He helped shape American theater for decades as a critic, playwright, producer and director, founding influential repertory companies at Yale and then Harvard.
Robert Brustein in 1993. He was perhaps best known for founding two influential and enduring theater companies: Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater. Robert Brustein, a fiery advocate of nonprofit theater who championed new plays, new forms and new approaches to the classics while variously working as a producer, director, playwright, critic and educator, died Oct. 29 at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
Mr. Brustein was unbothered by the negative reactions. As an artistic director, he said, he wanted “to liberate American theater from its British overseers,” with an aim to promote new works and new takes on the classics, even he alienated some of his more traditionalist subscribers. Mr. Brustein also clashed with playwrights including Samuel Beckett, who objected to an unorthodox 1984 staging of his play “Endgame” at A.R.T., directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. The production altered the setting, added music and featured Black actors in nontraditional casting.
As a boy, Mr. Brustein played the clarinet and tenor saxophone, started a big band and had dreams of becoming the next Artie Shaw. But he began to develop an interest in acting while away at summer camp and as a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1947 following a stint in the Merchant Marine.
At Harvard, he served as an English professor while also presiding over A.R.T. at the Loeb Drama Center. The group received a special Tony Award in 1986 and mounted original productions by Mr. Brustein, including his comedy “Nobody Dies on Friday,” inspired by the relationship between acting teacher Lee Strasbergand “Shlemiel the First,” a klezmer musical based on stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
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