Eric Bentley, an influential theater critic — as well as a scholar, author and playwright — who was an early champion of modern European drama and an unsparing antagonist of Broadway, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 103.

His son Philip confirmed the death.

Mr. Bentley was among that select breed of scholar who moves easily between academic and public spheres. His criticism found its way into classroom syllabuses and general-interest magazines.

And more than dissecting others’ plays, he also wrote his own and had some success as a director. He adapted work by many of the European playwrights he prized, especially Bertolt Brecht, whom he first met in Los Angeles in 1942.

The English-born Mr. Bentley variously walked the corridors of Oxford, Harvard and Columbia, where he taught for many years with faculty colleagues like Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, literary lions in their own right.

At Columbia he became engaged in leftist campus politics during the volatile 1960s and surprised everyone when he quit — in part, he said, to experience life as a gay man, having divorced his second wife.

But it was as a critic that he made his first and most enduring impression.

The critic Ronald Bryden, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1987, said that Mr. Bentley’s 1946 essay collection, “The Playwright as Thinker,” “did for modern drama what Edmund Wilson in ‘Axel’s Castle’ had done for modern poetry; it established the map of a territory previously obscured by opinion and rumor.”

Mr. Bentley published one admired collection of criticism after another, among them “In Search of Theater” (1953) “What Is Theater?” (1956) and “The Life of the Drama” (1964) — “the best general book on theater I have read bar none,” the novelist Clancy Sigal wrote in The New Republic.

Mr. Bentley’s book “Bernard Shaw” (1947) prompted Shaw himself to say that he considered it the best book written about him.

Mr. Bentley argued that the great serious drama of the modern era had been written in Europe. He pointed to the operas of Wagner and the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, García Lorca, Synge and Pirandello as well as Shaw. And great drama was still being written, he said in the 1940s, referring to Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sean O’Casey.

“Experimentalism in the arts always reflects historical conditions, always indicates profound dissatisfaction with established modes, always is a groping toward a new age,” he wrote in “The Playwright as Thinker.”

 

 

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Mr. Bentley discerned a new naturalism in the modern voice. “What is it we notice if we pick up a modern play after reading Shakespeare or the Greeks? Nine times out of ten it is the dryness,” he wrote, distinguishing that from dullness — “the sheer modesty of the language, the sheer lack of winged words, even of eloquence.”

Mr. Bentley was less enthusiastic about American playwrights — even, at first, Eugene O’Neill.

“Where Wedekind seems silly and turns out on further inspection to be profound,” Mr. Bentley wrote of the German playwright Frank Wedekind in the notes to “The Playwright as Thinker,” “O’Neill seems profound and turns out on further inspection to be silly.”

As for commercialized Broadway, he judged it to be anathema to artistic theater, a view many readers regarded as tantamount to an attack on American culture. “Condescending and misanthropic,” Cue magazine said.

The drama critic Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, said that “Mr. Bentley does not believe in a popular theater” and feels that “the audience is incapable of valid judgment in aesthetic matters.”

Broadway’s defenders reminded Mr. Bentley that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Shaw had, above all, been popular. To which Mr. Bentley rejoined, “To be popular in an aristocratic culture, like ancient Greece or Elizabethan England, is quite a different matter from being popular in a middle-class culture.”

He eventually became more favorably inclined toward American dramatists, but he never let up in his goading of American theatergoers to pay more attention to Europeans like Brecht. For a time he even wore his hair in bangs like Brecht.

While at Columbia Mr. Bentley turned out a twin series of anthologies, “The Classic Theatre” and “From the Modern Repertoire,” which became standard reading in drama curriculums.

 

 

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In the turmoil of the 1960s, he was a founder of the DMZ, a cabaret devoted to political and social satire whose subjects included the war in Vietnam, and he criticized Columbia’s handling of student political demonstrations on campus. In 1969 he quit his teaching post, shocking his friends and colleagues.

Many thought he had done so in protest, but he later said that he had simply realized that he wanted to be a playwright. “I always dreamed myself the author when I translated,” he said.

There were also personal reasons for resigning. He had decided to leave his second wife and live openly as a gay man, he said, and he thought his Columbia colleagues would not have tolerated that.

