Word: brustein
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Director Robert Brustein--who is the ART's Artistic Director, Professor of English at Harvard, and theatre critic for The New Republic--has performed major surgery on Thomas Middleton's seventeenth century tragedy to resurrect it for the Loeb stage. Brustein's version of the neglected Jacobean play is a kind of amalgam with the elegance of neo-classical tragedy, the gritty flow of nineteenth century Naturalism and the thematic revelance of Modernism, yet it still manages to cohere...
Kicking off the ART's seventh year in Cambridge, Brustein's Changeling demonstrates a not too didactic lesson: that we can breathe fresh life into old lines, and in so doing throw new light on theatrical traditions. Although this concept sounds obvious, putting on a play that was first produced in 1622 (and rarely thereafter) can be tricky business, especially when you've got to uphold a reputation for avant-garde wizardry...
Certainly, Brustein and Co, are not renowned for fuddy-duddy programming: the director's last effort was a very hip version of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and the upcoming calendar of his ART theatre includes a new opera by Philip Glass and Robert Moran, a Robert Wilson interpretation of Euripides's Alcestis scored by Laurie Anderson, and a tentative project by Polish movie director Andrzej Wajda...
ACCORDINGLY, The Changeling doesn't look or sound like a Jacobean tragedy about love, murder and intrigue. The metallic scaffolding and leather jumpsuits that comprise Michael H. Yeargan's sets and costumes could have been borrowed from an episode of "Battlestar Galactica." Brustein's characters speak their lines at breakneck speed and with near-feverish emotion to give Middleton's rhyming text the language and feel of everyday speech. No stuffy parlor play this...
...These Puritans are the ones who closed theatres in England for 18 years," says Robert S. Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre. "And Harvard still doesn't have a drama concentration or a drama program...