At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 1, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Robert Sanford Brustein was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
The legacy and influence of Robert Brustein, a major presence in American theater of the 20th century, live on in the 21st. As dean of the Yale School of Drama starting in 1966, Brustein founded the Yale Repertory Theatre, where he worked with playwrights such as Sam Shepherd and David Mamet and with players such as Meryl Streep. In 1980 at Harvard, he became director of the Loeb Drama Center and turned it into the home of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). He later founded the Institute for Advanced Theater Training. While at Harvard, Brustein also taught as a full professor of English. He retired in 2003, becoming a research professor of English and creative consultant to the A.R.T.
While Brustein’s command of drama, from ancient Greek plays to avant-garde theater, was legendary, he was always a theatrical innovator, seeking and creating genuinely new, profound productions. He was a leader in the regional theater movement, which emphasized serious, intelligent engagement with past great authors and newly rising ones. His founding of repertory companies at Yale and Harvard established fresh relationships between research universities and the performing arts, a model copied at other schools. In 1990 he told The New York Times, “The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit” and “the basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”
Brustein believed deeply in textual criticism of plays and honored their interpretations both as literary works and as fluid dramas that demand different performances for different times. Coming to Harvard, he apparently worried that the institution might not always support theater of high quality. President Derek Bok was said to have given that guarantee. The joke was that if the box office did not provide enough for the A.R.T., then Bok’s Office would. Brustein’s concerns were not without merit. Two early A.R.T. productions witnessed audiences leave midway through performances, but he was willing to accept such risks to achieve unique qualities that a calculated, commercial theater could rarely equal.
At the A.R.T., Brustein succeeded in melding performance, scholarship, and dramaturgy, while bringing together professionals, amateurs, and students. Under his leadership, the A.R.T. championed directors such as Alvin Epstein, JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Sellars, Julie Taymor, and Robert Wilson. Despite a demanding national and international schedule, Brustein regularly gave lecture courses on modern or post-modern drama from 1980 through 2001.
The current artistic director of the A.R.T., Diane Paulus, became acquainted with Brustein’s work when she was an undergraduate at Harvard. She thinks that his vision for theater remains bold and innovative. Sam Marks, a senior lecturer on playwriting in the Department of English, notes, “Not only does he leave an immense legacy in the theater, he changed the lives of so many of his students, whom he loved.”
Born in Brooklyn on April 21, 1927, the son of the businessman Max Brustein and the former Blanche Haft, Brustein grew up in Manhattan, attended the High School of Music and Art, then graduated from Amherst College. During college, he took time off to serve in the Merchant Marine. After receiving an M.A. in dramatic literature from Columbia University and two years at the University of Nottingham on a Fulbright fellowship, he pursued the Ph.D. at Columbia, then taught at Columbia, Vassar College, and Cornell University.
In 1964 Brustein published “The Theatre of Revolt,” a critical study. His publications are remarkably extensive. With his leading genres the review or chapter essay, he authored more than a dozen books, chapters in volumes edited by others, scores of reviews, articles in learned journals, a comedy about Shakespeare and Marlowe, and an autobiographical play, “Spring Forward, Fall Back.” His other plays include “Nobody Dies on Friday,” which satirizes the acting teacher Lee Strasberg, and “Shlemiel the First,” a klezmer musical based on stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Beginning in 1959, Brustein was a drama critic for The New Republic for 46 years. He contributed reviews and essays to The New York Review of Books. Among his books, one should mention “Letters to a Young Actor,” a variation on Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” Brustein advised young actors to obtain a broad liberal arts education rather than a narrow professional one. He edited Strindberg. Other favorite playwrights included Ibsen, O’Neill, Genet, Pirandello, and Shaw, all of whom he treated in “The Theater of Revolt” and whose works he showcased at the A.R.T. He continued to publish until shortly before his death, which occurred at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 29, 2023.
Brustein’s energy and productivity in directing, producing, teaching, mentoring, and writing were astounding. Feisty, he sometimes created controversy but to those encounters always brought opinions informed by knowledge, theatrical experience, and scholarly research. He seemed, at times unusually, to love the heat of friction. The more prominent his opponent, the grittier became his sandpaper.
Brustein and Samuel Beckett clashed over Akalaitis’s version of the set for Beckett’s “Endgame” at the A.R.T. Brustein retorted, “To threaten any deviations from a purist rendering of this or any other play . . . not only robs collaborating artists of their interpretive freedom but threatens to turn the theater into a waxworks.” Brustein also disputed with August Wilson about the nature and scope of Black theater in the United States.
Later in life, Brustein criticized what he believed was a renewed, even vicious, American worship of money and success, along with a concomitant decline in integrity, intelligence, and soul. He believed similar forces were eroding American theater. To The Boston Globe, he remarked in 2012, “I think the American theater reflects America now, as everything that happens is beginning to reflect America — one-percent America.”
First married to Norma Ofstrock, who died in 1979, Brustein in 1996 married Doreen Beinart, who survives him, as do his son, Daniel Brustein, stepchildren, and several grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
Respectfully submitted,
Derek Miller
Martin Puchner
James Engell, Chair
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