Word: brustein
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What can a writer do for an encore who has already been compared-by a critic as restrained as Robert Brustein -to. the Marx Brothers, Kingsley Amis, S.J. Perelman and Al Capp? For 13 years, ever since Catch-22 became an unparalleled publishing phenomenon and a cult book all over the world, that has been Joseph Heller's problem. His new novel, only his second, was given its present title as early as 1963. As a fabled work-in-progress, it had become a legend long before publication; with each passing year its promise (and therefore its risk) seemed...
Zero Mostel re-creates his Broadway role of John, Stanley's friend and upstairs neighbor. Writing about the 1961 production, Critic Robert Brustein observed that "Mostel has a great dancer's control of movement, a great actor's control of voice, a great mime's control of facial expression." The film preserves Mostel's virtuoso performance, including a long, bumpy transformation from man into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing...
...Many of Brustein's statements lend themselves to criticism. I am very suspicious of anyone who can condemn "relevant" theatre in the same book in which he cites Aristophanes. Has Brustein forgotten what was happening in Athens in 421, when The Peace was produced? When he cries for an art separated from contemporary events, does he dismiss Guernica, or Quartet for the End of Time, or, for that matter, Slaughterhouse-Five, because they spring out of a revulsion against war and fascism? What are his criteria...
Although his polemical style handicaps his logic, Brustein is making many good points. For one thing, he demonstrates graphically that much of the New Left is making use of exactly the tactics which have brought the old right such success-violence and terror, incredible self-righteousness and moral absolutism, and callous disregard for the rights of the individual. Brustein himself was forced to go into hiding last spring after repeated death threats. His classes were disrupted, his speeches heckled, his academic freedom essentially taken away in favor of mob rule...
...would prefer to sympathize with Brustein and not his opponents, those who abandon dedication and love for art in favor of the spontaneous and the impure, those who seek to destroy the university because it is the most fragile institution in American life, those who feed the war machine by whining self-indulgently when they could work to stop it, but Brustein will never convert them with name calling. Essentially this book is a cry of passion, but not an intellectual work. It may anger some and satisfy others, but it will appeal to prejudice, not the mind...