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