Learning from Robert Brustein

Robert Brustein, photograph courtesy of Mark Alan Lovewell

From 2014 to 2016, I attended graduate school at Harvard University’s American Repertory Theatre, as a major in dramaturgy. During my time there, I took two classes with the theatre’s founder, Robert Brustein, who passed away last weekend at the age of 96. Brustein’s accomplishments inspired reverence: theatre critic for The New Republic, professor at several of the finest universities in the country, founder of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the A.R.T. Yet despite all this, any time I stepped into the classroom with him I got nervous.

No, I was never intimidated by him. Rather, I had read his criticism of plays by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ writers, and found them incorrect at best and offensive at worst, so I worried about the kinds of utterances that might spill out of him in the classroom. I took two classes with him — History of Criticism and History of Institutional Theater — and both times I gave him the benefit of the doubt, only to regret doing so almost immediately afterwards. On the very first day of History of Institutional Theatre, he said the following:

“When the model becomes about doing diverse theatre with African-Americans and Latinos and women, ultimately this becomes a democratic hodgepodge that adds up to nothing. Too many of you are brainwashed by diversity business. The artist does not conform to demands that you recognize this and represent this. It’s completely contrary to the whole tradition of art and always has been.”

My classmates and I were too stunned to come up with a comeback that would make him reconsider this opinion. We probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway. One day after class, one of us said “we’re taking a class with a living legend!” to which I replied, “yeah, the legend of White male privilege.”

Since my graduation, I’ve had the chance to reflect on moments like this as a part of a larger context, as American theater has only now begun to reckon with its complicity in White supremacy. If every institution is endowed with the broken parts of its creator, whether we want them to be or not, then Brustein’s A.R.T. and Yale Rep embodied both his love of theatre, and the prejudice by which he only allowed a certain kind of art to thrive within those walls — one which, for all its glory, could only reflect so much of the human experience.

It is impossible to deny the impact Robert Brustein had in convincing academia to accept theatre as a discipline worthy of study. Born in 1927 on New York’s Lower East Side, the son of Jewish-Russian émigrés, Brustein came of age at a time when most undergraduate universities (including several of the Ivies) did not offer theatre majors — if you wanted to study it, you had to do so through a department like English or Comp Lit. Brustein experienced this as a graduate student at Columbia, where he studied under Lionel Trilling. Trilling, a renowned literary critic, was hot off the heels of The Liberal Imagination, a book that argued for literature as a means for understanding and engaging with liberal values in an age of fervent anti-Communism (Trilling himself had been a Marxist before breaking with them after World War Two). In an essay reprinted in his book Dumbocracy in America, Brustein recalled encountering Trilling for the first time in a class on nineteenth-century romantic literature:

“I was one of two or three hundred anonymous students, but I imagined Trilling was speaking directly to me. His lecturing style was not particularly dynamic. He spoke softly, even a little haltingly, as if in fear of framing a sentence that would not stand the test of time…Anyhow, I was enthralled by the man, and my hand ached from scribbling crabbed notes in bugling notebooks.”

But while Brustein loved Trilling, one area on which they disagreed was theatre. Like the Romantic poets, Trilling believed that theatre was better read than performed, regarding it as a lowbrow institution unworthy of serious study. For Trilling, Brustein wrote, “drama was what Sir Philip Sidney called ‘a poor stepsister of the arts.’”

It could be argued that Brustein spent the rest of his life attempting to convince his intellectual father figure of the worthiness and righteousness of his cause. And lest you think I’m engaging in a dime-store Freudian analysis, I’m not: Brustein himself expressed this point of view. “I imagined Trilling was my father,” he wrote, “[but] I was not following the path of his other adopted sons…and he was never able to reconcile himself to my obsession with the theatre.”

In his first book, The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama, published in 1964, Brustein made his most forceful case for modern, post-Shakespearean theatre as an art form of immense literary value. The book analyzes the work of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Eugene O’Neill, as well as theorist Antonin Artaud, author of the landmark treatise The Theatre and Its Double. Brustein chose these writers as exemplars of how playwrights can revolutionize our concepts of social norms, calling them “an anarchic individualist[s], concerned with the impossible rather than the possible; and his discontent extends to the very roots of existence. The work of art itself becomes a subversive gesture — a more imaginative reconstruction of a chaotic, disordered world…since he rejects the conventional pieties from the official culture.”

