Christine Dolen | longtime Miami theater critic and ATCA member, dies at 74
You can get a good understanding of Christine Dolen’s place in the South Florida theater community from the outpouring of hundreds of testimonials posted on social media in the hours after her death was announced on Sunday. She died on Feb. 1 at age 74 after a battle with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive lung disease.
Actors, playwrights, directors, theater managers, colleagues and more offered glowing tributes for her role in shaping the Miami area theater scene during her more than 35 years as theater critic for the Miami Herald, and the last 10 years as a freelance critic for the nonprofit ArtBurstMiami.
“Chris was a thoughtful and a tireless critic, and she wrote with verve,” said former ATCA chair Elizabeth Maupin, the retired Orlando Sentinel critic. “She also was a wonderful friend. We shared many a hotel room at ATCA conferences and on New York theater trips, and we laughed and laughed. My world is a lesser place without her.”
Chris was an active member of ATCA for decades, served on the executive committee and co-chaired a South Florida conference with the late Jack Zink in 1996.
She championed emerging artists, most notably future Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz, and prolific playwright Michael McKeever, a co-founder of Miami’s Zoetic Theatre.
“Simply put, it’s the end of an era,” McKeever posted on Chris’ Facebook page. “Brilliant arts journalist, great supporter of South Florida theater, and dear and true friend. The world will be a little less bright moving forward.”
She worked as the Herald’s theater critic from 1979 until “retiring” in 2015, when she started writing features and reviews for ArtBurst.
“I have spent more than half my life in aisle seats, watching and analyzing the magic that theater artists work so hard to create,” she wrote in a farewell column to Herald readers. “Honestly? I feel privileged to have documented the evolution of theater in the region, review by review, story by story.”
She was an active judge for the regional Carbonell Awards, which honored her twice with the George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. She received the award in 2001 and again in December 2023. In 2011, American Theatre magazine named her one of the 12 most influential critics in the country.
During her long career, she interviewed major playwrights including Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and she wrote extensively about Cruz after experiencing the first table reading of his “Anna in the Tropics.” Her celebrity interview subjects included George Abbott, Julie Harris, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Ashley, Harold Prince, Elaine Stritch, Patti LuPone, Bob Fosse, August Wilson, Lanford Wilson and more.
She concluded her farewell column by saying: “Thank you to the artists whose work made my ‘job’ such an engaging, endlessly fascinating pleasure. Being the Miami Herald’s theater critic has felt like being in a graduate school that never ends. Except now, it has.” She is survived by her husband, John Dolen, their son, Sean and his wife, May, her sisters Kathy Brooks, Dorothy Hindman and Beth Safien, and a brother, Cap Safian.
Plans for a memorial have not been announced.
The Miami Herald published a full obituary.
– Submitted by Jay Handelman, with links and light edits by Martha Wade Steketee
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