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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
spectators are on the stage, and the actors are refusing to play roles
that are not sufficiently close to their own personalities''') when every–
one else wanted to argue politics or drugs or just do some screaming–
so in the moratorium days at Yale he figured, in both the public mind
and his own, as the dogged if unloveable man of principle defending
academic business as usual.
Brustein tried, he tells us, to resist the "radical" call for suspen–
sion of classes, telling a student who interrupted his seminar "There's
a reality in here too," snapping back at the Drama School students
who wanted a "relevant" redirection of activities for a few days, op–
posing such redirection in faculty meeting but being voted down, getting
a vague but sincere-sounding death threat on the phone, which he took
with understandable yet perhaps excessive seriousness, advising King–
man Brewster to close everything up and send the kids home before
they got shot, burned or blown up. (Brewster, "haggard and under
obvious strain," declined the advice whose wisdom he would doubtless
have grasped if he'd been more relaxed.) Toward the end of the volume
we hear Brustein, in a "welcoming" speech to the Drama School stu–
dents the following September, virtually daring them to try to occupy
his office, as if his role as Tough Administrator and Professional re–
quired them to have such naughty intentions.
This was the part Brustein played, though life betrayed art and
("miraculously") no serious violence occurred at Yale, then or later.
But in that great repertory theater in the head worse plays than Bru–
stein's are going on these days - I'm complaining not so much about
his self-dramatization as about his failure to give an adequate critical
interpretation of the drama enacted.
The material for such interpretation richly exists in the introduc–
tion to his book
The Third Theatre
(1969). He had been praising (and
overrating, as "art") plays like
Dynamite Tonite, Viet Rock
and
Mac–
Bird
because they expressed a mood of protest that wasn't as yet com–
monplace; but by 1969 he felt compelled to recant, since too many
otherwise ordinary people were getting into, and thus spoiling, the act.
What was once beautifully locked up in the sanctuary of avant-garde
theater had leaked out into the street: "what was once considered spe–
cial and arcane - the exclusive concern of an alienated argumentative,
intensely serious elite - was now open to easy access through televi–
sion and the popular magazines."
In a sentence like that, with its terrible indifference to the ironies
struggling to emerge from its own terms, you have the pathos of a
