The architect of ART

Robert Brustein looks forward to The Master Builder and back on 20 seasons

by Carolyn Clay

Like the title character of The Master Builder, Robert Brustein has been hanging a few celebratory wreaths of late, in honor of his American Repertory Theatre's 20th season. But he does not intend to fall, like Henrik Ibsen's aging architect, from a tower anytime soon. After 33 years as a resident-theater impresario -- 13 as head of the Yale Repertory Theatre (and dean of the Yale Drama School) and 20 spent leading the ART at Harvard -- the 71-year-old Brustein has no plan to step down. Or even to slow down. He writes plays. He adapts plays -- his new adaptation of The Master Builder opens at the ART this week. Sometimes he directs his adaptations, most notably in the case of ART signature work Six Characters in Search of an Author, which he reinvented for Pirandello. He writes criticism for the New Republic. He's titular head of the ART Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, which last year formed an alliance with that granddaddy of all acting schools, the Moscow Art Theatre School. He's newly married, to erstwhile ART board member Doreen Beinart. He clashes swords with playwright August Wilson before a sold-out crowd at New York's Town Hall. He wades into any and every controversy -- his latest collection of criticism and polemics is entitled Cultural Calisthenics: Writings on Race, Politics, and Theatre. And always, always, he hustles for the ART.

Why does he do it? "First of all," enumerates the still prickly and passionate Brustein, "I believe fervently in what I'm doing. Second of all, I'm working with a community that is as agreeable and gifted as any I've ever known. That's very important -- that the people you see every day are people you love. And thirdly, I believe in the perpetuation of the institution. I want it to continue to exist." Yes, he does "think of a successor. I think I have to have some vital input into who succeeds me, and I also think I have to have some vital input into when I leave. There are discussions going on presently, so we are preparing for some eventuality down the road. It's not immediate, not in the next year or two. But I do think it's necessary for me to be able to present to Harvard a number of appropriate people who might succeed me." And no, he won't tell us who they might be. Besides, right now, there's Ibsen to be shilled for. And the Norwegian dramatist, dead for 93 years, couldn't ask for a better posthumous press agent.

Brustein -- who has also adapted Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and When We Dead Awaken (for Robert Wilson's controversial 1991 production) for the stage -- has been beating a drum for Ibsen at least since 1962's The Theatre of Revolt, in which he characterized the top-hatted, mutton-chopped Scandinavian as a radical. Even now he calls him "the primary dramatist of the modern period. He's still an eye opener, still the man who changed our entire perception of what modern drama can be." Indeed, Brustein finds in Ibsen's late masterpiece The Master Builder the seeds not just of modern but of post-modern drama. As for the business of adapting him, Brustein asserts that Ibsen "is famously badly translated, although I think some of the more recent translations, by Michael Meyer and Rolf Fjelde, are good. But starting with William Archer, they were always translated into Victorian English, and it made his name anathema to a lot of very literate and engaged theatergoers because they thought that Ibsen was a Victorian, whereas Ibsen wrote a very supple, limber prose."

But how much does the ART honcho identify with what he has called the "aging rebel" of Ibsen's play, who is egged by ego and the messianic proddings of a predatory young woman to climb perhaps higher than even a mighty man may climb? "I think there were unconscious and maybe conscious reasons why I chose this play at this particular time," Brustein allows. "It was also significant to me that I work together with a very young woman," he adds, loosely casting himself as Bygmester Solness and 27-year-old Kate Whoriskey, the recent ART Institute grad who is directing the work, as Solness's young muse Hilde Wangel. "In our opening remarks to the cast, I said that she was creating `castles in the air' and I was trying to provide the `firm foundation.' So it worked out symbolically as well as artistically for the two of us. And I have since withdrawn as co-director."

Says Brustein of Whoriskey, who has snatched an ART mainstage directing assignment quicker than any student since 1970s Harvard wunderkind Peter Sellars: "I think she's a real visionary, and she has an extraordinary imagination. I would have directed the play myself, but I thought she would bring to it some extraordinary images." Indeed, Whoriskey, opting to underline the play's symbolic aspect, has already nixed Brustein's early enthusiasm, inspired by the Argentinian acrobatic troupe De La Guarda, to stage the play's climax using bungee cords!

