Beautiful Music Together

IT WAS A LITTLE LIKE Lopahin buying the cherry orchard--nobody yippeed. When the Corporation named Robert S. Brustein to head the Loeb Drama Center, most students nodded, a few smiled, many winced. I thought it was cause for celebration, but suspicion of Brustein had become fashionable in many Harvard theatrical circles. He was coming to take their time away, to seize their space, to cook them and eat them for breakfast, as he told a gathering at the Signet Society the night before his appointment was announced. He didn't get many laughs.

On November 5, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) voted five to two to advise the Corporation to reject Brustein's proposal. After Brustein was approved, one of the Corporation members said he wasn't aware that the HRDC had taken a vote. So much for student opinion.

And the horror stories floated in from Yale. "Nail 'im to the wall contractually," they said. Brustein was willing to negotiate. He countered the charges from Yale undergraduates by pointing out that he had been hired there to deal only with graduate students and the repertory company, which scarcely left time for the Yale Dramat, the undergraduate society. Nobody seemed to hear him. And there were those space problems.

But what threat does Robert Brustein pose to Harvard theater? Although entertaining productions are not uncommon, few people defend the overall quality of Harvard theater. Even students who are heavily involved in it like to talk about how everybody's educated beyond their level of competence, which means that they know shows are frequently lousy but don't know how to change things. It's not really fair to generalize like this-- particularly since there are many talented directors, writers, and actors, some of whom have the energy and intelligence to motivate themselves even amid the general torpor--but one's general impressions are sometimes important. Harvard theater is comfortable; many of those involved don't really care about anything as grandiose as Drama or Theater--they care about having an outlet for their extracurricular energy, about making friends and having a good time. Nothing wrong there.

THE MOST MEANINGFUL QUESTION Brustein's detractors have thrown at me, and the one that forces me to expose a basic faith in the man's nature, a faith which some people consider unfounded or even a little stupid, goes like this: Why Harvard? Why is this big guy fooling around with undergraduates when his true concerns are so much loftier? We all know why he wants to come to the Loeb: a good location in a big Eastern city, with a built-in audience of "intellectuals" hungering for innovative theater: superior facilities; more sources of potentially big money, which apart from the University itself include a rich body of alumni, as well as grants from the usual foundations; the presence of students, which Brustein convincingly argues is conducive to creativity; and on some level, perhaps, the poetic justic of being asked to leave the Yale School of Drama and then hitching up to arch-rival Harvard; blah blah blah blah.

Okay, so where does this leave undergraduate theater and Harvard undergraduates, the sole body of students whom Brustein is contractually required to serve? I don't know. I'm not convinced Brustein does either. In the past, he has thought about undergraduate drama, casually, as an appendix to the larger topic of theater and the university, but I don't think he ever realized he'd have anything to do with it, or had any desire to participate actively in its evolution. It took a lot of fast, shuffling to present such a program to the university and the students, and that's one aspect of his hiring that legitimately enraged the HRDC--that his undergraduate proposals appeared half-hearted, and perhaps a bit insensitively thrown-together. But while I sympathize with the HRDC's fears, and respect it for wanting to protect future undergraduates from a Loeb administrative body that might not give a damn about their needs, I can't accept their position. Robert Brustein is too fine a critic and teacher to fit into the ogre mold they've cast for him.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO believe that a man who agonized for so many years over the state of our professional theater, who took an incredible risk in abandoning his position at the top of the critical profession to do something about saving that theater, who supervised and participated in the construction of a graduate curriculum in drama that will continue to affect schools and theaters throughout this country, who displays in his writing a passionate and unstinting dedication to the improvement of our culture--that such a man would waste as many as ten years of his life at Harvard ignoring the problems of his new environment and continuing to operate as if he had never left the old one. No way.

Whether or not Robert Brustein presently understands the different kind of commitment he will receive from undergraduates, even dedicated undergraduates, the necessary juggling of both his and their priorities, he will learn soon enough. In the process of adapting, I am convinced he will devise a new or more efficient system for integrating drama into the undergraduate curriculum--even if he is unable to create a drama major or department at Harvard.

As an example of the kind of innovation Brustein could bring to undergraduate drama, take his basic "no more masterpieces" approach to the "classical" canon, an approach that discourages dull, "definitive" productions, promoting constant re-interpretation and directorial probing into the heart of each play. He has written at great length, most recently in a splendid defense of Henrik Ibsen in this month's issue of Decade magazine, about applying this theory to contemporary social problems. A director, he has written, must try to infuse the "classics" with comtemporary meaning, to apply the general human problems as the playwright articulates them to their specific symptoms in our time and place.

In a graduate school devoted to the teaching of drama, a director, actor or designer may come to rely on his previous knowledge in related fields, or on the amount of on-the-side research he will have time to conduct. But an undergraduate may coordinate his participation in a production with a course related to some idea in the work, in fields like government, philosophy, sociology, economics, history or psychology, in addition to studying the literary and artistic tradition from which the work emerged. A small number of courses at Harvard now examine a dramatist or a play in contexts other than the dramatic, but Brustein could devise a comprehensive program, to apply these different outlooks to a production while satisfying a student's credit requirements and doubtless making the study far more meaningful. Brustein's direct work with undergraduates could lead to programs that combine drama with other academic disciplines, finding, for example, parallels to the rebellion of the modern dramatists in other fields.

WE KNOW HOW BRUSTEIN and his company can help us: by adding to and upgrading extracurricular programs at the Loeb; by working for increased academic recognition of drama; by inspiring excellence in student productions through higher standards at the Loeb. What is exciting is the realization that we can help him, that Harvard is providing not just a facility, but a whole new field of research. That's why this big guy is fooling around with undergraduates.

At very least the arrival of Brustein and company will provide an exciting change from what is--with a few exceptions--a stagnant and unprovocative theater, and an all-out challenge to a curriculum with serious gaps. At most, it could be the beginning of a new era for the performing arts at Harvard, and a model for the teaching of drama at every school in this country. We risk little--a few productions a year in the Loeb--and stand to gain a whole lot. Let's drop our suspicions and embrace the possibilities.