Word: brustein
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...Brustein became a respected drama critic for The New Republic. His disappointment and frustration with much of what he saw is chronicled in Seasons of Discontent, a collection of reviews from that period. When The New York Times offered him the position of daily drama critic, he declined--at The New Republic he could "speak the truth as I saw it without feeling responsible for people's jobs," he said. The American theater had come to a "dead halt," and Brustein was considering moving on to general cultural criticism--books, movies, sometimes theater--when in 1966. Yale President Kingman Brewster...
...Yale idea was big: to combine a drama school with a professional repertory theater, to attract practicing professionals who would both participate in Rep productions and provide instruction for students. "...thus," said Brustein, "Students learn not by doing things badly(the usual situation) but, first, by watching them done well and, second, by attempting to match those standards...
...beginning it was difficult. The Rep and the school operated on different levels, and according to Alvin Epstein, an associate of Brustein's for ten years and now director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, "It took a long time to fuse those energies, and the plan for how to fuse them was always changing." It happened, however, in spite of student unrest during the late '60s and fights among the faculty members. By the mid-70's the Yale Rep had become, in the words of Hartford Courant Drama Critic Malcolm Johnson, who has followed it from...
...Brustein reports that Kingman Brewster had initially said to him, "You've been shooting your mouth off about the theater--why don't you do something about it?" And for one of the stiffest critics in theater, there were "painful consequences" in dealing with people when he tried to put his ideals into action. One consequence was that Brustein has gained a reputation among some people for arrogance. But his colleagues dismiss this, finding him gentlemanly and stimulating. "He's no more arrogant than any other talented person I've ever worked with," says Alvin Epstein...
Others have tagged him as "the spokesman for elitism in American theater." Brustein doesn't like his "elitist" label, and calls it "a political football and a red herring." The word "elite," he says, is misunderstood in America. People think that "no one is better than anyone else. Well, that's the wrong road to take--a person can have a special talent or gift, and we have to identify that gift and encourage it. I'm interested in quality, excellence, standards." He says he has preserved his ideal over the last 13 years, but has learned how to soften...