Writing theatre criticism for The Village Voice from 1957 to 1974, Michael Smith lucked into an extraordinarily dynamic period in American theatre. Broadway-style commercialism was stifling innovation in the early sixties. In response, a new alternative theatre emerged in lofts, storefronts, churches, and coffeehouses radiating out from Greenwich Village. This generous selection of reviews from Smith’s “theatre journal” columns in The Voice gives a sense of the range, seriousness, and energy of the brilliantly imaginative artists he encountered in more than a decade of intensive theatre-going,
