L'Affaire Brustein

Still in a half-befogged state from Yale weekend, a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club [HRDC] stumbled into the Loeb on a recent Monday morning to serve his eight-hour slot behind the box office window. Puttering through a collection of weekend mail, tattered ticket stubs and dog-eared programs, he caught sight of an unfamiliar sheet of stationery and did a double take. Someone had slipped the Loeb an anonymous note. The letterhead, The Yale Dramatic Society. The message, a poem:

Good night, poor Harvard

Harvard, good night.

You've got our ex-dean,

He'll take your lights.

Good night, poor Harvard,

It serves you right.

When the big Brustein gets after you,

Harvard, good night.

While the verse itself was decidedly third-rate, the warning came through clearly enough. Robert deButts, president of the Yale Dramat, later denied responsibility for this vaguely literary attempt, although he conceded the poem was the handiwork of a Dramat member. He also conceded the verse's sentiment was close to his own.

The love-hate relationship between undergraduates at Yale and Robert S. Brustein, dean of the graduate Yale School of Drama since 1966 and director of the Yale Repertory Theater, has become something of a tradition, as basic as Yale-Harvard rivalry. But it is a tradition, many Yale undergraduates say, founded on specific grievance--grievances accumulated over Brustein's 12-year term at Yale.

The conflict is two-pronged: First is an endless battle between undergraduates and Brustein's drama school over stage time, access to the shop and props. Second is the widespread feeling among undergraduates that Brustein has little respect for their productions, and even less affection for the undergrads as a whole.

Brustein views it differently. He claims "amateur theatrics" are "very important in developing an appetite for drama" and as "a preparation for professional theater." Dramat members counter that they don't appreciate serving as the hors d'oeuvres to Brustein's Yale Rep entree.

The circumstances surrounding the conflict have a long history, by this time obscured in a confusing mesh of accusation and recrimination.

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The facts: Yale has two main theaters on campus--the University Theater, whose stage is shared by undergraduates and the drama school and the Repertory Theater, a renovated church and the elusive domain of the company.

Undergraduate productions outside of the University Theater are much like Harvard's: residential productions in dining halls and converted squash courts, a Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a musical here and there. Undergraduates also organized the Children's Theater Company several years ago, which tours New Haven schools.

The set-up at the University Theater is similar to the Loeb's, and the arrangement between undergraduates and the drama school is parallel to the offer Brustein has extended to Harvard under his proposed undergraduate drama program. The theater houses a main stage and an experimental theater (the Ex), like the Loeb. Unlike the Loeb, no soundproofing was installed between the two stages, so only one show may go on a night, further restricting an already cramped schedule. The repertory's shop is located in the building. Dramat students are permitted access to the company's extensive collection, but, understandably, the company has first priority. The Dramat also has its offices in the building.

This year the Dramat will produce three main stage shows and three or four Ex performances. The drama school produces two main stage shows a year and six to seven Ex shows. Meanwhile, the company produces seven shows a year plus a Christmas show at its theater.

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The controversy: Victoria B. Bailey, last year's president of the Dramat and a four-year member of its executive board, recalls a bleaker era. During her freshman year, the Dramat had one slot in the Ex and two performances on the main stage. For main stage performances, the Dramat was allotted one week's rehearsal time. "We would go in on Friday to a bare stage and start one week later," Bailey says. The other weeks of the fall and spring season went to the drama school. For weeks at a time, she remembers, "we couldn't see any sign of a performance going on. Stage space was just wasted." The drama school often used the stage shop to paint and dry their backdrops. Bailey laments, "It's one thing to lose our stage time to a performance. It's inexcusable to lose it for a shop."

Negotiating the calender for stage time at the University theater each April was always a nightmare, Bailey says. Representatives of the Dramat waged a yearly struggle with graduate school administrators in an effort to extend stage slots. "Some years Brustein just handed down a calendar without ever asking us for our approval. One year they assigned us our spring vacation as performance time. Another time it was Thanksgiving weekend. And they always considered our reading and exam periods prime weeks for us to perform."

When the Dramat did manage to engineer a bargaining session beforehand, Brustein would send a representative. As a rule, he never came to the meetings.

Ellen McLaughlin, a theater studies major at Yale and a member of the Dramat, says that the graduate school's attitude "has always been that the University Theater is not really the Dramat's. It belongs to the graduate school."

Times have, if not changed, at least improved. In the past few years, after a minimum of haggling, the graduate school administration has granted the Dramat the stage space it requested. But, as Cosmo A. Catalano Jr., technical adviser at the drama school, points out, "The Dramat knows enough now to limit their requests." They've learned to play the game.

Lack of contact between undergraduate dramatics and the graduate school is the other major cause for bitterness. McLaughlin and other Dramat members talk of an "environment of isolation" between undergraduates and the drama school. This isolation is particularly glaring in the graduate school's lack of interest in the "dining hall" undergraduate productions. "It's not considered respectable for graduate students to get involved in theater outside of University Theater," McLaughlin says. "Before Brustein, it used to be that graduate students would direct undergraduate productions. Now it's not common for undergraduates to stage a performance and not one graduate student show up to see it."