For those who still believe that the theatrical blogosphere rings the death knell for serious drama criticism in America, here’s something to put that fear to rest: The George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2010-2011 has gone to Jill Dolan of The Feminist Spectator, a blog she has been keeping since 2005. The prize committee’s citation specifies in its first sentence the growing importance and necessity of theatre blogs to the health of drama criticism as well:

Recognizing the growing importance of the internet as a site for the dissemination of serious dramatic criticism, the George Jean Nathan Award Committee this year honors for the first time a web publication, Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator. The Award Committee commends Dolan for her consistently thoughtful and articulate discussions of the contemporary stage. Whether covering high-profile productions of classical pieces, such as The Merchant of Venice, or revivals of more recent works, such as Angels in America, The Feminist Spectator always offers her readers clear and well-reasoned analyses. Dolan intersperses informed personal responses to plays and performances with significant historical, political, and cultural insights that help frame and contextualize her remarks. The blog cogently directs us toward feminist investigations of performance, wherein we must question the theatre’s “modes of production” and the “complicated questions of representation” that may be elsewhere ignored. A tireless champion of women artists, Dolan graciously, yet compellingly enjoins us to be mindful spectators as well as lovers of the theatre.

Prof. Dolan is the Annan Professor in English and Professor of Theater at Princeton University and the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989; to be reissued with a new introduction in 2012); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005); and Theatre & Sexuality (2010), as well as several other books and many articles and essays on feminist and lesbian/gay/queer contemporary American theatre. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.

My heartfelt congratulations to Prof. Dolan on the occasion of her award — and thanks too to the Nathan prize committee for noting the rise of the Internet as a valid and unique medium for serious drama criticism.