“It’s the definition of catharsis,” he advised American Theatre journal at age 90. “You’ll eliminate all of your bile and dwell perpetually.”
His spouse, Doreen Beinart, confirmed his loss of life however didn’t give a particular trigger.
Mr. Brustein was a passionate and provocative power in American theater, each as a participant mounting (and sometimes performing in) performs and as an observer reviewing exhibits for the New Republic, the place he was named theater critic in 1959. Throughout a profession of over six a long time, he oversaw a whole bunch of productions as a producer or director, wrote new performs and tailored older works, and taught or mentored actors together with Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub, Meryl Streep, Christopher Walken, Sigourney Weaver and Henry Winkler.
Starting in 1966, when he was appointed dean of the Yale Faculty of Drama, Mr. Brustein helped propel a regional theater motion wherein native theaters emerged as a vibrant, unbiased different to the commercially pushed phases of Broadway. Because the founding creative director of Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn., he cultivated a resident performing firm that carried out performs in rotation and introduced publicity to rising playwrights reminiscent of Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang.
After clashing with Yale’s new president, A. Bartlett Giamatti, over the course of the drama program, Mr. Brustein left in 1979 to take the same function at Harvard. He based the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, mounting new performs and experimental productions that included an excerpt of Robert Wilson’s mammoth opera “The Civil Wars” (virtually half the viewers walked out throughout a preview efficiency) and an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” performs, a few style mannequin turned punk rocker turned prostitute (some theatergoers threw their applications on the ushers).
Mr. Brustein was unbothered by the unfavourable reactions. As a creative director, he mentioned, he needed “to liberate American theater from its British overseers,” with an goal to advertise new works and new takes on the classics, even he alienated a few of his extra traditionalist subscribers.
“I like leisure, however leisure has obtained to be a critical effort to research the American soul by its theater,” he advised the Boston Globe in 2012. He added that if he sounded “like a Puritan,” he nonetheless delighted in creating “work that offers you time. Nevertheless it’s obtained to have some deeper resonance. And if it doesn’t, we’re dropping our soul.”
Mr. Brustein was awarded a 2010 Nationwide Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, who hailed him as “a number one power within the improvement of theater and theater artists in the USA.” However he additionally confronted frequent criticism from colleagues who questioned his zealot-like distinction between business and noncommercial theater, and who bristled on the disdain he held for many who sought to combine the 2.
By his personal admission, the American Repertory Theater was dwelling to a number of productions that went on to Broadway, together with Jules Feiffer’s “Grown Ups,” Marsha Norman’s “’night time Mom” and the musical “Large River,” a “Huckleberry Finn” adaptation with a e-book by one in all his former college students, William Hauptman, and music and lyrics by Roger Miller. Nevertheless it was a mistake, he mentioned, to permit the theater to ever be used as a “tryout station,” which he accused his successor Lloyd Richards of doing at Yale Rep.
“The fundamental goal of the business theater is to make a revenue,” Mr. Brustein advised the New York Occasions in 1990. “The fundamental goal of noncommercial theater, in its best type, is to create the situation whereby artistic endeavors could be identified. And I don’t suppose these are appropriate goals.”
Mr. Brustein additionally clashed with playwrights together with Samuel Beckett, who objected to an unorthodox 1984 staging of his play “Endgame” at A.R.T., directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. The manufacturing altered the setting, added music and featured Black actors in nontraditional casting.
A authorized dispute with the dramatist’s writer was resolved after Beckett’s title was faraway from the poster and program, which was printed with an announcement wherein Beckett known as the manufacturing “a whole parody of the play as conceived by me.” The playbill additionally included a retort from Mr. Brustein: “To threaten any deviations from a purist rendering of this or every other play … not solely robs collaborating artists of their interpretive freedom however threatens to show the theater right into a waxworks.”
A number of years later, Mr. Brustein kicked off a rancorous, years-long debate with playwright August Wilson — a poetic chronicler of African American life and tradition — within the pages of the New Republic. In a overview of Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson,” which opened on Broadway in 1990 and acquired the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Brustein wrote that Wilson had “so far restricted himself to the black expertise in a comparatively literalistic type.” He later mentioned the Black expertise had “come to be a repetitive theme” for the playwright.
