New York Time now

Andrea Stevens, a Times editor, died this month at 83. She was a loved and feared presence in the theater world. In an essay, Ben Brantley explores her ...

I trusted her to take the full measure of what I was doing, what I was trying to do and what I hadn’t yet done.” [Arthur Laurents](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/arts/arthur-laurents-playwright-and-director-dies-at-93.html), the acid-tongued librettist of “Gypsy” and “West Side Story,” wrote of her in his memoir “Original Story By”: “Andrea loves the theater like a woman who knows everything about her faithless lover but loves him anyway.” [Al Hirschfeld’s immortal caricatures](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/theater/al-hirschfeld-99-dies-he-drew-broadway.html) into the Sunday Times, who arranged the interviews with leading actors and playwrights that appeared in the newspaper. From an email she sent to Jason Zinoman in 2010, not long before she left The Times:“As the culture diffuses further, as distractions grow, as internet toys increase, it’s not going to be about taste,” she wrote. I figured ‘suggestions’ meant a couple of contacts, maybe a paragraph about the theme. Nonetheless, when I picked her up at her apartment building the next day, she was wearing freshly picked flowers, with leaves, in her hair. Peter Marks, now the chief theater critic of The Washington Post, recalled being assigned to write a piece when he was working in The Times’s Long Island bureau in the early 1990s: “‘I’ll send you some suggestions for the story,’ she said, managing somehow to sound at once encouraging and deeply skeptical. After discoursing briefly on the lot of serfs in feudal times, she concluded: “The majority of politicians are today’s priests in the temples. “It was exhilarating to be edited by Andrea,” said Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and former Times writer. Okay, the golden calf now wears a necklace of flowers, a nod to the natural world. She could be relied upon to be unfailingly supportive and rigorously demanding of any writer she worked with, whether journeyman reporter or laurel-wreathed dramatist. “And wouldn’t you know,” she wrote.