Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...avant-garde operas, 40-foot high Lincolns and inexplicable rhinoceri--and no reviews in Newsweek either--but theater Like It Oughta Be. To underline the point, two of the playwrights that Robert Brustein named to Time Magazine as representing "the kind of theater we're not interested in"--Shaw and Stoppard--are featured in the current season at the Huntington...
Another playwright Brustein would not touch with a 20-foot curtain rod is Clifford Odets, author of the Huntington's latest offering, Awake and Sing. Odets was one of the most prominent American playwrights of the 1930s, working with the Group Theater, the idealistic, left-wing venture that helped bring the modern theater to the United States. Odets first hit the big time with his Socialist one-act, Waiting for Lefty, which supposedly had audiences on their feet, yelling "Strike! Strike...
That bizarre sequence opens Tonight We Improvise, a play by Luigi Pirandello, adapted and directed by Robert Brustein for his American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Brustein also plays the impresario advocating auteurism; the cameraman is Frederick Wiseman, renowned for such PBS cinema verite documentaries as Canal Zone and Meat. Their monologues, just serious enough to be plausible -- Brustein actually does believe that directors have as creative a role as writers -- eventually become self-mockingly funny. But the jokes seem to go over the heads of much of the audience; instead of laughing, many spectators stare deadpan as if trying...
...effect is a powerful display of theater's seductive capacity to disparage illusion one moment, then compellingly restore it the next. Still, many Cambridge viewers remain baffled. They appear not to grasp that most of the scenario is Pirandello's rather than Brustein's and that despite the title, most is scripted rather than improvised. By Brustein's standards, the show is a success: it arouses rather than coddles audiences, forcing them to ponder the nature of theater -- not least the potential for being manipulated while happily submerged in a story. Says Brustein: "Audiences are responding correctly: they are being...
Tonight We Improvise opens A.R.T.'s 20th season and typifies the way Brustein's troupe has alternately exhilarated, frustrated and befuddled -- but rarely bored -- its audiences while building a reputation as perhaps the nation's most prestigious regional theater. Although Brustein routinely disparages Broadway, some of his productions end up there, including the 1983 Pulitzer prizewinner, 'Night, Mother. The troupe received Broadway's highest accolade, a Tony Award, last June. A.R.T.'s luster has been augmented by its affiliations with universities -- Yale from 1966 to mid-1979 (another ensemble now performs as the Yale Repertory Theater) and since then Harvard...