At its best, The Theatre of Revolt brings attention to overlooked works by masters of the art form. One of Brustein’s most striking passages is his description of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, his final play before a stroke sent him into retirement. Infrequently performed, When We Dead Awaken depicts the last days in the life of a sculptor, Arnold Rubek, who, while on vacation with his wife Maia, runs into a former model of his, Irena. Irena harbors intense resentment towards Rubek, threatening to kill him, while Maia is seduced by the hunter Ulfheim. At the end of the play, Rubek and Irena are killed in an avalanche, an “orgasm of the spirit that no other climax can exceed,” as Brustein writes. He continues:

“After a life of messianic striving, [Ibsen] is imaginatively feeling his way up the mountain, by Rubek’s side, to the wide, expansive area above…His struggle had taken him up and down Europe, seeking a homeland, exiled in spirit for the modern world, always exposing its disease and corruption. And struggling to find truthful expressions for his double vision which would mirror both his own subjective rebellion and the conformity of modern society, he had wandered from the fjord and moorlands to the civilized plateau below, longing for the heights and raging against the depths. At last, Ibsen had found his way back to the mountains where, free from the “taint” of man, liberation and revolt were pure and absolute. To a restless nature like his, always dissatisfied, always moving on, there could be no peace until death; and the total revolution he had envisioned in his youth could be realized only in apocalypse, in the pure, cold avalanche from the Northern skies.”

Brustein brought this to life in 1991, when he and director Robert Wilson collaborated on a production of When We Dead Awaken at A.R.T. Together they re-imagined the play, cutting out whole chunks of dialogue and casting legendary tap dancer Charles “Honi” Coles as the spa manager, performing several stand-alone musical numbers. Rather than mimicking an avalanche at the play’s climax, Wilson devised a shower of fire to rain on Rubek and Irena, leaving audiences with the awestruck terror Ibsen sought without following his stage directions to the letter.

However, in order for Brustein to make his case for theatre as an art form, he had to create a hierarchy by which some theatre was valued more than others. This meant that American theatre — and by American theatre, I mean Broadway — was forever a poor, wounded thing to be treated with pity. If the theatre of revolt was “not a popular theatre, nor are its dramatists much concerned with instructing the middle classes,” then the commercial dramatist, he wrote, quoting Strindberg, “functions as a lay preacher, peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.”

To Brustein, the American theatre too often settled for the “middlebrow” and the “lowbrow” rather than the “highbrow” works that he extolled. One day in class, he told a story about his astonishment when a woman he knew said that she preferred My Fair Lady to Long Day’s Journey into Night as her favorite show of the 1950s. Brustein’s condescending “astonishment” comes from his self-imposed hierarchy that preferences straight plays over musicals, the implication being that you can’t love both of them at the same time, even if they’re as incomparable as My Fair Lady and Long Day’s Journey. (In such a scenario I would go with Long Day’s Journey, but not without a serious debate.)

“What [Brustein] seemed to expect from a visit to the theatre was a validation of his own doctrines,” wrote the Anglo-Australian director Michael Blakemore, who publicly complained of inaccuracies in Brustein’s reviews of his National Theater revivals of Long Day’s Journey and The Front Page. Throughout Brustein’s body of work, American theatre remains a source of perpetual indignation as he frequently dismisses and sometimes outright misunderstands many of our greatest artists. Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Tennessee Williams, and Stephen Sondheim almost never passed muster — in fact, Brustein’s loathing of Arthur Miller led him to continually misread his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, as a plea to pity its title character, Willy Loman, rather than a chilling study of how a parent’s narcissism reverberates through generations.

Sondheim is another matter. Like many critics of his generation, Brustein felt Sondheim’s music was no match for his lyrics: as late as 1990, he criticized Sunday in the Park with George as “blurry aesthetic editorializing” and Into the Woods as “chic urban doggerel.” Despite this, in 1974, he invited Sondheim to the Yale Rep to write a musical of Aristophanes’ The Frogs, with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum book writer Burt Shevelove directing and writing the script (Shevelove had staged a production of The Frogs as a Yale undergrad.) In his book Finishing the Hat, Sondheim claimed Brustein treated him with “palpable condescension,” adding, “Arts education handily fosters little fiefdoms like Brustein’s that function as ego-builders and often serve primarily to make their practitioners feel like playwrights or producers or directors or critics…If my experience as Yale is any example, they also want to be stars.” Sondheim may not have been aware that in 1994, Brustein finally came around to his genius with a rave for his musical Passion.

