The Brustein Watch is finally over: after a year or more of speculation, a successor to American Repertory Theatre founding artistic director Robert Brustein has been announced. Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine, on his way out the door himself, announced Wednesday the appointment of Robert Woodruff as the next artistic director of the ART. Woodruff, who will be artistic director–designate for the coming year, will take the creative reins August 1, 2002. Also on that date, ART managing director Robert J. Orchard will ascend to the title of executive director. And resident dramaturg Gideon Lester will become associate artistic director/dramaturg. Brustein, who led the Yale Repertory Theatre from 1966 to 1979 and has been at the helm of the ART since 1979, will take a sabbatical leave and return to the ART a year later as founding director and creative consultant.

Woodruff, 53, has long been regarded as the likely heir apparent. A brilliant director best known for his productions of works by Sam Shepard and Bertolt Brecht, he is currently represented on the ART stage by an audacious staging of Shakespeare’s Richard II. His ART renderings of Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities and Charles L. Mee’s Full Circle both won Elliot Norton Awards for Outstanding Direction. He is at present assistant professor at the Hammerstein Center for Theatre Studies at Columbia University.

Issue Date: May 24 - 31, 2001