Word: brustein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...musical was adapted by ART artistic director Robert Brustein from a children's story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. But the adaptation is neither sharp nor captivating-instead it relies heavily on slapstick gags and cheap one-line jokes to drag its way through a simple story. Singer's morality tale here is not expanded or satirized; rather, it is presented and left to lie like cold chicken soup, sans matzoh balls, vegetables or even chicken. The adaptation fails to challenge the audience in the slightest, and is not even successful in its irreverence. Much of 'Shlemiel' simply insults both...
...fences. Not just the play, but the ones between director of the Loeb Drama Center and professor of English Robert Brustein and playwright August Wilson, whose conflict over color-blind casting and the theater was played out on a national stage...
...struck by the qualities of his character, and the smoothness of his writing," said Robert S. Brustein, director of the Loeb Drama Center. "He was destined to be an important playwright...
...juxtaposing, humor and pathos, undercutting the concept of the heroic ideal with lacerating irony, and completely devoid of the compelling central figure so key to the other plays, it is also arguably the trickiest one to interpret and perform. The current American Repertory Theater (ART) production, based on Robert Brustein's adaptation and directed by Francois Rochaix, chooses to play up the comic-ironic aspects without jettisoning the ambiguity or the tragedy. It succeeds marvelously in the first aim, somewhat less clearly in the second...
...good example of how Brustein allows his students to make innovation the only expectation they consistently satisfy. Everything else can feel like a work in progress so long as the audience goes away thinking about conventions overturned. "If we don't encourage our young artists," Brustein recently told the Harvard Gazette, "we will have a country without a civilization, without a culture." Next fall the Institute moves into its 10th year, a landmark for any school, but a referendum of sorts on how well the Institute lives up to its own expectations...