Critics, and Wilson himself, mentioned it was unfair for Mr. Brustein to solid the Black expertise as one way or the other distinct from the human expertise. “There’s no concept that can’t be contained in Black life,” Wilson advised the Occasions in response. “It’s full and it’s flourishing, like anybody else’s life.”
The 2 males continued to spar in interviews and articles, debating colorblind casting, Black theaters and multiculturalism within the arts earlier than agreeing to a public debate in 1997, earlier than a sold-out crowd at City Corridor in New York. It was the theater world’s equal of a heavyweight title bout: Scalpers hawked tickets whereas luminaries together with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Helen Mirren discovered their seats, and the viewers sometimes shouted insults and encouragement on the contributors.
Afterward, Occasions columnist Frank Wealthy described the sparring companions as “two humorless and infrequently petty egomaniacs.”
Mr. Brustein sought to border the controversy in classical phrases. In his telling, their argument was as previous as Plato, who noticed theater as a car for political thought and motion, and Aristotle, who thought of it a platform to look at “the workings of the human soul, which has no shade,” as Mr. Brustein put it. Each males agreed on a minimum of one level, discovering frequent floor within the want for extra Black-led theaters.
“I come away confirmed in my conviction that drama is the opposition of two concepts,” Mr. Brustein mentioned on the night’s shut. “So I feel we have now offered drama, if not enlightenment.”
The youthful of two sons, Robert Sanford Brustein was born in Brooklyn on April 21, 1927, and grew up on the Higher West Aspect of Manhattan. His mom was a homemaker, and his father was a wool yarn producer who immigrated from Poland at age 7.
As a boy, Mr. Brustein performed the clarinet and tenor saxophone, began a giant band and had goals of changing into the following Artie Shaw. However he started to develop an curiosity in performing whereas away at summer season camp and as a scholar at Amherst School in Massachusetts, the place he acquired a bachelor’s diploma in historical past in 1947 following a stint within the Service provider Marine.
He spent a yr on the Yale Faculty of Drama (he was “very disillusioned,” he mentioned, by the dearth of mental rigor) and continued his graduate research at Columbia College, the place he took courses with Lionel Trilling — one in all his function fashions as a critic — and acquired a grasp’s diploma in English in 1950. After two years learning on the College of Nottingham in England on a Fulbright fellowship, he returned to Columbia to obtain a doctorate in 1957, with a give attention to dramatic literature.
Mr. Brustein taught at Cornell, Vassar and Columbia whereas additionally writing theater criticism. He was employed at Yale on the energy of his e-book “The Theatre of Revolt” (1964), a Nationwide Guide Award finalist that examined the work of contemporary playwrights from Henrik Ibsen to Jean Genet.
At Harvard, he served as an English professor whereas additionally presiding over A.R.T. on the Loeb Drama Heart. The group acquired a particular Tony Award in 1986 and mounted unique productions by Mr. Brustein, together with his comedy “No person Dies on Friday,” impressed by the connection between performing instructor Lee Strasberg and his scholar Marilyn Monroe, and “Shlemiel the First,” a klezmer musical based mostly on tales by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Mr. Brustein’s first spouse, the previous Norma Ofstrock, an actress and Yale drama instructor, died in 1979. In 1996, he married Beinart, the director of a human rights movie program at Harvard’s Kennedy Faculty of Authorities. She survives him, as does a son from his first marriage, Daniel Brustein; two stepchildren, Jean Stern and journalist and political commentator Peter Beinart; and 7 grandchildren.
Mr. Brustein retired as creative director of A.R.T. in 2002 however remained energetic till his loss of life, writing books, theater criticism and occasional political essays for HuffPost. He confirmed the same versatility on the stage, writing performs that included an adaptation of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” a trilogy impressed by the life and work of Shakespeare, and a semi-autobiographical play known as “Spring Ahead, Fall Again.”
“He at all times desires to impress, that’s part of him,” director Andrei Serban, who labored with Mr. Brustein on a number of performs, advised the Occasions in 2001. “However the different a part of him is that in his very secret coronary heart, he needed to be a Broadway star. When he writes performs, they at all times have a component of Broadway, which is so very a lot in contrast to him. In a wierd method, his foremost heart is emotion. He could be moved to tears, develop into this Santa Claus of emotion. It’s such a paradox.”
Mr. Brustein mentioned he acknowledged the contradiction. “I do know I’m out of step,” he advised the Occasions. “I’m so out of step I’m virtually in step.”
