Word: brustein
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...avant-garde operas, 40-foot high Lincolns and inexplicable rhinoceri--and no reviews in Newsweek either--but theater Like It Oughta Be. To underline the point, two of the playwrights that Robert Brustein named to Time Magazine as representing "the kind of theater we're not interested in"--Shaw and Stoppard--are featured in the current season at the Huntington...
Another playwright Brustein would not touch with a 20-foot curtain rod is Clifford Odets, author of the Huntington's latest offering, Awake and Sing. Odets was one of the most prominent American playwrights of the 1930s, working with the Group Theater, the idealistic, left-wing venture that helped bring the modern theater to the United States. Odets first hit the big time with his Socialist one-act, Waiting for Lefty, which supposedly had audiences on their feet, yelling "Strike! Strike...
Despite the limitations of this particular production, it is a pleasure to break free of the Brustein-dominated Cambridge theater scene and see how the other half emotes. Realism in drama and an emphasis on the text is not dead, as the Huntington continually proves. Awake and Sing is a play about finding hope in a world crushed under the weight of materialism and selfishness. Whether or not the play makes its case, the fact that it is being done in Boston--and done so faithfully, too--is no small cause for rejoicing...
...effect is a powerful display of theater's seductive capacity to disparage illusion one moment, then compellingly restore it the next. Still, many Cambridge viewers remain baffled. They appear not to grasp that most of the scenario is Pirandello's rather than Brustein's and that despite the title, most is scripted rather than improvised. By Brustein's standards, the show is a success: it arouses rather than coddles audiences, forcing them to ponder the nature of theater -- not least the potential for being manipulated while happily submerged in a story. Says Brustein: "Audiences are responding correctly: they are being...
Tonight We Improvise opens A.R.T.'s 20th season and typifies the way Brustein's troupe has alternately exhilarated, frustrated and befuddled -- but rarely bored -- its audiences while building a reputation as perhaps the nation's most prestigious regional theater. Although Brustein routinely disparages Broadway, some of his productions end up there, including the 1983 Pulitzer prizewinner, 'Night, Mother. The troupe received Broadway's highest accolade, a Tony Award, last June. A.R.T.'s luster has been augmented by its affiliations with universities -- Yale from 1966 to mid-1979 (another ensemble now performs as the Yale Repertory Theater) and since then Harvard...