Thinking about the Theatre—and Theatre Critics: An Interview with Robert Brustein, Conducted by Bert Cardullo, New York City, July 2008

{ 220 } \ Thinking about the Theatre— and Theatre Critics An Interview with Robert Brustein, Conducted by Bert Cardullo, New York City, July 2008 Robert Brustein (b. 1927) is an Ameri­ can theatre critic, producer, and teacher. He was educated at Amherst College, where he received a B.A. in 1948, and Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1957. After teaching at Cornell University, Vassar College, and Columbia, he became dean of the Yale School of Drama in 1966, serving in that position until 1979. It was during this period that he founded the Yale Repertory Theatre. In 1979, Bru­ stein left Yale for Harvard University, where he founded the Ameri­ can Repertory Theater and became a professor of English. He served for twenty years as director of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard, where he also founded the Institute for Advanced Theater Training. He retired as artistic director of the Ameri­ can Repertory Theater in 2002 and now serves as founding director and creative consultant. As the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theatre from 1966 to 1979, and of Ameri­ can Repertory Theater from 1980 to 2002, Brustein supervised over two hundred productions, acting in eight and directing twelve. Robert Brustein has been the theatre critic for the New Republic since 1959, and he is the author of fifteen books—a number of them collections of his writings for that magazine. Twice winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism—in 1962 for his reviews in Commentary, Partisan Review, Harpers, and the New Republic; and in 1987 for Who Needs Theatre: Dramatic Opinions—Brustein is the only person to have received this award more than once. He was elected to the Ameri­ can Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and in 2002 was inducted into the Ameri­ can Theatre Hall of Fame. { 221 } An Interview with Robert Brustein bert cardullo: Could we begin at the beginning, as it were, when you started out as a critic? robert brustein: Yes, of course. When I started writing criticism in the 1960s, I was part of a prominent community—Eric Bentley, Harold Clurman, Kenneth Tynan, Walter Kerr, Richard Gilman, Stanley Kauffmann, and Susan Sontag. It was an amazing group. Everybody wanted to write theatre criticism in those days. Eric Bentley had a profound influence on me when I was a young, evolving intellectual. He was one of the few in our time who took theatre seriously as a genuine art form and not simply entertainment, although it must be that, too, of course. I read his books religiously and scoured the New Republic for his reviews. He was my idol, as it were, and he stimulated me through his work to go into theatre criticism. I can certainly attest to the impact that Bentley’s Playwright as Thinker had on me. I had been a student at the Yale School of Drama for a year in 1948. I was appalled, actually, at the fact that we would end our experience of watching a play, and we’d talk about the acting, we’d talk about the directing, we’d talk about the technical work, we’d talk about the lighting, talk about the management , but we would never, ever, talk about the play. I found in Bentley’s book a testimony to this fact. When I got to Yale, we read plays in synopsized form, and the way we responded to the plays was to say how many characters, how many sets, where it’s placed, what the particular period is, but we never, ever talked about the play. To come upon this book, and to read what Bentley had to say about the intellectual content of plays,the artistic content of plays,the way that playwrights influenced each other, the various styles and contrary but nevertheless unified approaches to the theatre that one found from the nineteenth century to the present time, really had an untold influence on me, and this man’s name became magic to me. I also just recently thought, in preparing for this interview, that I would look back over the book, and came across some passages...