Around the time he began moving away from academia, the theater reporter Pat O’Haire of The Daily News depicted him in his 12-room Riverside Drive apartment, its walls and shelves dense with theater memorabilia:

“Away from campus, or the confines of teaching, Bentley can only be described as a sort of combination establishment-guerrilla,” she wrote. “He goes barefoot and wears jeans, but his shirt, though colorful, is a traditional Brooks Brothers button-down. His hair is long and flecked with gray; he wears a beard that is neatly trimmed in a Captain Ahab style, with the upper lip shaved. It seems as if he is straddling two worlds.”

Eric Russell Bentley was born Sept. 14, 1916, in Bolton, a northern industrial town in Lancashire, England, to Fred and Laura Bentley. His father was a respected local businessman. His mother had wanted Eric to become a Baptist missionary.

Mr. Bentley was a scholarship student at the prestigious Bolton School, where he studied the piano. He then went to Oxford on a history scholarship; C.S. Lewis was one of his teachers. Yet as a merchant-class student surrounded by upper-class swells, he felt out of place.

Shaw became an early hero, Mr. Bentley told The Times in 2006, because he seemed to be a fellow outsider. “‘Pygmalion’ is a great classic in my book because it’s an Irishman’s recognition of the basics of class-ridden Britain,” he said.

He emigrated to the United States after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Oxford in 1938 (he was naturalized in 1948) and received a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale in 1941.

On the strength of his early books, Mr. Bentley was appointed in 1952 to succeed Harold Clurman as drama critic for The New Republic, a position he held until 1956. He also wrote for The Nation, Theatre Arts, The Times Literary Supplement in London and The New York Times.

When he wasn’t writing in the 1940s, he taught and directed at the University of California, Los Angeles; at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and at the University of Minnesota. From 1948 through 1951 he traveled in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, directing plays. In 1950 he helped Brecht with his production of “Mother Courage and Her Children” in Munich. He also directed the German-language premiere of O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh.”

By then his regard for O’Neill and other American playwrights had risen. His earlier criteria for artistic merit, he conceded, had been “puritanic” and even too “Brechtian.” His celebrated book “The Playwright as Thinker,” he conceded, “reflects more my academic side — a certain degree of excessive authority, even arrogance, you could say.”

In 1952, after his return to the United States, Mr. Bentley took over Joseph Wood Krutch’s course in modern drama at Columbia. The next year he was appointed the Brander Matthews professor of dramatic literature at Columbia, where he stayed until his resignation in 1969, with time off in between as the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard in 1960-61 and as a Ford Foundation artist in residence in Berlin in 1964-65.

He was later the Cornell professor of theater at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and a professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland.

Mr. Bentley was known to perform songs from the theater in nightclubs, accompanying himself on the harmonium.

As he concentrated more on his playwriting, he found his subjects in those who had rebelled against established society. He took up the causes of the left in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been: The Investigation of Show Business by the Un-American Activities Committee, 1947-1958,” first produced in 1972; the astronomer Galileo in “The Recantation of Galileo Galilei: Scenes From History Perhaps” (1973); Oscar Wilde in “Lord Alfred’s Lover” (1979); the sexually inconstant in “Concord” (1982), one of a series of three plays in “The Kleist Variations”; and homosexuality in “Round Two” (1990), a variation on Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde.”

Mr. Bentley discussed his sexual orientation in 1987, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I generally avoid the word bisexual,” he said. “People who call themselves bisexual are being evasive. They don’t want to be regarded as homosexual — or they want to be regarded as supermen, who like to sleep with everything and everybody.

“Nevertheless,” he went on, “if one can avoid these connotations, the word would be applicable to me, because I have been married twice, and neither of the marriages was fake; neither of them was a cover for something else; they were both a genuine relationship to a woman.”

Those marriages were to Maja Tschernjakow and to Joanne Davis, a psychotherapist. His first marriage ended in divorce, his second in separation (they never divorced). In addition to Ms. Davis and his son Philip, he is survived by another son, Eric Jr., and four grandchildren.

For all his laurels as a critic, Mr. Bentley carried a nagging regret: that his plays were not appreciated as much as his criticism.

“Brecht once told me that he left unpublished a lot of his poetry,” Mr. Bentley said in the 2006 Times interview, “because, he said: ‘If they regard me as a poet, they’ll say I’m not a playwright, I’m a poet. So I don’t publish the poems, so they’ll say I’m a playwright.’

