I'm reading "In the Intersection," so you don't have to . . .

What's "in the intersection," honey.

How is it?

Well, disappointing. And I can't tell whether the people who put it together are in the end brave or cowardly - or just guiltily greedy. Are they brave for even trying to contain the commercial corruption of the not-for-profit theatre - or are they cowardly for so clearly not wanting to come up with a bold statement regarding same?

Or worse yet, is the whole thing just one long exercise in deflecting the blame for the situation they themselves helped create?

I'll have to ponder all that further before I write up a full post about it.

But in the meantime, I admit that "In the Intersection" (by Diana Ragsdale, published by the Center for Theater Commons/HowlRound.com) is kind of interesting in a gossipy sort of way.  At the private little conclave the report records there were actually no members of the most corrupt not-for-(the public's)-profit theatres (as I like to call them now); so the conversational fireworks were somewhat muted and collegial.  Still, fun little cat fights do erupt here and there, especially between Rocco Landesman and Robert Brustein, about the indiscretions, misunderstandings (or rather the willful blindness of Brustein himself), and outright deceptions that went down as the East Coast not-for-profit cabal tiptoed along the primrose path to - well, where we are today.

There is one particularly telling exchange which I'll quote in full, because it gives you some idea of how long the not-for-profit theatre has been in denial regarding these questions.  The speakers here are: Bob Brustein, founder and former artistic director of the American Repertory Theater; Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theatre;  Rocco Landesman, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts; commercial producers Kevin McCollum, Sue Frost, and Margo Lion; attorney Loren Plotkin; Tony Taccone, Artistic Director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre; Mame Hunt, dramaturg, Sundance Institute; and David Dower, Director of Artistic Programs, ArtsEmerson.



                                                   * * * * * *

Towards the very end of the day, Oskar Eustis hearkened back to the session on contracts with Michael David and his descriptions of the hands-off [contractual] approach of Dodger Theatricals [producers of Into the Woods and Big River, among many others, and led by Rocco Landesman, Des McAnuff, and other investors - TG] and (turning to other commercial producers in the room) said, “That doesn’t sound like what you guys have done or feel about it at all. Am I right about that?”

Kevin McCollum said that he would not want any nonprofit to violate its mission by working with him and that from his perspective it all comes down to the pre-production discussions. Landesman then also clarified (as he had the day prior) that Dodger Theatricals was not always hands-off. He shared that when Dodgers produced Into the Woods with the Old Globe “most of the elements were already set.” He described it as “a pre-Broadway run.”

Bob Brustein commented, “So you bossed the whole thing. You rented a theater.” Margo Lion weighed in saying that the deals are “not always like that” and Landesman replied, “But they’re sometimes like that.” Brustein then turned to his former student and current friend, Rocco Landesman, and said he wanted to ask a question about Big River. (Which Landesman produced, and which was developed at Brustein's theatre, the A.R.T., and Des McAnuff's theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, and went on to a successful Broadway run. - TG). He reiterated that he never understood the production was a “deal” even though Landesman had suggested the director and the composer. Brustein then asked his question and the conversation took a few interesting turns.

B. Brustein: OK. While I was presumably leading this theater (the A.R.T.) were you giving notes to the director and … were you carrying on like a Broadway producer?

K. McCollum: We do carry on, don’t we? All we do is carry on!

[laughter]

R. Landesman: … Giving notes to the director? I was certainly having conversations with him. Michael David did as well. We were all part of the same group.

K. McCollum: You were making something together.

L. Plotkin: If Bob had wanted to fire the director could he have fired the director? If he thought he wasn’t doing a good job?

B. Brustein: Of course, I could have …

[Plotkin puts his hand up to Brustein as if to say, “Wait, Let Rocco respond.”]

R. Landesman: If he had wanted to fire him off that production he could have.

S. Frost: Well, it was his contract I would assume—

R. Landesman: I would have objected strenuously …

S. Frost: Sure, but—

R. Landesman: … Bob had the contracts with the director, with the actors, with all of them.

M. Hunt: Objected strenuously, and then what?

B. Brustein: Pardon me?

[Hunt repeats her question while Frost says over her …]

S. Frost: Objected strenuously and let Bob call it because it’s his contract.

B. Brustein: That’s all he could have done. He could have only objected strenuously. It would have tested our friendship …

R. Landesman: And then what I would have done is, when we took it on, I would have put the director back. And then our friendship was intact.