That would require a less than septuagenarian Solness, to be sure, and the ART has got one in New York actor Christopher McCann, who heads a cast that also includes Sharon Scruggs, Kristin Flanders, Will LeBow, Jeremy Geidt, Benjamin Evett, and Aysan Çelik. McCann, says Brustein, "is younger than you would expect" of one of the aging-artist alter egos of Ibsen's late period. "But, actually, if you look at the text, the man is middle-aged. He's still in his prime, although to me there's a hidden story in this about an older man who strains himself with a younger woman, who's pushed beyond his endurance. There's an obvious sexual strain going on here as well. You remember, the play was inspired by Ibsen's epistolary romance with young Emilie Bardach, who was 18 years old and whom he called the May sun of a September life."

Whether it's technically 19 or 20 (the company was launched at Harvard in the spring of 1980), the ART is older than that and is looking back as well as forward this "20th season." A book is coming out in May from Brustein's publisher, Ivan R. Dee, entitled The Lively ART. Characterized by Brustein as "a memento of our 20 years," it's to include, in addition to a lot of eye-catching photos, articles written for the ART's newsletters and programs by the likes of ART authors "Carlos Fuentes and Derek Walcott and Dario Fo -- we've got a lot of Nobel Prize winners -- not to mention really gifted critics like Harold Bloom and Dick Gilman."

There may even be a few reflections on his company by Bob Brustein, and some of them will surprise you. Asked to name a highlight of the Tony-winning troupe's first two decades in Cambridge, he replies, "Oh, my mind immediately goes to The Juniper Tree [the Philip Glass/Robert Moran/Arthur Yorinks opera based on a Grimm fairy tale that the ART produced in 1985]. That was one of the most haunting and beautiful experiences of my life. The Juniper Tree had an effect on people, mostly women, that was lasting in a way that I can't compare anything else we've done with. It had a real effect on their dream life. It was a dream play, and if you gave yourself up to it, it was an extraordinary sensual experience.

"What else? the CIVIL warS and Alcestis, those two [Robert] Wilson pieces were glorious. Ubu Rock -- I think Ubu Rock was some sort of pinnacle of avant-garde madness and charm and presumption. All of [Andrei] Serban's productions, almost without exception, touch something very deep and subterranean. I think his Taming of the Shrew was very special; Juniper Tree was his too. And his Twelfth Night with Cherry Jones and Diane Lane. The King Stag and Six Characters, in repertory. We've taken those to Russia most recently. We've taken those to Taiwan, a number of places. And they always demonstrate, as well as we can demonstrate, what our theater is about. They're two productions done by the same company of actors. Secondly, we integrate into Six Characters the rehearsal process for The King Stag. Thirdly, they're both Italian plays from entirely different centuries. So they're almost like one evening, which appeals to me enormously because it says we are a company rather than just a theater where you go to see a show. We're an organism that the audience is invited to participate in and to become part of.

"New plays, you know, are among the things we're very proud of. We're proud to have had the opportunity to premiere The Day Room [the first play by novelist Don DeLillo, whose second, Valparaiso, just debuted at the ART -- see page 12 for our review]. All of David Mamet's plays with us have made me very proud. I think he's the country's leading dramatist. Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother [a painful work that went on from the ART to win the Pulitzer Prize] is a piece we're very proud of. I am personally very proud of Shlemiel the First [the klezmer musical based on Sholem Aleichem tales for which Brustein wrote the book]. The new plays are very important to our work because they influence the way we approach the classics. The new dramatists tell us how to approach the old dramatists."

Certainly that list makes clear that ART is not the land of Arthur Miller or Tom Stoppard or Neil Simon. Rather, it is often characterized as the turf of the auteur director -- a label Brustein cannot rip off with greater vigor. The company's aesthetic, he insists, "is something created by a creative ensemble, which includes directors but which is propelled by playwrights. The play we're doing is always the most important element in our work. Approaching that play, trying to investigate that play, really penetrate the play, is the work of the actors, directors, designers, and dramaturgs. It is the work of interpretation.

"It's very crucial to our work that it be perceived as ensemble work. We're trying to do what the Boston Bruins and the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Celtics do: become a team that works together and knows each other's plays and therefore can produce the most well-oiled mechanism as a result. And the most imaginative leaps." n

Robert Brustein's new adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder opens in previews this Friday, February 12, and plays in repertory with Don DeLillo's Valparaiso through March 21. Tickets are $23 to $55. Call 547-8300.