Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Akalaitis and ART Director Robert Brustein have defended their production on the grounds that Beckett has made revisions in the staging when he produced the play himself and that Beckett has permitted other unusual stagings, such as a flooded warehouse being used as the theatre for a 1983 production of the play. Generally, the law is not on their side. Beckett can allow particular changes in his play without opening the floodgates to any changes. If Beckett thinks a flooded stage is okay as a backdrop for minimalist drama, but a ravaged T-stop is not, that is his legal...
...course, the ART's version ofEndgame will not single-handedly banish the original to rare manuscript archives. Yet Brustein is wrong to say, as he has, that the original of a play exists only in the manuscript. It also exists in the general kind of staging which made the play a classic: sometimes it is preserved on celluloid, other times it becomes a Platonic form of a performance of that play. With Endgame, it is a timeless, barren interior of grey lighting. That aspect of the play could be 'lost' if it became popularly believed that Beckett's Endgame should...
...threatened an injunction to block the Endgame production. Just before opening night, both sides agreed instead that the show would go on. But attached to each program would be disclaimers from Beckett and his American agent and publisher, Barney Rosset, along with a defense of the production by Robert Brustein, A.R.T.'s artistic director...
...letter to Brustein, Rosset had also questioned the casting of black actors in two of the play's four roles. Last week Actors' Equity, the stage performer's union, denounced such objections. Said the executive secretary of Equity, Alan Eisenberg: "We've got to raise the consciousness of the playwright to the concept of nontraditional casting...
Beckett, whose consciousness is already perched in the higher altitudes, holds that his stage directions are not embellishment but requirements fundamental to his play's radical astringency. And the play's the thing, he insists. Brustein, the eminent former head of the Yale University School of Drama, counters that theater is an amalgam of creative efforts, with contributions by the director, designers and actors. Says he: "The play, while the most important aspect, is not the only one." Brustein draws a distinction between new plays and those already in the canon. When staging a premiere, a director should respect...