Theater: Robert Brustein, Reinventing the Classics

At Harvard, Robert Brustein 's rep troupe instructs by example

A bit of backstage wisdom popular among targets of caustic review holds that every drama critic is a frustrated actor or director. By that measure, Rob ert Brustein may be the most serene critic in America. For nearly two decades, the longtime scholar and sometime reviewer for the New Republic and the New York Times has been able to cast himself occasionally as an actor, hire himself as a director, and indulge his critical precepts as producer of two celebrated and controversial theater companies.

As dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979, he installed a professional acting troupe that premiered such plays as Ted Tally's Terra Nova and Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-prizewinning Buried Child and trained performers as diverse as Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler. The company also tried some daffy updating of classics: the 1607 Revenger's Tragedy be came an essay on Viet Nam War protest, the witches in Macbeth came from a spaceship, and The Frogs of Aristophanes frolicked in a Yale swimming pool.

When Brustein was let go as dean in 1979 for reasons that are still disputed, he vowed to take the Yale Rep with him. To Yale's surprise, he more or less did; though another company now performs in Yale's name, Brustein's rechristened American Repertory Theater is in its fourth season at Harvard. This spring the university will consider whether to commit its patronage past 1984 and whether to endorse Bru stein's plan for conservatory training in drama. Brustein says he cannot continue without increased funds from Harvard.

In an academic community, Brustein's approach to literature verges on insurrection. Professors tend to cherish fidelity to a text and tradition in its interpretation. Brustein seeks to make every play speak to the present, and does not revere even Shakespeare's words as sacred. Often stimulating and insightful, his productions of masterworks are novelties that presume the audience knows the standards from which he departs.

Perhaps as incendiary an example of this revisionism as Brustein has ever offered is the A.R.T.'s current Three Sisters, a production by Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters — to return to the gaiety of Moscow — is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with antic energy and force. Serban adroitly manages a welter of themes: aimless ambition, futile romance, grotesque distortions of honor, loneliness in a crowd. The play becomes the raucous comedy that Chekhov always insisted it was and hurtles exuberantly toward a triumph of optimism over experience. Among a solid cast, including Jeremy Geidt as the pathetic Chebutykin, three performers achieve fresh insight: Alvin Epstein as a hyperkinetic but somewhat dim Vershinin; Cheryl Giannini as a hard, petulant Masha; and Karen MacDonald as a vulgar, manipulative yet curiously sympathetic Natasha, the sister-in-law who drives the three sisters from their family home.