“I feel at times that I should not have written my criticism,” Mr. Bentley continued, “because when I write a play, they say, ‘The critic has written a play.’”

TORONTO — Black and Indigenous employees say they were disparaged. Female employees say they were sexually harassed. Guides say their managers instructed them to block off an exhibit on same-sex marriage during tours for religious schools.

All this has happened, critics say, at an unlikely place: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg.

In recent weeks, the museum has been engulfed by accusations of discrimination and harassment. And on Wednesday the museum released a report from an external review, which concluded that “racism is pervasive and systemic within the institution.”

For a museum devoted to documenting the history of human rights, the report was a stinging rebuke.

“This is a tainted place as far as I’m concerned,” said Barbara Nepinak, an elder of the Pine Creek First Nation who is a member of the Special Indigenous Advisory Council to the museum. “But it can be fixed and I strongly believe it will be fixed.”

In June, museum officials had admitted they had accommodated requests from school groups to exclude, or even hide, content they might find objectionable and issued a public apology. The institution’s president stepped down, too.

After Wednesday’s report, Pauline Rafferty, the museum’s chairwoman and acting chief executive, vowed to take several immediate steps, including the establishment of a diversity and inclusion committee.

“We’ve accepted the report’s findings in full and the recommendations in principle” she said. “The opportunity here is to make systemic changes but it will take time and it will be very hard work.”

Still, the review is the fourth in the institution’s short lifetime, making many people skeptical that systemic discrimination will be corrected, even at a place built to inspire visitors to combat it.

Armando Perla, a curator who worked at the museum for years, said he was disappointed that the review did not recommend removing a broad swath of the museum’s management but instead focused on training.

“No amount of training is going to fix the managers,” said Mr. Perla, who is now head of human rights at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

The museum opened in 2014 in Winnipeg — a Prairie city with a large Indigenous population. It is a stunning landmark in the city, with its illuminated “spire of hope” visible from afar, and thousands of glass panels swooping around its limestone walls to resemble the folded wings of a dove.

Even before the doors opened, though, the museum inspired protest and heated debate. Several curators and outside experts complained that exhibits had been politically neutered and so watered down as to become meaningless.

“It became an ethical cheerleading triumphalist narrative about Canada, forwarding the notion of Canada, the peacekeeping nation, as a leader in human rights,” said Elise Chenier, a history professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who did not want to be identified by the museum as a creator of an exhibit on same-sex marriage in Canada, saying the institution had oversimplified the “debate in the queer community about marriage.”

The museum’s former curator of Indigenous content, Tricia Logan, wrote in a book that she had been “consistently reminded” to match any mention of state-perpetrated atrocity against Indigenous people with a “balanced statement that indicates reconciliation, apology or compensation provided by the government.”

Maureen Fitzhenry, the museum spokeswoman, disputed the assertion that the museum had revised content for political or nationalistic reasons.

Many in Winnipeg’s Indigenous community were outraged over the museum’s decision to use the term “genocide” for five overseas genocides officially recognized by the Canadian government — including the Holocaust and the massacres in Rwanda — but not for the treatment of their people in Canada.

At the time, the country’s first Truth and Reconciliation Commission had concluded years of hearings on the government’s longstanding use of residential schools as a pernicious tool of assimilation that had forcibly removed more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and cultures.

A year after the museum opened, the commission’s final report described the schools as weapons of “cultural genocide.” But the museum took until 2018 to use the term.

In June, public debate about the institution was reignited by a local anti-racism protest.

A former museum guide and program interpreter, Thiané Diop, 29, wrote on social media that during four years of working at the museum, she had faced racism from colleagues, the public and donors “constantly,” and instead of addressing it, her bosses said she wasn’t a “good fit.”

Others also accused managers of making racial slurs and culturally insensitive remarks.

Shania Pruden, a 23-year-old from Pinamutang First Nation who also worked at the museum, recalled that a manager told her to get “thicker skin,” after visitors pointed to her while talking about the history of “Indians,” making her feel ashamed.

“When there was a problem, management most likely wouldn’t do anything,” Ms. Pruden said.

Four former female staff members told The New York Times they had reported episodes of sexual harassment and, in one case, sexual assault to management. In all cases, they said managers’ first response was to question their accounts.

