Theatre Revolution as Theatre

170 pp., $5.95

WILLIAM JAMES created a useful basis for analysis when he divided people into two groups, the tough-minded and the tender-minded. The distinction is not one between hard-headedness and sentimentality, but between a certain intellectual coherence and a sort of scatterbrained intellectuality. However you use the term "tough-minded," though, it clearly is applicable to Robert Brustein. He is a man who has fought for an intellectually respectable program at the Yale Drama School, where he is dean, and also one whose commentaries in the New Republic and elsewhere are extremely forthright and even acidulous, betraying taints of creeping handlinism.

"Something is eating me," writes Brustein in his new book. "I have the conviction, and it grows rather than lessens, that we are living in a profoundly decadent society. Worse, I suspect that some of the very things that are taken as symbols of transformation are themselves further signs of decline. Our age is apocalyptic, which means that human or institutional failings of any kind can become the occasion for total refusal, so that whatever is solid and firm in our tradition is abandoned along with whatever is corrupt." Stating his apocalyptic vision at the start, Brustein uses it as the context for a criticism of everything from Kingman Brewster to the Living Theatre.

Brustein is one of those respected old-line liberals who today occupy the right wing of the political spectrum in the American university. He is a man who was on the Left when it was hard to be on the Left, who put his career as a director on the line for the right of his actors to use the American flag on stage as a prop, who paid his dues to the Movement long ago. But now he has chosen to lash out against those to his left in a tone of frenzied polemic which insures that they will never take him seriously. He has argued a number of points which are, in themselves, eminently reasonable, but in a manner which is innately offensive.

Some of Brustein's arguments against the Living Theatre, for instance, are valid. A theatre which rejects the traditions of the dramatic art in favor of a nebulous, ephemeral attempt to draw its audience into spur-of-the-moment participation is not creating art; whatever sort of internalized art the participants may think they feel, they have not, and can not, transfer it beyond themselves into any permanent form, and permanence is the soul of art. Yet the belittling manner in which Brustein talks about the Living Theatre and its directors, and for that matter about the Yale faculty and administration, and all of his opponents, is extremely depressing.

REVOLUTION AS THE ATRE is the title of one of Brustein's most controversial essays, which appeared in the New Republic a year or so ago. Its thesis is that the political events of contemporary America are theatre, not reality. Thus: "When James Forman disrupts a church service to demand reparations from Episcopalians or when Sonny Carson and his followers, Mace in hand, grab the microphones at a Regional Plan Association meeting discussing New York's master plan, then we know that the incidents have been staged for the newspaper reporters and television cameras, and should, therefore, be more properly evaluated by aesthetic than by political criteria, according to the quality of the dialogue, costumes, acting, and directing." In a sense, of course, Brustein is right. Ignoring the sincerity, or the motivations, of Forman or Carson, obviously their actions are designed to attract the maximum public attention, in the most compelling way. They are acting out a drama. But is it necessary to be as cynical as Brustein is?

Many of Brustein's statements lend themselves to criticism. I am very suspicious of anyone who can condemn "relevant" theatre in the same book in which he cites Aristophanes. Has Brustein forgotten what was happening in Athens in 421, when The Peace was produced? When he cries for an art separated from contemporary events, does he dismiss Guernica, or Quartet for the End of Time, or, for that matter, Slaughterhouse-Five, because they spring out of a revulsion against war and fascism? What are his criteria?

Although his polemical style handicaps his logic, Brustein is making many good points. For one thing, he demonstrates graphically that much of the New Left is making use of exactly the tactics which have brought the old right such success-violence and terror, incredible self-righteousness and moral absolutism, and callous disregard for the rights of the individual. Brustein himself was forced to go into hiding last spring after repeated death threats. His classes were disrupted, his speeches heckled, his academic freedom essentially taken away in favor of mob rule.

One would prefer to sympathize with Brustein and not his opponents, those who abandon dedication and love for art in favor of the spontaneous and the impure, those who seek to destroy the university because it is the most fragile institution in American life, those who feed the war machine by whining self-indulgently when they could work to stop it, but Brustein will never convert them with name calling. Essentially this book is a cry of passion, but not an intellectual work. It may anger some and satisfy others, but it will appeal to prejudice, not the mind.