JUDITH WYNN ROUSUCK ’69

After transferring to Laurel in Eleventh Grade—a decision that she believes changed her life—and serving in her Senior year as the editor-in-chief of The Distaff Side, the school newspaper, Judy recognized that she could combine her love for storytelling and for journalism. So off she went to pursue both her interests as an English major at Wellesley College where she won a major poetry prize and served as editor-in-chief of The Wellesley News.

Upon graduating from Wellesley in three years, she returned to Cleveland for a job editing the program guide for WCLV, the fine arts radio station where she had done her Laurel Senior Project. That led to an internship at The Cleveland Press which turned into a paid job writing reviews as a member of the critics’ staff. Those two early ventures on the coast of Lake Erie—in radio broadcasting and print journalism—-would foreshadow her life’s career path, in another waterfront city 360 miles away.

Judy left The Press to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She landed at The Baltimore Sun where she spent the next 33 years, a decade of them as a general assignment arts reporter and then 23 years as the theater critic. A fixture in the Baltimore theater scene as one of the country’s most highly respected theater critics, she reviewed more than 3,000 plays and interviewed some of the most important writers, directors, actors in the theater world, including August Wilson, Eubie Blake, Cary Grant and Wendy Wasserstein, during her tenure at The Sun. She credits her persistence as key to finally landing an interview with Stephen Sondheim, which she counts among her career highlights. Cognizant of the role local heroes play in storytelling, she wrote a comprehensive series on the making of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Hairspray by Baltimore’s own John Waters.

Judy’s theater reviews have always been based not on “like” but on analysis. She asks herself before approaching any review: What were the theater artists trying to accomplish and how well did they do it? As one of her supporters noted, “her criticism is distinguished by a deep and well-researched understanding of the place each play or musical holds in theater history, an encyclopedic knowledge of other productions and the local connections to each work, and an ebullience and enthusiasm for the theatrical art form.” The insightful and balanced precision in her commentary respects not only the playwrights, the performers and production teams but their potential audiences. In recognition of the role Laurel played in building Judy’s strong foundation in writing and critical thinking, her mother established the Judith Wynn Rousuck Journalism Award, which is given annually to an Upper School student.

Head of School Ann Klotz notes, “This commitment to critical writing and thinking is hugely important at Laurel; we are so fortunate to have Judith, a Renaissance woman, as a role model for our students at a moment when the skills necessary to assess a source’s validity have never been more essential.”

Living an ethos to educate and encourage the next generation of writers, Judy has taught theater and writing at Goucher College, at the O’Neill Theater Center, at the National Endowment for the Arts Journalism Institute in Theater at the University of Southern California and in a talented youth program at Johns Hopkins University. She fed her own thirst for knowledge as a National Endowment for the Humanities Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan and as a visiting student at Brown University in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel’s graduate playwriting program.

In true theater style, as the landscape of print journalism changed, Judy’s second act emerged 18 years ago when she left The Sun and found a new home at WYPR, Baltimore’s National Public Radio station, where she provides weekly critiques of area theater productions. Over the years, her short stories, articles and commentary have been published in magazines ranging from American Theatre to Dog World. Her debut novel, Please Write: A Novel in Letters, which tells its story through correspondence between two literate terriers and their very human grandmother, recently received the Dog Writers Association of America’s Best Novel award.

For her advocacy for the arts and for educating and engaging generations of theatergoers through balanced and insightful criticism, the Laurel School Alumnae Association bestows its Lifetime Achievement Award on Judith Wynn Rousuck ‘69.