Richard Gilman

When Richard Gilman, who has died aged 83, joined Yale University school of drama in 1967, he had a name as an intellectual drama critic, with little teaching experience apart from short stints at Columbia and Stanford universities. A year earlier, his friend Robert Brustein had become dean of the school, shaking it up by creating the Yale Rep as the school's public platform, training students for repertory rather than Broadway or Hollywood. Gilman was an ally in this adventure and, until his retirement in 1998, taught popular modern drama, while his graduate playwriting and criticism workshops became legendary for their wit and erudition.

As a playwriting teacher Gilman provided his students with critical sharpness and personal warmth. Slashing their work and giving them a supporting hug was his style. He had a hand in the emergence of Christopher Durang, Albert Innaurato, Wendy Wasserstein, Ted Talley and William Hauptmann, and of actors such as Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver.

For Gilman, modern drama started with Georg Buechner and rose to maturity in the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Pirandello, followed by Brecht and Beckett. His book The Making of Modern Drama (1974) has a chapter on Peter Handke, whose play Kaspar provides a character to join the damned and ostracised with whom Gilman sympathised. Not a man of direct activism, he sided with those dramatis personae who shook the established order as cultural, emotional and sexual subversives.

Gilman returned repeatedly to Chekhov. His book Chekhov Plays (1995) highlights the playwright's elusive and sardonic moments as an anticipation of the tragicomedy of the absurd.

Gilman's criticism workshop - along with beer and pretzels - was a gruelling experience for the students submitting their writing. Pieces could be about anything, and I once reviewed two cookbooks just to test the limit. The piece was discussed by all in a humorous and cutting spirit, sustained by Gilman, and then read by him line by line with more hilarious comments. The method, as brutal as it was, taught us to read with critical scrutiny. The sardonic deconstruction was sobering but effective.

Gilman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a lawyer's family that was "psychologically Jewish" but hardly religious. He enrolled at Wisconsin University on the eve of Pearl Harbor, joined the marine corps in 1943, fought in the Pacific and graduated after the war.

He then became an "intellectual hobo" in lower Manhattan bohemia until, attracted by the "essential truths" of Catholicism, he converted. He left the church a few years later with more intellectual self-assurance and a strengthened will. By then, he was writing in the progressive Catholic magazine, the Commonweal, about literature and film, and, from 1961, on theatre.

He was recruited in 1964 by Newsweek to write on the theatre. But, under editorial pressure, he had to focus on the mainstream while his interests rested on the "off" and emerging "off off" New York scene. "In Commonweal I could simply invoke Kierkegaard," Gilman said "while in Newsweek I had to write 'the hunchbacked, 19th-century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard'."

Gilman stood for partisan criticism. He was interested in innovation and curious about the European avant-garde that rarely made it to New York. Opposing the conventional naturalism of American drama and the psychological approach nurtured by Method acting, dismissive of Eugene O'Neill and Thornton Wilder, and hostile to sentimentalism, Gilman favoured the stage as a realm of imagination. He praised the early Living Theater and found his ultimate heretic hero in Polish director Jerzy Grotowski in the late 1960s.

Writing occasionally in the Partisan Review, the Nation and elsewhere, Gilman championed the intellectual challenge of dramatic writing and the transformative power of the stage. He authored Decadence: the Strange Life of an Epithet (1979), and an intellectual memoir of faith found and lost, Faith, Sex, Mystery (1986). His collected theatre criticism from 1961 to 1991, The Drama is Coming Now (2005), reads as a war of attrition between the outriders of avant garde and experimentation and the trivia of Broadway.

After a heart attack in 1992 and a diagnosis of cancer in 1997, Gilman moved to Japan. There, he was cared for by his third wife, Yasuko Shiojiri, who translated his work in Japanese. She survives him, as do two daughters and a son in the US, and four grandchildren.

· Richard Gilman, theatre scholar, born April 30 1923; died October 29 2006

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