Filipino-American, Randy Gener, wins Nathan Award for dramatic criticism

Nathan Award

New York City writer and critic Randy Gener, senior editor of American Theatre, is the winner of the 2007-08 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, which is administered annually by Cornell's Department of English.

The award was endowed by Nathan (1882-1958), the great theater critic who graduated in 1904 from Cornell, where he was an editor of both The Cornell Daily Sun and humor magazine the Cornell Widow. Nathan went on to write for and co-edit (with H.L. Mencken) two influential magazines, The Smart Set and American Mercury, and to publish 34 books on the theater.

Nathan's will mandated that the award winner for "the best piece of drama criticism during the theatrical year" be chosen by a majority vote of the heads of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities.

Gener is also an editor, playwright, visual artist and author of "Love Seats for Virginia Woolf" and "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Pieces," among other plays; scholarly essays, articles and reviews in the Village Voice, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, the International Herald Tribune and other publications. He also was a founding critic of the New York Theatre Wire, an online magazine.

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New York Daily News article....

As a paperboy selling the People's Weekly on the streets of Manila, Randy Gener read the story of his father, a Filipino businessman living in the U.S. getting shot to death in Los Angeles.

"I had a habit of reading the paper before I went off," he recalls.

This particular morning he'd decided to read it after his rounds. But, sitting on a bus, glancing over one man's shoulder, Gener saw the tragic headline and recognized his own last name.

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