Wednesday’s report found that there “are indications that sexual harassment and stalking complaints made by Black women may not have been investigated or addressed adequately prior to the fall of 2016.”

Two of the institution’s previous external reviews addressed sexual harassment, said Ms. Fitzhenry, the museum spokeswoman. The third involved broader concerns by museum staff, she said, declining to offer more specifics.

“It was a culture of violence,” said Gabriela Aguero, a former guide and program developer who took a mental health leave last year because, she said, of the stress of the museum’s workplace culture, as well as its content.

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Ms. Aguero exposed the museum’s former practice of asking guides to skip the exhibit on the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada during tours for religious schools and for guests who objected to the content.

“This practice is contrary to the Museum’s mandate, and contrary to everything we stand for,” the museum’s executive team said in a June letter confirming the practice had happened for two years.

The outside report concluded that L.G.B.T. and queer content was omitted or hidden on six occasions in 2017, and on one occasion in 2015.

It also noted critically the absence of any representation in exhibits of two-spirit people, a term used by some Indigenous people to describe those who have both a masculine and a feminine spirit, despite years of requests for inclusion from that community.

“The censorship was not just around same-sex marriage” said Albert McLeod, a director of the Two-Spirited People of Manitoba, a community group that tried to get the museum to include stories of the struggles of two-spirit people.

“Even a human rights institution can be rife with discrimination unless it practices its own teachings,” said Karen Busby, a recently retired law professor and founding director of the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba. “It won’t go away with good intentions.”

After the museum’s announcement that it would conduct an independent review by a feminist lawyer who is Black, Jewish and identifies as queer, former employees reacted with a mix of relief that it was happening, sadness that it was necessary and cynicism that anything would change.

“A lot of us have felt isolated doing this work for a long time,” said Mr. Perla, the former curator, in an interview before Wednesday’s report. “Now we’re realizing we are not alone.”

When Mr. Perla worked at the Winnipeg museum, he said, there were only three managers from visible minorities in the building — a pervasive situation in Canadian museums, he said.

“When you have managers who are only white,” said Mr. Perla, who is gay and came to Canada from El Salvador as an asylum seeker, “with no visible minorities to challenge the status quo, you will keep doing things as you have done them.”

Some Indigenous staff and advisers said the museum had made strides in addressing their concerns.

In a 2018 speech, the museum's president, John Young, said the “policies and practices of colonialization” in Canada, were genocide. Signage in the museum was changed.

The museum also began to incorporate Indigenous “ways of knowing and being” into its institutional processes, said Jennefer Nepinak, its former senior adviser on Indigenous relations. In 2019, the museum entered into a contract with Carey Newman, an artist from Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, by taking part in a potlatch — a traditional ceremony.

“Learning is very difficult and change is very difficult,” Ms. Nepinak said, calling the agreement “one of the highlights of my career.”

Glen Murray, the former Winnipeg mayor and Ontario cabinet minister, stepped down from the museum’s fund-raising board. He said he hoped the museum’s internal reckoning becomes a template for other organizations.

“The museum should be an example now of how to move forward,” said Mr. Murray, the first openly gay mayor of a big city in North America, “to correct this, for how you honestly resolve problems, bring people together and rebuild trust.”

He added, “That could be its own powerful story for change.”

SEDALIA, Mo. — Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

“It’s like pulling teeth,” Ms. Fizer’s mother, Amy, said.

The deputy who shot Ms. Fizer has not been charged or disciplined, and Ms. Fizer’s parents say they have not received any updates about the investigation into her June 13 death. They said that investigators never interviewed them, and that the sheriff declined to tell them the name of the deputy who shot her.

Over the weeks, the rallies for Ms. Fizer tapered from a hundred protesters to a couple dozen. Every Saturday morning, they wave signs and ask passing cars to honk in support of the 25-year-old woman with a big grin and flower tattoo, who loved swimming and Chinese takeout and dreamed of having children, and of a larger life beyond her night-shift job at a gas station. Her family and friends have become her movement.

“We’re just doing it all on our own,” Amy Fizer said.

There are hundreds of stories of law enforcement killings in small towns and rural areas, but scant research into how and why they happen. One analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that between 2013 and 2019 there was a slight rise in shootings by officers in rural and suburban areas and a decline in big cities. Experts say rural shootings may be tied to higher rates of gun ownership, a lack of mental health services, or insufficient training for officers responding to people in crisis.

