Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...November 5, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) voted five to two to advise the Corporation to reject Brustein's proposal. After Brustein was approved, one of the Corporation members said he wasn't aware that the HRDC had taken a vote. So much for student opinion...
...horror stories floated in from Yale. "Nail 'im to the wall contractually," they said. Brustein was willing to negotiate. He countered the charges from Yale undergraduates by pointing out that he had been hired there to deal only with graduate students and the repertory company, which scarcely left time for the Yale Dramat, the undergraduate society. Nobody seemed to hear him. And there were those space problems...
...what threat does Robert Brustein pose to Harvard theater? Although entertaining productions are not uncommon, few people defend the overall quality of Harvard theater. Even students who are heavily involved in it like to talk about how everybody's educated beyond their level of competence, which means that they know shows are frequently lousy but don't know how to change things. It's not really fair to generalize like this-- particularly since there are many talented directors, writers, and actors, some of whom have the energy and intelligence to motivate themselves even amid the general torpor...
...MOST MEANINGFUL QUESTION Brustein's detractors have thrown at me, and the one that forces me to expose a basic faith in the man's nature, a faith which some people consider unfounded or even a little stupid, goes like this: Why Harvard? Why is this big guy fooling around with undergraduates when his true concerns are so much loftier? We all know why he wants to come to the Loeb: a good location in a big Eastern city, with a built-in audience of "intellectuals" hungering for innovative theater: superior facilities; more sources of potentially big money, which apart...
Okay, so where does this leave undergraduate theater and Harvard undergraduates, the sole body of students whom Brustein is contractually required to serve? I don't know. I'm not convinced Brustein does either. In the past, he has thought about undergraduate drama, casually, as an appendix to the larger topic of theater and the university, but I don't think he ever realized he'd have anything to do with it, or had any desire to participate actively in its evolution. It took a lot of fast, shuffling to present such a program to the university and the students...