ART in Retrospect: Textual Ethics

IN HIS LATEST BOOK, Making Scenes. Robert S. Brustein, director of the American Repertory Theater (ART), describes how he gathered his tribe from the Yale Rep in 1979 and led them to Cambridge, a land of milk and honey, and Harvard, an enlightened temple of learning. "I ambled through the town, admiring the openness of the Harvard campus, marveling at the vitality and variety of Harvard Square...." he writes about a 1978 visit while on tour with the Yale Rep. In a letter he sent Dean Rosovsky first proposing the move to Harvard, he wrote. "I have always been convinced that Cambridge in general, and Harvard in particular, are the ideal locations in America for the kind of serious intellectual-professional activity I have been describing."

After two years here and a season and a half of ART plays at the Loeb Drama Center, it would be surprising if Brustein didn't feel like toning down his enthusiasm a bit. The ART has had its successes--paramount among them, the twin achievement of introducing a high-quality non-commercial repertory theater to a city that badly needed it, and creating undergraduate theater courses in a University that has shunned them in the past. In both cases, the success and failure of individual productions and courses matters less than the survival and growth of the company and the curriculum. The ART has solid roots: blossoms will only be a matter of time.

The troublesome question already emerging from the brief spell of this company's residence at Harvard is neither artistic--are the shows good or bad?--nor academic--do the courses do their job? It lies between these two concerns, in a grey area where the professional and academic ideals of theater clash.

THE PROBLEM, surprisingly, is not friction: with undergraduates. When news of Brustein's impending arrival at Harvard first leaked out two years ago, some students heard reports of Brustein's insensitivity to undergraduate needs at Yale, and feared a repeat performance. The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club opposed his appointment. But the HRDC board members missed the point: Brustein the theater director and English professor at Harvard would naturally feel more responsibility towards undergraduates than Brustein the graduate dean at Yale. So far, in his new post. Brustein has apparently assured most of the student theater community that he has an open door and a willing ear.

Some students also suggested the ART's arrival would inhibit undergraduate drama by reducing the number of student productions at the Loeb from seven to four a year. The numbers do tell a tale of reduced opportunity for students: but, in truth, the Loeb has swallowed up student productions in the past far more often than student talent has managed to fill its confines. A huge theater, it tends to dwarf mediocrity into oblivion.

This year showed that four Mainstage productions is plenty of room for student actors, designers and directors to show off their talents. There's also been a side benefit: by pushing over-ambitious students into the more manageable confines of the Loeb's versatile Experimental Theater, the ART's presence has provoked a true renaissance there. The spring season boasted mostly first-rate productions, and two in particular that rivalled the best I've seen, on the Mainstage or off--Bill Rauch's The Visit and David Edelstein's The Father.

Undergraduates already owe the ART a great deal. Students have performed many small parts in ART shows and a couple of middling ones; no doubt as the acting curriculum expands, and they take advantage of it, they will move into more prominent roles. The existence of that curriculum itself is a boon made possible only through the presence of Brustein and his company. The general survey course offered this year will need revision to be successful; the more advanced acting, directing and criticism courses, however, all went far towards proving that theater is a valid, important academic pursuit.

BUT BRUSTEIN'S VISION of the benefits theater and university offer each other goes beyond the details of courses and shows. The exchange is meant to be scholarly, intellectual, academic in the most benign sense: the university shelters the theater, gives it space, limited financial support, and a presumably interested audience; the theater gives the university a "living library" of drama for its members to consult.

"Just as no one would dream of teaching Dostoyevsky or Hegel without access to their books in Widener, so no one could properly teach Sophocles or Shakespeare without access to their plays on the stage," Brustein writes in Making Scenes. This is sound reasoning to anyone who understands the difference between studying dramatic texts and studying drama. But if the ART is presenting itself as a sort of dramatic library, much of the Harvard faculty seems to believe that its texts are corrupted.

I first became aware of faculty dissatisfaction with ART last fall during the run of Andrei Belgrader's farcical production of As You Like It. I had reviewed the show favorably--it seemed to poke fun at pastoral conventions no one today can stomach, in the same spirit Shakespeare had half-mocked them in his writing. It was a wild show, full of excesses, including a Hymen with four breasts and phalluses for hair, but it brought As You Like It to life on stage more fully than more cautious productions.

Several acquaintances on the faculty mentioned that the English department was "up in arms" over the production, and, in fact, later that fall several Faculty members participated in a debate with ART personnel at a Monday night forum at the Loeb over how Shakespeare ought to be produced. The preoccupation of that debate--fidelity to the text--was echoed this spring by Noel Lord Annan of the University of London, invited here by the English Department. Faculty here, directly, and Annan, indirectly, were criticizing Brustein and his theater for abandoning their duty to the author in orgies of directorial license.

The problem is, everyone believes in the text. Enshrining the words begs the far more important question: what do you do with them? The academic can ponder this without forcing the issue, but the director faces it each working day. If you search back in Brustein's writings to his earlier, theoretical broadsides like "No More Master-pieces," you'll find there an outspoken defense of the text against directorial depredations. Brustein argued that the text was the director's treasure house--by mastering it, he could find the appropriate way to direct a play, the right metaphors, emphases and designs. The only other options are to impose external ideas on the play's words--abhorrent. I think, to ART professionals and Harvard faculty alike--or not to direct at all. Some academics might dream about that--ideal communication between playwright and audience, with no interference from pesky directors--but they're thinking of lyric poetry, not drama. The modern theater needs its directors: they should be disciplined to become the text's students, not its slaves.

