Roy Proctor with his grandchildren (Photo courtesy Joe Proctor)
Richmond theater critic and playwright Roy Proctor closed his run on Sunday, May 10, after 80 consecutive years.
Actor, author and playwright Irene Ziegler recalls Proctor’s genuine appreciation of theater and of the community that produced the work.
“Love him or hate him, he took his job as critic seriously and raised awareness of Richmond theater during the ’80s and ’90s,” she says. “In later years, he penned dozens of short plays and monologues that were published and performed over 100 times in this country and abroad. He took a lot of flack from disgruntled actors and directors, but he was, at heart, a friend to our craft and a sincere practitioner. He was a good egg.”
From 1974 to 2004, first for the Richmond News Leader and then, after the 1992 merger, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Proctor wrote arts and theater criticism. His News Leader column, “Critic at Large,” covered various cultural happenings, while his Times-Dispatch column, “Rialto,” centered on theater.
Photo courtesy Joe Proctor
The papers gave him what he called in a 2018 interview his “dream job.” Proctor was a native of Thomasville, North Carolina, with a background in the theater arts who also studied creative writing. He became an observer of all the region’s artistic pursuits.
"I used to know Saturday morning if the phone started ringing that he'd given the show a great review," Carol Piersol, artistic director of the 5th Wall Theatre, remembers. "If it didn't, it was bad. We took reservations by phone then, without any credit card — people just paid at the door. Opening night was always sold out with a big reception, and Friday night we had a talkback to attract an audience. Saturday and the rest of the run was up to Roy."
“He worked full time reviewing theater and then would use his vacations going to the theater,” recalls actor Melissa Johnston Price. “He frequented a lot of the festivals in New England. I think he played a big part in helping to make this the thriving theater community it is today. He advocated for us to his editors, doing feature articles every week, seeing every show and, of course, his Phoebe Awards were something all the theater artists in town looked forward to every spring. We owe him a lot.”
The Phoebes — named for the Proctor family’s departed poodle — were bestowed by Proctor and announced on the front page of the fat Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday Arts & Leisure section and were by turns anticipated, dreaded and ridiculed. Those who received favorable ink, though, didn’t mind so much. Proctor gave those whose contributions he recognized a certificate until the 1992 merger.
Proctor told Ray McAllister, in a 2016 Boomer magazine interview, that by the time of his retirement, he’d seen 3,500 plays, countless art shows and 2,000-plus movies.
Richmond’s satirical Punchline weekly got ahead of 1999’s holiday rush with its version of the Hammacher-Schlemmer gift guide in its Nov. 24 issue. On the corner of Page 7 is a tribute, of sorts, to Proctor — a photo illustration of a ball cap emblazoned in white capital letters proclaiming “ROY IS RIGHT.”
Roy is Right
The cap raised the conundrum of the heckling "Muppet Show" duo Statler and Waldorf — if the state of city’s performing arts was so abysmal, why pay money to go? The description nonetheless concluded that with the theatergoer’s viewpoint stitched to the front of the hat, “you’ll be able to root for this underdog critic without ever having to open your mouth.”
The jocular opinion wasn’t shared a decade later when Proctor received a commission from what was then the CenterStage Foundation to write about the history of the venue, which started as the Loew’s movie palace. He’d covered shows there for years in its different incarnations. The Proctor version soon ran counter to the foundation’s accounting, and they disagreed with his approach. Proctor went public in Style Weekly and declared that CenterStage sought “historical revisionism.”
“[Some] criticisms were direct assaults on any standard of sound reporting and historical writing," Proctor stated in an editorial. The crux of the dispute came down to financial information and the omission of those who objected to the foundation’s creation.
The book ended up canceled, which surprised nobody. Proctor told Style, “These foundation people really didn't know what they were doing." But Roy certainly did.
In 2004 he asked then Firehouse Theatre Project director Piersol about directing a staged reading in the company’s series. He chose Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer.” Over the next several years, he directed four more staged readings and six fully staged plays.
Proctor began his playwriting life at 73. “When you become 73, you become concerned about legacy,” he told McAllister. He hoped that his grandchildren might be impressed by “what their crazy grandfather was able to do — and maybe inspire them toward their own achievements.”
He’d ultimately write some 50 plays, which included radio scripts and adaptations of works by short-story masters Anton Chekhov and O. Henry. These pieces received productions in the United States and abroad. He garnered awards for his theater writing but also his contributions in the support of theater here.
In 2013 the merging Henley Street Theatre and Richmond Shakespeare Co. bestowed on Proctor their Richmond Folio Award. At the 11th Annual Richmond Theatre Critics Circle Awards in 2018 he received the Richmond Theatre Legacy Award at the Sara Belle and Neil November Theatre at the Virginia Repertory center. The gala, the venue and the recognition demonstrated the tremendous evolution of Richmond’s theater during Proctor’s time.
Terance Prokosh, the writer’s close friend during the past 15 years, describes Proctor’s weakening health and use of a wheelchair. After a brief and unhappy nursing home stint he returned to his North Side residence, where he’d lived since moving to Richmond and where he’d organized numerous cheerful social gatherings.
“His decline was recent and quite sudden,” Prokosh says. He struggled with diabetes and an infection that seemed to be under control. On Friday morning, when taken by ambulance to the hospital, Prokosh told Proctor he’d be home later that day.
When occasion rose to memorialize a theater person — or a theater itself — that had come to an end, Proctor introduced his recognition of the passage in his column with the phrase, “Dim the Rialto lights.” We are in a time when all theaters are dark and marquees, instead of play titles, are offering words of encouragement.
These days, when many of us are sorting and sifting through our personal papers, there are a few sussing through yellowing clippings about long-ago productions. And they will reveal how often Roy was right.
