David Richards, a theater critic whose lively and accessible prose style made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist at The Washington Post and who had a brief stint as the New York Times’s chief drama critic, died June 24 at a hospital in Warrenton, Va. He was 82.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his husband, theater director Leonard Foglia.
As a child growing up in a stoic New England family in the postwar years, Richards often said the rule at home was to cloak all emotion and “never make a scene.” His eventual introduction to community theater in his teens was a revelation – people making scenes for a living, eight times a week. “I was hooked,” he liked to say. “I learned about life from the theater.”
After a varied early career, including a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, as a French instructor at Howard University, and as a writer for the Voice of America, Richards worked as a drama critic at the Washington Star for a decade until the newspaper folded in 1981.
Richards spent the next nine years at The Post and was disinclined to stay within strict boundaries as a theater critic. He covered cultural news stories and profiled stage luminaries such as director Jose Quintero, playwright Edward Albee and actors Julie Harris and Carol Channing. Some of them may not have relished his revealing dive into their off-the-clock personalities.
“Channing does not indulge in introspection eagerly,” he observed in a 1984 article. “She would clearly prefer to dwell in the shallows of her show business anecdotes. … If you try to get behind them, you encounter stiff resistance. She has always given every bit of herself on a stage, and any implication that there is, perhaps, another Channing, a private Channing, under the feathery eyelashes and extravagant wigs and generous dollops of rouge, makes her profoundly uneasy.”
With some “raw nerve” touched by his line of questions, Richards reported, Channing, began a sour but telling soliloquy: “Nobody likes to take himself dead-on seriously, like we’re doing now, laboring over my innermost thoughts. I can be as funny as a crutch, and we could laugh and have a good time. But if you don’t want me to be lighthearted and amusing, fine!”
Richards was a Pulitzer finalist in 1989 and was lured the next year to the Times as a Sunday drama critic. He relished the position, which allowed him the freedom to write at length about whatever play appealed to him. The Sunday job was also considered a rejoinder at times to views expressed by the show-making/show-breaking chief theater critic Frank Rich, especially when the latter was displeased with a production.
Where Rich torpedoed “The Will Rogers Follies” in 1991 as “the most disjointed musical of this or any other season,” Richards praised the “sumptuous production numbers, exquisite chorus girls, phosphorescent rope tricks in black light, a dog act, songs you want to hum, a stairway to paradise (or somewhere thereabouts), close harmony, shapely legs in kaleidoscopic patterns, and a thoroughly engaging star performance by Keith Carradine, as the laconic cowboy-philosopher from Oklahoma.”
“The Will Rogers Follies,” an audience hit, ran for two years. In 1993, Richards replaced Rich, who left his longtime perch covering theater to became an op-ed columnist at the Times. Foglia said his husband felt he could not refuse the offer to take over the main position, but it was an ill-suited fit almost from the start.
Richards quit after a year. There were varying reports about the circumstances of his leaving, all of which amounted to his general unhappiness in the job in which he suddenly was the most influential theater critic in the country and had significantly less autonomy in the shows he could choose to spotlight.
“It struck me as a very isolating job,” he told The Post at the time. “It’s one of those jobs that look enviable from the outside, less enviable from the inside. People resent the Times’ theatrical power and therefore resent the person who wields it.”
He noted that he had seen 5,000 plays during his career and was tired of the overwhelming amount of mediocrity. “You end up having to write about nebulous, gray, shapeless, formless plays,” he said, “and it’s a hard thing to do and be interesting about it.”
Of solitary disposition to start with, he found himself increasingly wary of invitations from boldface figures in New York journalism and society. As Foglia recalled, “He used to say, ‘They don’t want me. They want the critic of the New York Times to fill up the spot on the table.'”
Friends in Washington encouraged him to return to The Post, which he did for two years as a national cultural affairs writer before leaving journalism.
David Bryant Richards was born in Concord, Mass., on Oct. 1, 1940, and spent his early years in Lexington, Mass. He was 9 years old when his father, a home builder, died. His mother, an interior decorator, and real estate agent, remarried and settled with David and his younger brother in Scottsdale, Ariz.
In Arizona, his mother took him every week to the local playhouse, and Richards soon found himself entranced. “Good theater stretches our notions of people and events,” he once observed. “And a stretched mind never returns exactly to its original shape.”
He graduated in 1962 from Occidental College in Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in French, followed by a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont.
In addition to studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, he spent two years in the Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps, where he taught French. He completed a master’s degree in speech and drama from Catholic University in 1969 and acted with the university’s touring theater group.
Richards had published articles in Arizona newspapers starting at 17 and had long considered a career in journalism before his interest in drama led him to the critic’s seat at the Star.
In 1981, he published “Played Out,” a biography about the troubled movie star Jean Seberg, who had been targeted by the FBI for her support of the Black Panther Party and died by suicide two years earlier.
Richards and Foglia became a couple soon after meeting in 1993. They married in 2014 when same-sex marriage became legal in Virginia. They co-wrote suspense novels and lived many years in Mexico, where Richards received a master’s degree in art history from the Universidad Autónoma de Queretaro.
In addition to his husband, survivors include a brother. In 2010, Richards and Foglia settled on a 21-acre property in rural Washington, Va., near Shenandoah National Park, and he grew tomatoes. His visits to the theater became infrequent as his physical condition worsened.
“The theater allows us to encounter a far greater tangle of human behavior than we ever do in the course of daily living,” he once wrote of his driving motivation as a critic. “It is a celebration of our multiple possibilities as human beings. At its best, theater leaves us with one sure thought: There but for the whimsies of fate, go I.”
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