HERE'S A BRIEF LOOK at the high points of the ART's season-and-a-half record, with attention to how closely the company and director followed or strayed from the given text:

* A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Alvin Epstein. The premier ART production--revived from the Yale years--stripped away decades' worth of accumulated glitter from Shakespeare's play, revealing a darker fairy world than we're used to. Epstein uncovered hidden streams of conflict--between fairy and fairy, fairy and man, man and woman--with the aid of Purcell's fine-woven Baroque score. These emphases, however, were just that; there were no placards. Costumes and sets had a somber beauty. No one could have left the Loeb feeling Shakespeare's text had been tampered with or betrayed.

* The Inspector General, directed by Peter Sellars '80. In his best--and last--production here, Sellars picked up the stone of politically-influenced readings of Gogol's play and found a bed of grotesque worms and grubs underneath. Sellars made Gogol's townspeople universal types of small-mindedness, highlighted by every variety of physical and spiritual deformity. And he did so through an almost too-painstaking devotion to his author's words: the new translation he used rendered literally Gogol's Russian folk adages and gnarled figures of speech. The translation missed occasionally and frequently hit--but the production cannot be faulted for infidelity to the author.

* Lulu, directed by Lee Breuer. Of all the best ART productions, this one raised the most hackles. Breuer applied shameless directorial pyrotechnics--literally and figuratively--to Wedekind's two Lulu plays, and of course to make a single evening out of them he had to cut and chop some. The production was, in the best sense, experimental; Breuer zeroed in on the essence of the myth Wedekind was working out in his plays--the rise and fall of a wild beast of sex--and tried to find a contemporary stage technology and idiom to match. He found it in touches like giant close-up projections of Lulu's eyeballs or skin, a luxuriant fur rug on which Lulu lounged like a restless tiger, and a high-tech set with mikes and floodlights that looked more like a recording studio than a stage. Breuer took plenty of license with Wedekind, but you can't help imagining Wedekind the experimenter nodding in approval. If necessary--for the purists--call this a "free fantasy on Lulu"; it worked.

* Figaro, directed by Alvin Epstein, and Grownups, directed by John Madden. The ART's final productions this season are both hilarious comedies with plenty of attention to language and enough naturalism for anyone's taste. Epstein repeats his earlier feat in this Figaro, dusting off a far more acerbic play by Beaumarchais than the one we're accustomed to via Mozart. If the ART performers are less assured here than they were in Midsummer. Mark Leib's nimbly colloquial translation more than makes up the difference. With Grownups, a world premiere, there can be little argument about faith to the text: the author works at the director's side at least part of the time. More important, though, Madden finds just the right setting and approach to match the author's intention, which is to gall and exasperate the audience with little pin-pricks of domestic jokes and quarrels. The sets are detailed, maddeningly familiar portraits of normal family rooms--a suburban kitchen, with postcards pasted to the fridge door, and a Manhattan living room, with stuffed chairs and a dinky stereo playing a Brandenburg concerto. Feiffer's play, in this fine production, is both funny and chilling: funny because it's written and performed with care and style, chilling because everyone in the audience seems to recognize their parents, their friends and themselves on the stage.

THIS SURVEY OUGHT to suggest that the ART does not play dirty with dramatic texts--or, as senior actor Jeremy Geidt put it when the company was still moving in, "We don't set Hamlet in Upper Silesia just because Upper Silesia happens to be fashionable. Yet the cry of academic theatergoers, at Harvard or anywhere else, resounds with the same refrain: stick to the text. And herein lies the root trouble with Brustein's vision of harmony between university and theater.

The student of a play who treats it as a piece of literature becomes accustomed to staging ideal performances in his mind's eye; his imagination becomes his private stage, and his intellect the all-powerful and all-knowing director. This is everyone's reading habit, of course, but for the scholar it can become an obsession that inhibits his capacity to follow someone else's approach on the live stage. He is always comparing what is before him to what his imagination remembers, and no matter what is before him, it falls short. At the most ludicrous, he becomes the playgoer who cannot fully enjoy the soliloquies of Hamlet without silently mouthing them to himself as the actor's speech rattles by.

I do not mean to suggest that the academic vocation precludes any enjoyment of live theater, or any discernment about it. Some of the best theater critics work at universities, and many faculty members here provide both the ART and undergraduate theater with invaluable encouragement. But there is a hidden danger for a professional company working within a university, whether its professors are friendly or hostile. The academic community believes in treating art as a static object, a repository for beauty and truth that can be interpreted and reinterpreted, but only from without--only if you don't touch. An essay on As You Like It that outlined Shakespeare's underlying mockery of the pastoral mode of poetry, in other words, is quite acceptable, but a staging of the play with that in mind constitutes tampering with holy relics.

If the ART and other university-based theaters like it are to exorcize this source of friction before it becomes hardened and bitter, they will have to take the lead in proving to their skeptical audiences that, far from strangling plays with directorial nooses, they are giving classics new life and strength from within. They can do this in ways the ART has already begun to try: by meeting critics in public, by explaining intentions in program notes and in-house publications, by accepting outside criticism and suggestions when they're justified, and by being patient.

With a separate season of new plays scheduled for a theater outside the Loeb, and a cabaret in the Loeb lobby for revues and drinks after Mainstage shows, the ART will be operating at full throttle next year. If financial troubles--like a projected deficit this season and looming, savage cutbacks in federal aid--do not bite too deeply, and the ART makes strides towards getting more students into the Loeb--perhaps by further reducing the price of the already dirt-cheap student pass--future seasons are likely to show that Brustein and Harvard were prescient in teaming up. But before their teamwork becomes fully effective, somehow the gap between the academic theater and the live theater will have to narrow. Let's hope the academics grow to appreciate the need for the director in the modern theater, and the theater professionals find in the academics a valuable source of interpretive knowledge and ideas. Otherwise, this team could be in for some rough seasons.