In 1967, Brustein wrote an essay that would become the driving artistic principle for his work at Yale and A.R.T. Titled “No More Masterpieces,” it re-enforced Antonin Artaud’s belief that theater directors’ reverence towards the classics — Shakespeare, Molière, the Greeks, etc. — had stultified artistic innovation, turning masterpieces into museum pieces. Brustein wrote:

“If we don’t attempt some renewal in our thinking about these works, we run the risk of becoming as paralyzed in the theatre as captive husbands now are at Wagnerian opera. Ideally, such renewal should take place every ten or twenty years, and indeed has been taking place throughout history; in fact, it is only in recent times that literature has assumed the inviolability of scripture — perhaps because it has begun to take the place of scripture.”

This conflict in the English-speaking theatre world between staging the text traditionally or running wild with it had no such counterpart in Europe, where playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Bertolt Brecht, and directors like Andrzej Wajda and Yuri Lyubimov (to name but a few) took daring swings for the fences with works challenging our conceptions of theatrical realism, both with new plays and revivals of the classics. Brustein wanted to bring Europe to America, and at Yale and A.R.T., he did just that: creating a repertory company in the style of the Moscow Art Theater who performed in a series of plays done in rotation while teaching classes by day — all free from the lights of Times Square. Brustein described much of this ethos in his memoir of his years at Yale, Making Scenes, which doubly functions as a loving tribute to his wife Norma, who died of a heart attack in 1979. It is an entertaining and engaging read, even if his harangues against “PC” policies like affirmative action feel like they were airlifted from an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

Under Brustein, the Yale School of Drama became a hotbed of talent, and those who received his favor were promised the moon. One of the stars of Yale’s acting program, Meryl Streep, became such a standout that she feared her classmates’ jealousy for getting cast in so many leading roles. And as a graduate student in Yale’s playwriting program, Christopher Durang received his praise, including getting a mainstage production of his play The Idiots Karamazov, an absurdist retelling of Dostoevsky’s novel with Streep playing the legendary translator Constance Garnett.

However, this hierarchy created an Animal Farm-like atmosphere where some students were more equal than others. One of the students who experienced this the hardest was Durang’s classmate and friend Wendy Wasserstein. As quoted in Julie Salamon’s biography of Wasserstein, Wendy and the Lost Boys, Brustein says he thought she was “a lightweight,” as opposed to Durang, whose outrageousness appealed to him. He skipped the Yale production of Wasserstein’s first play, Any Women Can’t, and never commented on the workshop of her second, Uncommon Women and Others (He had the gall to send her a good-luck telegram on the play’s opening night off-Broadway.) If Brustein had lowered his blinders, he might have seen what a tremendous writer Wasserstein was, but by dismissing her work as “sitcom-y,” he denigrated both her talent and the art of the sitcom. This sexism extended to his seasonal programming — in Brustein’s entire time at Yale, only one play by a woman, Natalia Ginzburg’s I Married You for the Fun of It, was presented on the theater’s mainstage.

After a falling out with Yale president Bart Giamatti, Brustein brought his actors and faculty to Cambridge, where he served as Artistic Director of A.R.T. for 22 years, winning a Tony Award for regional theater in 1986 and eventually establishing the Institute for Advanced Theater Training, a joint program between A.R.T., Harvard, and the Moscow Art Theater School in Russia (he called it an “institute” because Harvard did not have an undergraduate theater concentration, and would not add one until 2015.)

Brustein’s output at A.R.T. was outstanding and daring. Directors like Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and André Serban did some of their most famous work there, and Brustein staged and translated several plays, especially those of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. His production of Six Characters in Search of an Author became a staple of the theater’s repertoire, and his Tonight We Improvise co-starred documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who stood on stage with a camera to film the proceedings each night. The theatre also engendered controversy, such as when director Joanne Akalaitis’s radical rethinking of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame led Beckett to contemplate suing them, but Brustein stood up for her right to interpret the work as she wished.

Despite this, the theater still largely emphasized classic plays written and directed by White men. When they did new plays, they were usually by White men, most notably David Mamet, whose controversial Oleanna premiered there in 1992. And with a few exceptions, such as Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play ‘night, Mother, A.R.T.’s presence on Broadway was nil.

