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Critic Brustein's papers a dramatic addition to Gotlieb Center
By David J. Craig
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This 1983 photograph of American Repertory Theatre founding director Robert Brustein and actress Meryl Streep is on display as part of the Brustein exhibition on the main floor of Mugar Memorial Library. Also featured is correspondence with Streep, who was one of Brustein's students at Yale in the 1970s. Photo by Richard M. Feldman |
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Theatergoers perusing the new Robert Brustein exhibition at Mugar Memorial Library may spot in a letter from novelist Philip Roth the inspiration for a memorable scene in Brustein's play Nobody Dies on Friday, where a man sits on his grown son's lap during a conversation. Perhaps what is most striking about the correspondence between Roth and the founding director of the American Repertory Theatre, however, is the evident affection between the hard-nosed New York iconoclasts.
“Dear Phillie,” Brustein begins a letter dated February 4, 1991. “Patrimony is an extraordinarily moving book. I read it in one sweet sitting, drenched with feeling, which is rather the way I imagine you wrote it. Your mandate not to forget anything has helped you evoke this funny, odd, remarkable man in all his fullness so that we get to love him almost as much as you do. . . . Phil, let Arthur have all his sons — Patrimony does the job on all our fathers. . . . I can't be sure I ever met your dad but I remember — when we ran into each other in Miami in the mid-seventies — you going to visit him with such a combination of expectation and nervousness.”
Replies Roth four days later: “Bob . . . I thought the book would speak to you particularly. You may not know that one of the highpoints of my life was seeing you pull your father onto your lap, as he was crossing the room one evening at your house on the Vineyard. You just pulled him down onto your lap and there he sat as though it was the most natural seat for him in the world. He continued his conversation with all of us from there!”
The letters are among the documents Brustein recently gave to BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, formerly called Special Collections. The yearlong exhibition of his personal archive, Innovator On-Stage: The Life and Work of Robert Brustein, opened on the library's main floor on December 8. Brustein, theater critic, playwright, actor, director, educator, author, and major force in American theater, was invested as a fellow of the newly named center at a ceremony the same day.
“Brustein is a figure whose papers would be welcome in any collection; I'm sure the Library of Congress or the Lincoln Center theater collection would love to have him,” says Howard Gotlieb, director of the Archival Research Center, which includes among its many collections a major theater archive that boasts the papers of George Bernard Shaw, Elliot Norton, and Sam Shepard. “The beauty of the Brustein collection is that it is complete in every aspect — correspondence, journals, schoolboy notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, memorabilia, awards, scripts with his comments on them, and his books. The collection is very rich also in the sense that it shows what was going on in Brustein's mind, from his time as a student all the way through the days when he created and ran his own production company.”
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Robert Brustein was invested as a fellow of BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, formerly called Special Collections, at a December 8 event marking the opening of an exhibition of Brustein's personal archives at Mugar Memorial Library. Photo by Fred Sway |
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In the 1960s and 1970s, Brustein became well known as the radical theater critic for the New Republic and as dean of Yale University's drama school, where he created the Yale Repertory Theatre. There, he staged many provocative interpretations of well-known plays and trained actors Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken. The exhibition includes correspondence with them, as well as letters from Yale alumni such as playwright David Mamet and producer Rocco Landesman.
In 1979, Brustein joined Harvard to form the American Repertory Theatre (ART), and there continued to put on cutting-edge productions, primarily at the Loeb Drama Center, until his 2002 retirement as artistic director. He also continued to generate controversy: Samuel Beckett publicly disassociated himself from ART's treatment of Endgame in 1984. But Brustein's relentless championing of the avant-garde established ART as one of the most important regional theaters in the United States. Under his direction it won a 1986 Tony Award for excellence as a regional theater and produced critically acclaimed plays such as Marsha Norman's Pulitzer prize–winning 'Night, Mother, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Ibsen's The Master Builder.
A professor emeritus of English at Harvard, Brustein still reviews regularly for the New Republic and teaches at ART, where he is a creative consultant. “Brustein is an Erasmus of our times in that he is a bit of everything — versed in his subject academically as well as professionally,” says Gotlieb. “There are a lot of theorists and critics who've never been behind the curtain, and who have never been on the boards, but Brustein has been involved in practically every aspect of theatrical work, and that makes it important to listen to him.”
Brustein recently led a series of panel discussions at the BU Theatre on the future of American theater. He tells the Bridge, “Theater can either go into oblivion as a form or it can renew itself and redefine itself and prove that it is essential to people's lives. I happen to think it is essential to people's lives.”
He is the author of 12 books on theater and culture, including The Third Theater (1969) and Making Scenes (1981), both of whose manuscripts and working drafts are in the collection. He is “honored and pleased,” he says, to have his papers at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, which he praises for being “focused on the present and the future.
“There are a couple of things that I would like to be remembered for — one is my devotion to the idea of permanent company work,” Brustein says. “I believe that the best work comes out of the sort of collaboration when actors, directors, technicians, designers, administrators, and dramaturges work together over a period of time. I tried to devote most of my life to that. . . . The other thing I'm proud of is my having been in the position to be able to facilitate the work of people who I think are going to develop in a very serious and important way. I helped to train actors, playwrights, and directors, and I gave them a space to do their work.”
For hours of the Brustein exhibition and more information about the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, visit www.bu.edu/archives.
12
December 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations