WITH the close of the '60-'61 season, Drama Critic Louis Kronenberger rings down the curtain on a personal performance that has outlasted the combined runs of Tobacco Road, Oklahoma! and South Pacific. Twenty-three years ago on Jan. 29, 1938, Kronenberger slipped into his first aisle seat for TIME, and promptly panned Erskine Caldwell's Journeyman, a kind of illegitimate son of Tobacco Road. No other TIME writer has manned a single section over a comparable span or filled his post with equal wit, grace and distinction. He has been the delight of readers, the scourge of meretricious producers, and the despair of his fellow writers.

Departing, after a theatrical year that rather resembles a turkey trot, Kronenberger is content, at 56, to recall more enchanted evenings from the past. Among them: The Little Foxes, The Chalk Garden, Tiger at the Gates, Don Juan in Hell, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Misanthrope. Says he: "The idea that reviewers love bad shows so they can be very clever is the reverse of the truth. If you like a play, your praise carries the reader with you. If you don't like it, you have to sustain the reader's interest. Two of the most delightful evenings I ever had in the theater were at the English production of The Importance of Being Earnest and a revival of Pal Joey. Both times I had a 102DEG fever, all of which proves that if something is good, it has nothing to do with how the critic feels." What disturbs Kronenberger about Broadway today is that it "has become so dependent on adaptations as opposed to original plays. Adaptations almost always lose something. It's like cutting up a sofa to make a chair."

The man in the critic's chair is more often remembered for being bright than right, waspish than wise. Playwright Jean Kerr recently recalled that she rankled for ten years over a barbed line in a Kronenberger review of her first play, Jenny Kissed Me: "Leo G. Carroll brightens up Mrs. Kerr's play in much the same way that flowers brighten a sickroom." Then there was the hapless actor who was commended for "playing his role up to the hilt except that he had no sword." Wit can be instant wisdom. Kronenberger's first clever words on a playwright have often proved to be the last word in sound critical judgment, as when he wrote of Christopher Fry: "He is less in the world of people than in the world of nouns and metaphors."

As a late child of the 18th century about which he has fashioned expert and fascinating books, e.g., Kings and Desperate Men, Marlborough's Duchess, Louis Kronenberger has occupied a paradoxical role in the modern theater--an urbane, classical temperament confronting a drama of increasingly primitive sensationalism. As a man of reason, he has dueled with the sentimental drama that wears its heart on its sleeve and with the tricked-up theatrical spectacle. Almost alone among contemporary critics, he has upheld comedy's right to be taken seriously, chiefly because "comedy is a kind of thermostat that regulates and corrects the emotional, ethical, intellectual temperatures at which we live." Serving the comic spirit in the way he likes best, Kronenberger plans to write comic novels on the order of his Grand Right and Left and recent A Month of Sundays. He will also teach part-time as Brandeis University Professor of Theater Arts.

In Louis Kronenberger, TIME and the American theater have had and will miss a most dependable critical thermostat.

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