Meanwhile at Yale, Brustein had been succeeded by Lloyd Richards, the Black Canadian director who, with August Wilson, became the most important director-writer pairing in American theatre since Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller (or Kazan and Tennessee Williams — take your pick.) At Yale, Richards directed the first productions of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, winning himself and Wilson Tonys for Fences, and Wilson two Pulitzers. Brustein disregarded Wilson, unfavorably comparing Fences to Death of a Salesman for using “the sins of the White oppressor” to explain patriarch Troy Maxson’s rage at a world that passed him over. (A subsequent feud between Brustein and Wilson over Black creatives’ place in theatre would climax with an unsatisfying town hall in 1997.)

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Brustein grew even more vituperative towards the new generation of playwrights, many of whom were women, people of color, or LGBTQ+, styling himself as a gatekeeper of theatre. In his essay “The Theatre of Guilt,” he railed against Wilson, Terrence McNally, David Henry Hwang and others, arguing that their reorientation of theater towards what we now call “identity politics” was detrimental to the art form. Plays like Fences, M. Butterfly, Children of a Lesser God, and The Normal Heart were “plays you’re not allowed to hate” because otherwise you’d be accused of racism/sexism/homophobia, etc. “I do not believe the theatre to be either a suitable or effective place for social reform and moral blackmail,” he wrote:

“Activist plays will always be with us, and the theatre is large enough to accommodate every variety of expression. But we must beware of confusing quality with good intentions or the expression of talent with the effusions of a warm heart. Although major artists can sometimes write powerfully from humanitarian motives, these are more often the incentives of second-rate plays and minor playwrights. Buying tickets to such works is usually like putting a small contribution in the collection plate at church and ignoring the homeless in the neighborhood. How many people are moved to real sacrifice by theatrical exhortations?”

“Theatre people have always had a soft spot for causes,” he added. “Rarely the cause of theatre.”

Brustein remained The New Republic’s theater critic until 2000 and stepped down as A.R.T.’s artistic director in 2002. For the rest of his life, he wrote plays, books of criticism, and taught classes at both A.R.T. and Suffolk University in Boston. He would even publish a follow-up to “No More Masterpieces” called “More Masterpieces,” in which he feared that the movement of postmodern revivals that he fostered may have gone too far.

For whatever issues I had with his views, by the time I became his student, he had mellowed into an elder statesman, and could be charming and funny. Occasionally we’d find common ground, such as with our mutual love of Hamilton. He let me do a presentation on Frank Rich for History of Criticism in which I assigned my classmates “Exit the Critic,” Rich’s essay upon leaving his post as critic for The New York Times that included details of his fraught relationship with Brustein — and he didn’t hold it against me.

Although the Institute for Advanced Theater Training has folded, I remain indebted to the program that Brustein created. For whatever its faults, my experience at Harvard and my time at the Moscow Art Theater School, which was the formative event in my life as a writer, happened because of the intense idealism which motivated his life and career. But during my time there, it was clear that the A.R.T. was no longer the institution he originally had in mind. Under its current artistic director, Diane Paulus, the theatre was no longer an experimental sandbox but a Broadway powerhouse. Paulus won the theatre three Tony Awards between 2012 and 2014, including one for herself, and almost every mainstage show during my time there went either to Broadway or off-Broadway. The economics of American theatre had turned Brustein’s vision of an academic repertory theatre into an idealistic aspiration rather than an achievable goal.

Yet despite A.R.T.’s newfound inclusivity — the majority of plays done there the past few years have either been written or directed by underrepresented creatives, and the theater recently hired its first Black executive director, Kevin Dinkins Jr. — the racial biases built into its foundation did not evaporate with Brustein’s departure. In the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, Black writer Griffin Matthews posted a video calling out Paulus (without using her name) for racism when she staged his musical Witness Uganda at A.R.T. in 2014, and then off-Broadway in 2015 as the retitled Invisible Threads. “She is a liberal,” Matthews said. “She is an artistic director. She is a Tony winner. She is a producer. She teaches at Harvard…she has no real Black friends and has never needed to have them because that’s not part of the equation of rising to the pinnacle of success.” Change a few words, and he could easily have been talking about Brustein.