Elinor Fuchs, one of the leading scientists on the American stage, has died at the age of 91

Elinor Fuchs, whose passionate insights into contemporary theater – first as a critic in the New York avant-garde scene and later as a professor at Yale – made her one of the leading scholars of the modern American stage, died on May 28 at her home in Manhattan’s West Village. She was 91 years old.

Her daughter Katherine Eban said the cause was complications of Lewy body dementia.

Professor Fuchs specializes in dramaturgy, i.e. the structure of a play, including its dramatic structure, the motivations of the characters and technical questions about set design and lighting.

In conventional times, dramaturgy can be a mysterious, even somewhat stuffy, field. But in Professor Fuchs’ hands, it became an important tool for studying the revolutionary new forms of theatre that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – forms that complicated or entirely rejected conventional notions of character, dramatic arc, and authorial intent.

Unlike many other theater scholars, Professor Fuchs initially approached these questions from a journalistic perspective. After attempting a career as an actress and writing a play, she devoted herself to freelance theater criticism for what was then a large alternative weekly newspaper in Manhattan, including The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News.

She was drawn to challenging plays like “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,” a 1979 play at the Public Theater that included a full-length rock concert as its third act. The play was panned by the New York Times and was soon canceled.

But Professor Fuchs was enthusiastic. She saw in the play and the other experimental pieces not only a new perspective on theater, but also a completely new postmodern cultural awareness – even if she found it difficult to explain at first.

“I lacked a name, let alone an appropriate vocabulary and grammar, for this dizzying new perspective, which was at once artistic and cultural in nature,” she wrote in her 1996 book The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism.

She turned to Europe, where thinkers like Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida were asking radical questions about art, literature and culture, providing insights that enabled Professor Fuchs to explain what she saw in the cramped theaters of Lower Manhattan.

She wrote extensively about pioneering playwrights and troupes such as Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, and the Wooster Group, and translated her knowledge of French literary theory into language understandable to the general public—a form of code-switching that made her one of the most important interpreters of late 20th-century experimental theater.

“It’s just a kind of hard-won, practical knowledge that you acquire when you go to the theater night after night and have to write about it,” said David Bruin, a drama teacher at New York University who studied under Professor Fuchs at Yale, in a phone interview. “It brought her entire body of work into focus.”

Among theater students and professors, Professor Fuchs is probably best known for “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” a short essay she wrote shortly after arriving at Yale in 1987 that soon became required reading in theater programs across the country.

The article offers guidance on how to approach a play, and in doing so lays bare the core of Professor Fuchs’s entire critical philosophy. Unlike in reality, she wrote, everything in a play is intentional; whether it is realistic or abstract in its presentation, it is its own world and must be approached as such.

“To see this whole world, do this literally: form the piece into a medium-sized sphere, place it at a medium distance in front of you, and squint,” she wrote. “Before you lies the ‘world of the piece.'”

Elinor Clare Fuchs was born in Cleveland on January 23, 1933. Her father, Joseph Fuchs, was a violinist and concertmaster in the city’s orchestra and later a long-time teacher at the Juilliard School. Her parents divorced when Elinor was 4 years old. Her mother, Lillian Kessler, left Elinor in the care of her grandparents and moved to Washington, where she founded Kessler International, an export company specializing in machine tools. Elinor joined her when she was about 9 years old.

Like her mother, Elinor attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1955. That same year, she married Stanley Palombo, but the couple divorced about a year later.

She married Michael Finkelstein in 1962. The couple divorced in 1977. In addition to Mrs. Eban, she is survived by another daughter, Claire Finkelstein, and four granddaughters.

Professor Fuchs moved to New York to pursue an acting career and amassed enough credits to receive a Screen Actors Guild card; she also modeled for the covers of paperback romance novels and thrillers.

In 1973, she and Joyce Antler published Year One of the Empire, a play in the form of a staged documentary about the expansion of American power. It was first performed at the Metropolitan Playhouse in 2008 to rave reviews.

The Times called it “an insightful, entertaining and at times gripping dramatized account of America’s entry into the imperialist era at the turn of the 20th century.” It won an award for best play from Drama-Logue magazine (now part of Backstage).

Professor Fuchs received her Master’s degree in Theater Arts from Hunter College in 1975 and her Doctorate in Theater Arts from the City University of New York in 1995.

In the late 1980s, Ms. Kessler developed Alzheimer’s disease and Professor Fuchs cared for her for several years. After her mother’s death, Professor Fuchs wrote a memoir about the experience, Making an Exit (2005), in which she reflected on how her training in theater helped her cope with her mother’s condition.

“On her 84th birthday, Mother shouted ‘We can do it!’ 30 times in 10 minutes, radiating a mad cheerfulness,” she wrote in the Times in 2005. “At the time, I was assigning my students pieces by Gertrude Stein. If Stein could elevate repetition to an art form, if Beckett and Philip Glass could do it, why not relax and enjoy it when it came from Mother?”