New Brunswick, New Jersey
New Brunswick is a city (New Jersey), city in and the county seat of Middlesex County, New Jersey, Middlesex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.
EC Comics
E.C. Publications, Inc., (doing business as EC Comics) is an American comic book publisher. It specialized in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, nota ...
(publishers of Tales From The Crypt, Weird Science, and MAD among others) and was soon writing enthusiastic letters of comment and criticism on every issue. Publisher Bill Gaines was so impressed with his critiques that he named him "EC's Official Number One Fan" and bestowed upon him a free subscription to everything EC published, provided that Stark would keep the detailed letters of review coming. EC colorist Marie Severin made a gag sign for Gaines' office that read "God help us to write stories that will please Larry Stark!" Stark’s letters were occasionally excerpted in the E.C. letters columns but EC fans wanted to read them in their entirety, as Gaines did. The first "fanzine" to satisfy that demand was Bhob Stewart and Ted White's POTRZEBIE, in which Stewart wrote that “POTRZEBIE’S main purpose in life is to present the criticism of Stark…sans censorship. You rarely get to peruse his monstrous prose other than a few sentences in the E.C. letter columns. EC values his opinions so much that Gaines has given Larry a free lifetime subscription to all the EC Comics on the condition that he will write EC a letter about each issue telling what he liked and didn’t like about it. Now you’ll know too. Thru POTRZEBIE.” Stark’s column was titled ONE MAN’S OPINION and ran through a change in editorship for POTRZEBIE, later continuing in THE EC FAN JOURNAL. Stark made several visits to the EC offices and his "Elegy" to EC, originally published in HOOHAH #6 (1956), has been reprinted over the years in multiple formats. Most recently it was included in its entirety in "American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1950s" by Bill Schelly (2013).
Between 1950 and 1956, Stark studied English at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
, leaving New Jersey for
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...
in January, 1957. In 1956-57 he co-edited the publication ''Stellar'' with Ted White, who recalled:
:I lavished more care on the package than I did on the contents. The contents were good. Larry Stark was a good editor -- much better than I, then -- and when he dropped out I'd learned enough from him to keep up the standards, but the material was mostly by other people.
In the summer and fall of 1957, Stark acted in two Harvard stage productions and then worked backstage at Cambridge theaters for the next five years. In 1962, he began doing theater reviews for MIT's '' The Tech''
under the pseudonym Charles Foster Ford. During this period he used a basement mimeograph machine to print the work of local poets with his Larry Stark Press, notable for publishing
Peter Guralnick
Peter Guralnick (born December 15, 1943, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic, author, and screenwriter. He specializes in the history of early rock and roll and has written books on Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips, and Sam Cooke ...
's first book in 1964.
Theater reviews
Stark was the first to write theater reviews for the alternative weekly, '' Boston After Dark'', providing a continual coverage of Boston and Broadway-bound productions during the years 1966 to 1972. After circulating his own short-lived review publication, ''Theatre Journal'', he contributed to ''Time Out'', a free college paper published by '' The Cambridge Phoenix''. During the 1980s, he wrote for Wisconsin's ''
La Crosse Tribune
The ''La Crosse Tribune'' is a daily newspaper published in La Crosse, Wisconsin, covering the tri-state area of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota in the United States.
The paper was first founded in 1904, following a media scandal in which existin ...
''.
Returning to the Boston area, he acquired a computer which he used to create fiction and also to write theater reviews posted on General Electric's online service,
GEnie
GEnie (General Electric Network for Information Exchange) was an online service provider, online service created by a General Electric business, GEIS (now GXS Inc., GXS), that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around ...
. In October 1994, he launched Theater Mirror, an informative online guide to
New England
New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...
theatres and stage productions. With insightful reviews and entertaining commentary by Stark, plus a continual flow of reviews submitted by several other contributors, Theater Mirror became a focal point for Boston actors, directors and theatergoers over the years. The Plays Up and Running section of Theater Mirror offers an alphabetical listing of current productions throughout New England with links to theatres from
Connecticut
Connecticut ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. ...
to
Maine
Maine ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the United States, and the northeasternmost state in the Contiguous United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Provinces and ...
. The Theater Mirror Archive has reviews by Stark and others dating back to 1995.
Stark's approach is much like that of film critic
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael often defied the conse ...
, simply to describe "what it's about," and he often attempts to capture the essence of a play stylistically, as in this 2001 review of Conor McPherson's ''The Weir'':
:Now it's no secret the Irish is great ones for the tellin of stories, especially in them small rural bars in the Northwest country where Conor McPherson sets his hour and a half slice o'life "The Weir". Surely there's not much else to do but to drink and to gossip with a few mates of an afternoon. And once a "small one" or two's been chased down with a bottle of stout, them tales of somethin strange and maybe supernatural just come tumblin out. Better that than a lonely walk home with the wind in yer face, isn't it, now?
Stark's book, ''A Theater Lover's Guide to 90 Theatres in Boston'', was published in 2001. For '' The Tech'', 38 years earlier, he wrote ''A Guide to Harvard Square's 15 Bookstores''.
On August 10, 2006, Stark was honored by the Boston theater community at a special tribute and celebration of his 74th birthday.
Documentary film
Actress-filmmaker Bernice Liuson Sim of RedDragonfly Films released a documentary about Stark titled ''Stark Review: The Heart of Boston Theater''. On September 17, 2006, pilot footage for ''Stark Review'' was screened for an audience of 600 in
Arlington, Massachusetts
Arlington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is six miles (10 km) northwest of Boston, Massachusetts, Boston, and its population was 46,308 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census.
History
Europe ...
, and 12 days later, Sim, Stark and co-producer Kevin Anderton discussed the ''Stark Review'' project with film criti Daniel Berman on Brookline Access Television. The film premiered April 8, 2013 at Boston's Lyric Stage.