Dear Kerr: You, Sir!

Of all the journalists thrown on the job market when the New York Herald Tribune was closed down for good during the city's newspaper strike, Drama Critic Walter Kerr, 53, who had held his post for 15 years, was surely the least worried about the future. While spending the summer lecturing at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, he was besieged with offers. Frank Conniff, editor of the still unpublished World Journal Tribune, even flew over to try to recruit him. But when the critic finally made up his mind last week, his decision was not surprising: Kerr chose the New York Times.

That the Times wanted Kerr was not surprising either. In an effort to improve its reviews, the paper had hired Stanley Kauffmann away from the New Republic only eight months before, but Kauffmann never quite succeeded in adjusting to daily journalism. Now he will return to the New Republic as associate literary editor, and talk about "The Art of the Film" on TV. "It's not so much letting Mr. Kauffmann go as asking Mr. Kerr to come in," said Executive Editor Turner Catledge, who admits to having approached Kerr twice before. "Kerr seems to suit the New York readership better."

Arch & Tricky. Neither present Times readers nor former Trib readers are likely to disagree, since Kerr is the most thoughtful of the daily reviewers. Never sidetracked by extraneous details, he writes a highly structured review. His leads are often small gems of summation. "After the Fall" he began, "resembles a confessional which Arthur Miller enters as a penitent and from which he emerges as the priest. It is a tricky quick change, sometimes an almost imperceptible one; but it constitutes neither an especially attractive nor especially persuasive performance."

Unimpressed by avant-garde obscurity, Kerr is wary of many of the modern plays his colleagues are so quick to champion. Beneath the plays' tough-minded exterior and the four-letter words he detects a sentimentality that seems to say the world is all wrong while the author is all right. While other critics gushed over the "lofty literacy" and "awesome depths" of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice two seasons ago, Kerr stuck to his standards. He found the play arch and pretentious: "The language becomes picky, tricky; at once rigid and self-indulgent, as though everything were being translated from some strangely euphuistic Latin."

Kerr often brings off a bright epigram: "Cruelty, carried far enough, can turn into Al Capp"; "Inadmissible Evidence is so many slivers run under all the fingernails in the auditorium." No critic, in fact, pays such meticulous attention to his prose. Indeed, he sometimes sacrifices content to style and overwrites. He trotted out a veritable Noah's Ark to praise Barbra Streisand's performance in Funny Girl: "She's like a grasshopper, a shy one . . . she's an eel on a chair, nibbling at flowers . . . second cousin to an octopus on a chaise longue." And he is overly fond of metaphors of cuisine: "Well-done with French-fried potatoes and salad thrown in on the side" (The Unsinkable Molly Brown); "a disillusioned slice of life with no butter" (A Taste of Honey).

Write & Wait. Steeped in the theater, Kerr wrote movie reviews for his home town newspaper in Evanston, Ill., while still in grade school. His wife Jean, author of Mary, Mary and Please Don't Eat the Daisies, is better known and perhaps wittier; but where she glides, he grapples. She naturally goes to all first nights with him, and, since they are unabashed suburbanites, she waits at the office while he turns out his review.

This has led wounded playwrights to smirk that she writes the reviews while he waits--a bit of malice that merely makes the Kerrs laugh.

So pleased is the Times with its new catch that it even announced the first play he will review this season: Albee's latest, A Delicate Balance, which opens Sept. 22. Chances are that as many people are looking forward to Kerr's review as to Albee's play.

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