J. Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail’s theatre critic, won his fourth Nathan Cohen Award.The Globe and Mail
The Canadian Theatre Critics Association has awarded J. Kelly Nestruck, The Globe and Mail’s theatre critic, this year’s Nathan Cohen Award for outstanding critical essay for “Shaw vs. Shaw: Why the theatre festival isn’t cancelling the anti-vaxxer playwright.”
Mr. Nestruck’s essay explored how George Bernard Shaw, the namesake of the second-largest theatre festival in Canada, formed his vaccination views. At the time of writing in 2021, the festival was producing Shaw’s play The Devil’s Disciple.
“That the Shaw Festival is finally producing Shaw again is a direct consequence of a significant majority of the province’s population receiving at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine,” Mr. Nestruck wrote. “Is there a certain dramatic irony here?”
This year the award was judged by Chris Jones, theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune.
Mr. Jones described Mr. Nestruck’s essay as an “audacious idea” that is “replete with a deliciously exasperated comment from the artistic director, who clearly didn’t want to answer the question.”
“In short, this was a fresh and worthwhile criticism of George Bernard Shaw, but also an accessible piece that nodded to the complexity, perhaps even the absurdity, of critiquing a prominent anti-vaxxer from a previous century, and thus a world away,” Mr. Jones wrote in a news release.
This is Mr. Nestruck’s fourth Nathan Cohen Award, named after the noted Canadian theatre critic. He last won in 2019 for his coverage of the Robert Lepage production Kanata, épisode 1, la controverse; in 2016 for a piece on three Arthur Miller productions; and in 2012 for an essay on Bernard Shaw and his late-life extremist views.
This year’s winner of the Nathan Cohen Award for outstanding review is Barbara Gabriel for her review of Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor.
Sophie Bouey won outstanding emerging critic for her review of Pass Over.
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