Biography
Rawson's main discipline is as a theater critic. From 1983 to 2009, he was full-time theater critic and theater editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In 2009, he semi-retired, continuing as that paper's part-time senior theater critic. He also appears as the weekly critic for KDKA-TV.
Rawson is active in several theater organizations, including the editorial board of Best Plays, the standard theater yearbook established in 1920 by Burns Mantle. He is a board member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame, for which he helps supervise the annual balloting for the selection of new inductees. He has long been active in the American Theatre Critics Association, which he has twice served as chair (1991-93 and 2007-11) and for which he has organized conferences in London, at Connecticut's O'Neill Theater Center, at Canada's Shaw and Stratford Festivals and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Since 1968, Rawson has been a member of the English faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught courses primarily in satire, Shakespeare, critical writing, Irish drama, and the work of playwright August Wilson. Rawson's B.A. is from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington at Seattle.
In 1999, he wrote Where Stone Walls Meet the Sea, a 600-page centennial history of the Donald Ross-designed Sakonnet Golf Club in Little Compton, Rhode Island and of the summer colony of which it is a part. He and Laurence A. Glasco have written "August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays" (Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, 2011) and their larger work, August Wilson's Pittsburgh, is expected in 2013, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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