In 2023, theatre critic, author and actor Jerry Wasserman won the Max Wyman Award in Critical Writing.The award celebrates critical commentary on the visual, performing and literary arts in the province of British Columbia. It is intended to honour informed and compelling writing that stimulates critical thinking, fosters ongoing discussion about the role of arts and culture in contemporary society and demonstrates the value of creative commentary in our understanding of the world around us.

At the 2015 Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards held in Vancouver, Jerry Wasserman received the 2015 Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance (GVPTA) Career Achievement Award for a body of work that has made major contributions to the theatre community in Vancouver. In the same year, at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research conference, his edited collections, Modern Canadian Plays, Volumes One and Two, 1985-2015 (Talonbooks), received the Patrick O'Neill Award for Best Edited Collection in Canadian Theatre, Special Commendation. In 2011, Wasserman received the Sam Payne Award from the Union of B.C. Performers which recognizes "humanity, artistic integrity and encouragement of new talent."

One of Vancouver's most versatile actors--who often plays one of the bad guys--was a longtime theatre critic for CBC Radio's Afternoon Show before switching to print reviews for The Province. Jerry Wasserman, a professor of English and Theatre at UBC since 1972, subsequently became head of the university's Theatre and Film department. He has 200-plus acting credits that have included many of Vancouver's professional stages and multiple roles on TV programs such as X-Files and Smallville.

Offstage he has also edited Twenty Years at Play: A New Play Centre Anthology (1990). When the New Play Centre's artistic director Paul Mears took over from Pamela Hawthorn, he sought ways to celebrate and publicize the 20th anniversary of the organization, whereupon Wasserman suggested putting together 20 Years at Play, the first regional anthology of plays in Canada. Wasserman had appeared in the NPC's production of Tom Walmsley's The Working Man in 1975.

"I didn't want the book to be a museum piece," he said. "I wanted it to be living plays which are still in repertory." Some plays included were Tom Cone's Herringbone, Sheldon Rosen's Ned and Jack, John Lazarus' Dreaming and Duelling, Tom Walmsley's Something Red, Margaret Hollingsworth's War Babies, Betty Lambert's Under the Skin, Ian Weir's The Idler and Alex Brown's The Wolf Within. Previously published materials, such as Sherman Snukal's Talking Dirty, the most commercially successful B.C. play at the time, were not included in the anthology even though Talking Dirty went through six years of workshopping at the New Play Centre. Wasserman's only disappointment in assembling the landmark volume was his discovery that relatively few women had come forward to the NPC for playwrighting workshops at that time.

"By about 1980, partly because I was also working in Vancouver theatres as an actor, often in new Canadian plays, I found myself teaching mostly drama courses and eventually creating a course on Canadian drama," he has said. "That led to my decision to put together an anthology of modern Canadian plays, partly to save money for my students but mainly because it seemed time to recognize this lively artistic activity in print. Turns out a couple of other academics had the same idea: in 1984-85 three Canadian drama anthologies were published. But my Modern Canadian Plays is the only one that has remained in print, going through five editions in order to stay current, and expanding from 12 to 31 plays. It's pretty cool that it has now been in print for 30 years, which may be a record for any Canadian literary anthology."

Wasserman has a B.A. (Adelphi), M.A. (Chicago) and Ph.D. (Cornell). As an academic he specializes in modern drama and theatre history with particular interests in Canadian, American and modern British theatre as well as blues music and blues literature. With Sherrill Grace of UBC's English department he has co-edited Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (Talonbooks 2006). In 2006 he also edited the 400th anniversary edition of arguably the first North American play, Marc Lescarbot's Theatre of Neptune in New France, as Spectacle of Empire (Talonbooks $21.95), with the original French script, two modern translations and an extensive historical and critical introduction.

He grew up in New York City and suburbs, started college majoring in Engineering and ended up with a Ph.D. in English literature, specializing in 20th century literature and dramatic literature. He came to UBC in 1972 to teach modern British, with an emphasis on fiction, and his early publications were almost all on novelists: Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Huxley, Ellison, as well as Beckett, Rabelais and Shakespeare.

Jerry Wasserman is the instigator and overseer of Vancouverplays.com, a public service reference site about Vancouver theatre, started in 1998, produced, directed and edited by Jerry Wasserman, and designed, maintained and updated by Linda Fenton Malloy, a freelance web artist based in Vancouver.

DATE OF BIRTH: November 2, 1945

PLACE OF BIRTH: Cincinnati, Ohio

ARRIVAL IN CANADA: 1972

EDITOR OF:

Modern Canadian Plays, Volume II - Fifth Edition (Talon, 2013) $49.95 9780889226791

Modern Canadian Plays: Volume I, Fifth Edition (Talon, 2012) $49.95 978-0-88922-678-4

Spectacle of Empire: Marc Lescarbot's Theatre of Neptune in New France (Talon, 2006). $21.95. 0-88922-547-8

Theatre and AutoBiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (Talon, 2006). Co-edited with Sherill Grace.

Modern Canadian Plays, Volumes One and Two. 4th edition. (Talon, 2001). $34.95 0-88922-243-6

Twenty Years at Play: A New Play Centre Anthology. (Talon, 1990). $18.95

[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2015] "Theatre"