Word: brustein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Just as no one would dream of teaching Dostoyevsky or Hegel without access to their books in Widener, so no one could properly teach Sophocles or Shakespeare without access to their plays on the stage," Brustein writes in Making Scenes. This is sound reasoning to anyone who understands the difference between studying dramatic texts and studying drama. But if the ART is presenting itself as a sort of dramatic library, much of the Harvard faculty seems to believe that its texts are corrupted...
...Monday night forum at the Loeb over how Shakespeare ought to be produced. The preoccupation of that debate--fidelity to the text--was echoed this spring by Noel Lord Annan of the University of London, invited here by the English Department. Faculty here, directly, and Annan, indirectly, were criticizing Brustein and his theater for abandoning their duty to the author in orgies of directorial license...
...problem is, everyone believes in the text. Enshrining the words begs the far more important question: what do you do with them? The academic can ponder this without forcing the issue, but the director faces it each working day. If you search back in Brustein's writings to his earlier, theoretical broadsides like "No More Master-pieces," you'll find there an outspoken defense of the text against directorial depredations. Brustein argued that the text was the director's treasure house--by mastering it, he could find the appropriate way to direct a play, the right metaphors, emphases and designs...
...company was still moving in, "We don't set Hamlet in Upper Silesia just because Upper Silesia happens to be fashionable. Yet the cry of academic theatergoers, at Harvard or anywhere else, resounds with the same refrain: stick to the text. And herein lies the root trouble with Brustein's vision of harmony between university and theater...
...projected deficit this season and looming, savage cutbacks in federal aid--do not bite too deeply, and the ART makes strides towards getting more students into the Loeb--perhaps by further reducing the price of the already dirt-cheap student pass--future seasons are likely to show that Brustein and Harvard were prescient in teaming up. But before their teamwork becomes fully effective, somehow the gap between the academic theater and the live theater will have to narrow. Let's hope the academics grow to appreciate the need for the director in the modern theater, and the theater professionals find...