Theater: Disorientation As An Art Form

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One of the company's goals, Brustein says, is to demonstrate for audiences "what is unique about theater, what can happen intellectually only in that environment, as opposed to illusions that could be bettered on film or videotape." That translates into virtual exclusion of such naturalistic writers as Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill and of what Brustein calls "verbal, academic playwrights like Shaw, Wilde and Tom Stoppard." Adds Brustein: "We are not interested in the theater of totally resolved emotions." Instead the company has emphasized new nonnarrative plays, obscure classics infused with directorial pyrotechnics, political tracts and works at the borderline between theater and opera. The results have often enraged purists. Last season Brustein staged a Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling, minus its major subplot; Andrei Serban's 1982 staging reduced the Three Sisters' yearning for "Moscow" to an endearment crooned to an infant.

Brustein's latest step is to establish at Harvard what he inherited at Yale in 1966 as dean of its drama school: a conservatory for training actors, directors and designers. The Institute for Advanced Theater Training opened in October, and will become a two-year, nondegree program with a total of 40 students, mostly recent U.S. college graduates.The training will include performing in or working backstage at A.R.T. shows.

Brustein, 59, has taught English at Columbia, Yale and now Harvard and is the longtime drama critic for the New Republic, but he prefers the practical side of drama. Undaunted by some early failures at Yale, including his science fiction Macbeth in 1971, he has gone on to direct or produce productions of wit, energy and visual sophistication. Although he has been "a little taken aback" at the response to Tonight We Improvise, he argues, with the tenacity that has made him a godfather of the regional repertory movement, "Any theater that believes and persists in its vision will eventually draw an audience." The A.R.T. is a compelling case in point. Occluded storytelling cost it nearly half its subscribers between the second and third seasons at Harvard. The rebuilt audience, if still sometimes off-balance, is passionately loyal: the company played to at least 95% of capacity in each of its past two seasons.