Christopher Rawson
Christopher Rawson (born Christopher Comstock Hart) is an American writer, university teacher and theater critic.
Formative years
Rawson was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His biological father was noted stage and film actor Richard Hart. His parents divorced shortly after he was born, and he was adopted by his stepfather, Jonathan Rawson.[1]
Career
Rawson's main discipline is as a theater critic. From 1983 to 2009, he was full-time theater critic and theater editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, covering theater not just in Pittsburgh but also irregularly in New York, London and the Canadian theater festivals. In 1984, he started the annual Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh) Performer of the Year Award, now (2019) in its 36th year. In 2009, he semi-retired, continuing as that paper's part-time senior theater critic. He also appears as the occasional critic for KDKA-TV. Mr. Rawson attended Deerfield Academy. His B.A. is from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington at Seattle.
Rawson is active in several theater organizations. He is a board member of the
From 1968, and as Emeritus since 2018, Rawson was a member of the English faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught courses primarily in satire, Shakespeare, critical writing, Irish drama, and the work of playwright August Wilson. He came to know Wilson and his plays well through covering him since 1984 for the playwright's hometown newspaper of record. In 1999, when the eighth play ("King Hedley II") in what would become a 10-play cycle had its world premiere, in his Dec. 15 column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was the first to name it the "Pittsburgh Cycle". Since then, the August Wilson Estate has named it the American Century Cycle, and both names are now used. Rawson is on the Board of Trustees (as secretary) and serves as program chair of the Daisy Wilson Artist Community, named for Wilson's mother, which is restoring August Wilson House at 1727 Bedford Ave. in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where Wilson lived his first 12 years and where his cycle of 10 plays can be said to have begun.
Since 2001 Rawson has produced Off the Record, an annual musical theater satire of Pittsburgh news and newsmakers which raises funds for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and other charities. In 1999, he wrote Where Stone Walls Meet the Sea, a 600-page centennial history of the