A Brustein Portrait

Robert Brustein has earned the label "controversial" at Yale, at Harvard, in the American theater--a brilliant scholar who is also a provocative artist, an incisive critic who also runs a professional theater, a moralist, philosopher, and a culture-watcher. If and when he comes to the Loeb in 1980, he will focus the attention of the country on theater at Harvard--and rightly so: it's in his nature to shake things up.

Robert Brustein graduated from Amherst College in 1948. From there he went to Yale School of Drama, but left after a year, "very disillusioned" by the lack of vigor and intellectual standards. He earned an M.A. at Columbia in 1950, and then began working for his Ph.D. under Lionel Trilling in Dramatic Literature and Cultural Criticism. He taught briefly at Cornell (freshman composition, where he says he "first learned to write"), Vassar, and, after receiving his Ph.D., Columbia. "I actually went into drama criticism because I thought it would get me practical work in the theatre," Brustein said in an interview re-published in The Third Theatre.

In 1959 Brustein became a respected drama critic for The New Republic. His disappointment and frustration with much of what he saw is chronicled in Seasons of Discontent, a collection of reviews from that period. When The New York Times offered him the position of daily drama critic, he declined--at The New Republic he could "speak the truth as I saw it without feeling responsible for people's jobs," he said. The American theater had come to a "dead halt," and Brustein was considering moving on to general cultural criticism--books, movies, sometimes theater--when in 1966. Yale President Kingman Brewster approached him about taking over the Yale School of Drama.

The Yale idea was big: to combine a drama school with a professional repertory theater, to attract practicing professionals who would both participate in Rep productions and provide instruction for students. "...thus," said Brustein, "Students learn not by doing things badly(the usual situation) but, first, by watching them done well and, second, by attempting to match those standards."

In the beginning it was difficult. The Rep and the school operated on different levels, and according to Alvin Epstein, an associate of Brustein's for ten years and now director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, "It took a long time to fuse those energies, and the plan for how to fuse them was always changing." It happened, however, in spite of student unrest during the late '60s and fights among the faculty members. By the mid-70's the Yale Rep had become, in the words of Hartford Courant Drama Critic Malcolm Johnson, who has followed it from the beginning, "the most consistently interesting theater in the area." Even at its worst, Johnson said, it was a place where sparks were thrown off.

Brustein reports that Kingman Brewster had initially said to him, "You've been shooting your mouth off about the theater--why don't you do something about it?" And for one of the stiffest critics in theater, there were "painful consequences" in dealing with people when he tried to put his ideals into action. One consequence was that Brustein has gained a reputation among some people for arrogance. But his colleagues dismiss this, finding him gentlemanly and stimulating. "He's no more arrogant than any other talented person I've ever worked with," says Alvin Epstein.

Others have tagged him as "the spokesman for elitism in American theater." Brustein doesn't like his "elitist" label, and calls it "a political football and a red herring." The word "elite," he says, is misunderstood in America. People think that "no one is better than anyone else. Well, that's the wrong road to take--a person can have a special talent or gift, and we have to identify that gift and encourage it. I'm interested in quality, excellence, standards." He says he has preserved his ideal over the last 13 years, but has learned how to soften the application of it. Epstein says he's mellowed.

At the Yale School of Drama, Brustein and his colleagues developed a three-year, building-block curriculum in which students progress from the study and practice of poetic realism (Chekhov, Ibsen) to Shakespearean verse-speaking with increased physical stylization, to the total vocal and physical stylization demanded by the post-modernists (Brecht, Beckett, Handke). Along the way, students are gradually mixed into Yale Repertory productions, beginning as spear-carriers and moving up to understudy positions and major roles. Another innovation was the creation of two majors: Theater Management and Dramatic Criticism. The latter included courses in "Dramaturgy," the graduate acting as a built-in theater critic, hired by regional companies as a literary and artistic advisor.

Soon after arriving at Yale, Brustein began--perhaps out of necessity--to formulate a new approach to reproducing classics in the theater. In his article "No More Masterpieces" (1967), Brustein argues that the classical canon (which includes Shakespeare and modern playwrights such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg) should continue to serve as staple for repertory theaters, but that there should be "no more piety, no more reverence, no more sanctimoniousness," and no more dull, "definitive" productions: each new production of a classical play should be regarded "less as a total re-creation of that work than as a directorial essay upon it."

Some people feel that this has led to a softening of Brustein's intellectual standards. When most conservative critics attacked, for example, Peter Brook's cold, bleak Endgame version of King Lear or his violent Midsummer Night's Dream for imposing alien concepts on the original plays, Brustein hailed them as valuable new perspectives on great works. "Bob is very tolerant toward a real effort on somebody's part to do something," says Epstein. "Even if he disagrees, he'd rather see that than see someone dead from the neck up." Brustein, in fact, has frequently stated that theater should be a dialogue, that productions should often arise in response to each other.

Brustein's books, The Theatre of Revolt (1964), Seasons of Discontent (1965), The Third Theatre (1969), and Culture Watch (1975), are not only great reading--written in a direct, lively style that combines the best features of journalism and literary scholarship--they provide an approach to both modern drama and the current American theatrical scene. His writings, diverse as they are, display a common vision: the theater is not, and never has been isolated from day-to-day human existence and the problems of any given society--it is created out of those problems and fed by the artist's desire for truth and dissatisfaction with the present order of things.

His latest book, The Culture Watch (1975), deals with many of the problems he has encountered since moving to Yale, and very likely will continue to worry about at Harvard: the need for no-strings government funding of the arts, the need for young people to dedicate themselves to the theater (as opposed to the movies, where successful actors, and frequently writers and directors--end up), and the need for a progressive (seminal) theater in which to try out new, experimental works, as well as an active consumer theater consisting primarily of repertory companies.

Brustein also discusses the role of theater in the university, or perhaps more to the point, the university in theater. The university, he writes, "remains the brightest hope not just for the preservation but also for the development of high culture in America...It enjoys a special position as the locus of youth and age, experiment and tradition, art and intellect, working process and realized results, apprenticeship and professionalism, the possibilities of the future and the heritage of the past."

He argues, however, that an undergraduate college is not the place for a professional conservatory, that the job of a college is to "arouse an appetite for the arts" and "a respect for excellence and a sense of humility." Colleges should function, he writes, "as a substitute for the culture that Europeans absorb quite naturally from their home and their society."

Today, however, he feels that Harvard students are intelligent and sophisticated enough to have absorbed much of this culture before they get here--that they are already prepared, or will be by the time they are juniors or seniors, to take part in a vigorous extracurricular program.