drama criticism in the Baltimore Business Journal, or one-off pieces in odd places like The Wall Street Journal or the website of the Baltimore Symphony. Getting to the point where I decided I wanted to be a writer and nothing else was just a matter of time – and of picking up some steady gigs like a column and my current reviewing post, BroadwayWorld.com.