Featuring Bob Trussell

Bob Trussell first caught a glimpse of himself as an actor in 1969 when he was a theater student at the University of Texas.

How was it?

“Traumatic.”

“I realized my talents probably lay elsewhere.” Trussell dropped out of college but while his critique of himself was the end of his college days, it was just the beginning of his career.

For the last 21 years Trussell has worked as the theater critic for the Kansas City Star, a long way from the town of Kingsville, Texas where he grew up, and that traumatic experience on stage.

Trussell has no formal training as a writer, but you could say writing runs in the family.  

“My dad was a newspaper man,” Trussell says. “It was just a little small town paper, but he had all of these interests so he was a sportswriter but he was also an entertainment writer. He would write movie reviews.”

Like father like son.

Trussell didn’t set out to be a newspaper man like his dad. In fact he didn’t really set out to do anything in particular.

After marrying his wife in his hometown, the two decided a change of scenery was in order.

 “It wasn’t exactly like throwing a dart at a map,” Trussell says,” but sort of.”

That sort-of dart landed the newlyweds in Kansas City. After a string of bad jobs, a family connection got Trussell his foot in the door at the Kansas City Star.

He would be doing everything except writing.

“Originally I was a copy clerk. In those days, that meant anything. It meant you could go get copy editors coffee and cigarettes or it meant that they would have you run stuff up to the news room.”

Hard work brought him his first break and after about nine months, he became an obituary writer. To some a morbid task but not for Trussell.

“It was pretty good training for reporting, actually, because you had to make sure everything was correct.”

The training paid off and Trussell moved into yet another job title. The new position of  “news clerk” gave him his first shot at real reporting. He covered everything from local politics to law enforcement to the weather.

While he had been working all of these positions at the Star, he had also been voluntarily writing movie reviews for the arts and entertainment desk.

Again, it was Trussell’s willingness to try anything that landed him into a new position higher up on the totem pole.

“In 1984, there was an actual opening on the arts and entertainment desk,” Trussell says, “and so I became a full-fledged member of the staff up here. But for the first few years I was still doing movie reviews. For all practical purposes, I was the second string movie critic. But I would also do concerts and jazz in Kansas City and that sort of thing.”

Then came a decision that would change Trussell’s life for a long time but this decision was not his to make. Just as he had come to Kansas City and just as he had received job title after job title at the Star, Trussell stumbled into the role he has played for the last two decades.

“Butler, who had been the lead entertainment critic, decided it was all a bit too much and decided to separate the beat into movie and theater. He was given first pick — do you want to be the movie critic or do you want to be the theater critic — and he said ‘well I want to do movies’. So I became the theater critic.”

From theater student to theater critic, Trussell now found himself back in the field where he had began back in Texas.

 “One thing I like about it is that I really do like the art form,” Trussell says. “I spent years reviewing movies, and if I had to go back to that now I am not sure how enthusiastic I would be about that because as time goes by theater just seems so much more vital to me and movies seem less so than they used to, because to me there is something about sitting in the same room with these theater artists, these actors, and watching them create an illusion which usually involves extreme emotions.”

After 20 years of seeing theater in Kansas City, Trussell says he sees a change in both himself and in the theater scene.

“I used to be meaner,” Trussell says. “When I was new in the early ’90s I think people in the theater community certainly thought I was mean but something that has happened over time in that the quality of theater has gotten better and so lately it is hard for me to see bad acting. I guess if I am guilty of anything these days I am probably guilty of maybe giving people a little too much of the benefit of the doubt.”

That’s something you don’t hear every day. A critic giving the benefit of the doubt.

“As time goes by I have seen so much theater in town that I am able to put it in some kind of context and so that kind of allows me to soften the sting of my negative opinions.”