Ms. Fizer’s parents said they know only the barest facts about what happened the night she died.

She spent the last day of her life splashing around in a kiddie pool with her best friend, Taylor Browder, and Ms. Browder’s young children, talking about life and her future in Sedalia, an old railroad town of 21,000 people that is home to the Missouri State Fair. Ms. Fizer had attended the Sedalia Police Department’s citizen’s academy in 2016 but quickly decided she did not want to become a cop. She sometimes talked about working as a parole officer.

Ms. Browder said that Ms. Fizer headed home to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend to take a nap and shower before her overnight shift at the Eagle Stop gas station on the western edge of town.

At about 10 that night, a Pettis County sheriff’s deputy pulled her over for speeding. In an interview, Sheriff Kevin Bond said that the deputy “met with verbal resistance” when he walked up to Ms. Fizer’s car and that he told investigators she claimed she had a gun and threatened to kill him.

Ms. Fizer’s friends and family have a hard time believing that. Ms. Fizer’s boyfriend owned a gun, they said, but in a conservative county where the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, Ms. Fizer did not like guns or carry one.

Investigators later found five shell casings by the driver’s side door of her Hyundai, but no gun in her car.

David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

Unlike in other cases that have galvanized efforts to change policing, there is no body camera footage of the shooting. The sheriff’s office stopped using body cameras after software problems and a crash on the hard drive that recorded the data. Fixing it was “just cost prohibitive” for a rural sheriff’s office where money is tight and starting pay for deputies is $26,000, Sheriff Bond said.

Sheriff Bond said there had been no prior use-of-force complaints against the deputy who shot Ms. Fizer. The deputy, who has not been named, was put on paid leave, and the sheriff said he immediately called in the Missouri State Highway Patrol to handle the scene and investigate the shooting.

The Highway Patrol finished its investigation last week and handed over a report to the Pettis County prosecuting attorney, who had a special prosecutor appointed. Ms. Fizer’s family said they have not been told about the results of the report, and have been following developments through the news.

“If this would’ve happened in the city, something would have been done by now,” said Haley Richardson, a friend who said Ms. Fizer was kindhearted and stood up for vulnerable people. “We’re going to stay out here. We just want answers.”

Ms. Fizer’s relatives said that a divide in money and class between them and authorities in Pettis County had made them feel like second-rung citizens. Ms. Fizer was not rich, and members of her family had been in and out of prison and struggled with drug addictions.

“If you’re on the outer fringes of society you’d know,” Amy Fizer said. “They pull you over. They do what they want, when they want.”

Some of Ms. Fizer’s friends and relatives said they had already been outraged by Mr. Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis police custody, which happened about three weeks before Ms. Fizer was shot. They joined Black Lives Matter rallies as the movement spread throughout small towns across America.

But they also emphasized that they did not want to abolish the police. They supported law enforcement. Just not this deputy, or this sheriff. The aftermath of the shooting led to calls for Sheriff Bond to resign and prompted a police sergeant in suburban Kansas City to challenge the sheriff in November’s election.

“You have law enforcement running around without any body cameras, dash cameras, the minimal equipment,” said the challenger, Brad Anders, who lives in Sedalia. “The investigation, whatever it may reveal, is never going to be enough. There are questions that will never be answered.”

The anger over Ms. Fizer’s death exploded on local Facebook groups. Sheriff Bond said people had threatened to publish his home address and harassed and threatened a deputy and his family, and he warned that “instigators” were using Ms. Fizer’s death to sow “social chaos.”

When a statue of a World War I “doughboy” infantryman honoring veterans was vandalized in July in the town square — an incident unrelated to the protests for Ms. Fizer — his officers opened an investigation and arrested an 18-year-old on vandalism charges.

“Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?” the sheriff wrote. “Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?”

Ms. Fizer’s father, John, had complicated feelings about the upwelling of nationwide anger at the police. He was angry. He wanted justice for his daughter. But he counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

In a Facebook post, Mr. Fizer wrote that he did not want “Antifa-type outrage here in our quiet hometown.”

“I love my law enforcement,” he said. “I’d hate to think where we’d be without them.”