Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...