PARTISAN REVIEW
121
WAITING FOR LEFTY
REVOLUTION AS THEATRE. By Robert Brustein. Liveright. Cloth, $5.95:
paper, $1.95.
Robert Brustein's general thesis about the "revolution" on and
off campus
is
that the "radical" acts of politics and culture we're so
familiar with these days are just that, "acts," self-regarding, self-serv–
ing,
self-generating theatrics, effective in attracting and holding an
audience but not in serving the social and human purposes they in–
voke. Though he here writes mainly about student protest, virtually
no active opposition to the existing order of things is exempted from
this
charge. Even good causes - and Brustein insists that he too op–
poses the war, racial injustice and so on - get perverted by the avail–
ability
of instant publicity, which reduces even sincere reformers to the
level of the charlatans and opportunists who compete with them for
public attention.
The evident truth in this idea is, however, somewhat larger and
more
difficult than Brustein allows. Any public action is of course thea–
trical
to some extent, in that it assumes an audience and recognizes
that what is "done" has rhetorical as well as efficient force.
If
you
allow for any public expression of collective desires or needs at all, you
must attempt a harder discrimination, between good theater and bad,
between the acts whose style expresses a serious and hopeful imagina–
tion of valuable ends and the acts whose style is merely its own end.
But Brustein, for whom all "revolutions" are hideously one, who (on
the evidence of this book) doesn't distinguish between LeRoi Jones and
James Kunen, between Altamont and Leonard Bernstein's living room,
or
(in
his more recent
New York Times Magazine
piece on "cultural
schizophrenia") between Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Erich
Segal,
isn't interested in making such discriminations just now.
Yet even the private resistance he offers as the alternative - "the
revolution of character . . . through an act of moral transcendence,
human intelligence, and deliberate will" - can't evade the ambiguity
of the word "act." As Kenneth Keniston pointed out in a letter to the
Times
which Brustein manfully reprints, Brustein's account of the tense
days
in
New Haven is as much theater as it is accurate reporting. Just
as he is a performer in his own description of the riotous Theatre of
Ideas symposium on "Theatre or Therapy," playing the role of Serious
Academic Critic (" 'We are at the tail end of Romanticism when the
