Terry Teachout

There are times when the passing of someone you never personally knew hits you harder than you would have imagined.  Just heard that Terry Teachout died in his sleep at the age of 65.

Terry was a theater critic for the Wall St Journal, wrote monthly in Commentary, the author of Pops, the captivating biography of Louis Armstrong and of the play Satchmo at the Waldorf which I and the Mrs saw a few years ago.  He did several movie podcasts with my good friend Titus Techera - I'll always remember their discussions of Vertigo and Night of the Hunter (it wasn't just the analysis, Terry had the perfect voice for the medium), and appeared on the Political Beats podcast discussing one of my favorite groups, The Band.  I also read him frequently on Twitter.

He was a talented and insightful writer (his pieces in Commentary were one of the few things that kept me as a subscriber - he'd write about musicians, actors, producers, directors from the mid-20th century, often about whom I knew little but he always made it interesting) but what make me so mourn his passing is the spirit of the man, a spirit that was gracious and generous, always trying to find the best in people, and someone I would have liked to know.

His last few years were personally rough.  He found love late in life, but his wife had a severe lung disease and died about two years ago after a lung transplant failed.  For some time thereafter he sounded like the saddest man in the world on his twitter feed.  But he found love again, announcing he'd found someone special and was clearly enthralled by her.  It was wonderful to see him bouncing back.  Two days ago, his last tweet announced his new girlfriend's mother had unexpectedly died.  And now this.

I have had such a blessed life, full of beloved friends and family, beautiful art, and the best of all possible partners. Gratitude uplifts me.

— Terry Teachout (@TerryTeachout1) December 17, 2020

John Podhoretz at Commentary:

The loss to his loved ones, the loss to the American theatre he both championed as a critic and mastered as a playwright, and the loss to the broader American culture he knew more fully than anyone else in our time cannot be overstated.

Terry possessed an extraordinary talent, all the more extraordinary because his life’s work was a defense of the value, meaning, and profundity of ordinariness. A child of small-town Missouri, he was someone who made a study of every topic that interested him and, with his passion for completeness, achieved a greater level of expertise in matters of high and popular culture than just about anyone in America.

This was part of his own understanding, based on his own experience, that there could be greatness anywhere—in an unknown actor in Idaho, a great director in Oregon, a great scenic designer in suburban Chicago. And indeed, in Terry’s estimation, the single best theatrical experience of his lifetime happened in Glencoe, Ill.—an innovative production of Our Town, the American play that exemplified Terry’s most profound sense of things: He believed the everyday lives of everyday people were as fascinating and as revelatory as depictions of the great and near-great.