K. McCollum: Tom Sawyer got everyone to paint his fence.

S. Frost: Can I say, I find it hard to believe that it would be easy for a commercial producer to say, “Here’s my show I’ll be back opening night.” I think it would be very difficult, practically speaking.

B. Brustein: I didn’t know it was his show.  (?????!; Brustein says this elsewhere as well. - TG)

S. Frost: No, no, no. But he’s speaking of a long history. … But it doesn’t mean that that relationship isn’t a positive one. When we did Memphis at La Jolla we were there the entire time—the entire time.

O. Eustis: And the director was the artistic director.

S. Frost: Correct.

O. Eustis: That makes a difference.

S. Frost: That made it a lot simpler.

O. Eustis: Just like Des [McAnuff] was [on Big River].

K. McCollum: Isn’t that worse?
…

T. Taccone: Better for the theater.

K. McCollum: Better for the artistic director.

T. Taccone: Better for the theater.

S. Frost: It’s better for the theater.

Unknown: How is it better for the theater?

T. Taccone: I’m not talking about the product. I’m saying it’s better for the theater when a staff member is the central artist, creator.

S. Frost: Absolutely. Totally. But it made it a partnership. It didn’t make it an “us” and “them.” … And I rarely carried on .… But what fun is it to not be part of it? You know?

R. Landesman: I was there at the time …

B. Brustein: I know you were part of our company. You had joined our company.

R. Landesman: I wasn’t part of the company but I was there.

B. Brustein: You were a collaborator and an adviser—

D. Dower: Let’s come back from our breakout groups . . .

                                                   * * * * * *

I admit I winced for Brustein - actually for all of them - as I read that sad little scene.  How could Brustein have been so blind to what was going on right under his nose with Big River?  And was he really so blind, or is he simply claiming to have been now?

Such unintentionally ironic exchanges only beg the larger questions - is there any way today to put the commercial genie back in the not-for-profit bottle - as these very people apparently let it out years ago?

Or was the genie never really in the bottle to begin with?

We'll consider these issues at further length in future posts here at the Hub Review . . .

Brustein's mortal error

Just a few months ago, Robert Brustein was busy insisting in a panel discussion on The Merchant of Venice that Shakespeare was not only anti-Semitic, but sexist and racist, too (don't worry, I tore apart his arguments handily enough, to applause from the audience).

So I was surprised to discover he'd written a play about the old villain (actually, an entire trilogy!), and that he was quoted in the pages of the Globe as "loving above all writers" the poet he considers a racist, sexist anti-Semite.

Hmmmm.  Well, I suppose consistency was never Brustein's strongest suit.  But consider this: another playwright whom Brustein has long disparaged is Tom Stoppard - who's hardly Shakespeare, granted, but whom many of us have enjoyed and applauded over the years.   (Brustein's case here was aesthetic, rather than political - he always found Stoppard superficial, even "cute.")

So imagine my even greater surprise when I discovered that Brustein's play about Shakespeare, Mortal Terror (now playing at Suffolk's Modern Theatre) was often a transparent imitation of Stoppard's screenplay for Hollywood's Shakespeare in Love.  This time the play in question is Macbeth rather than Romeo and Juliet, but the dramatic method is much the same - indeed, some scenes are such close echoes you're tempted to call them plagiarism.

So let's recap!

What we have in Mortal Terror, then, is a play written in tribute to a man whose politics Brustein has always despised, in the manner of a playwright he has always derided.

I'm not sure irony gets much sweeter than this.

Although as a theatrical experience, Mortal Terror is far more sour than sweet.  Brustein, of course, is no Shakespeare; but it turns out he's hardly Stoppard, either. (Dare I say it? He's far more superficial!) And so his play is a botch - but still, to be fair, it's not quite dreadful; every now and then some farcical fart-joke mechanics kick into gear (thanks to a ferocious comic performance from Jeremiah Kissel, who even when saddled with second-rate material basically won't take no for an answer), and the show delivers some honest - and intentional - guffaws.  (As I recall, the A.R.T.'s old default mode, when it wasn't conducting one of its surreal theatrical autopsies, was just this kind of crass but harshly funny schtick.)  At times Brustein even delivers a genuinely witty line or two (it helps when he drops Stoppard for Steve Martin, the other unacknowledged source hovering over this particular playwriting party).

But wait - did I say second-rate?  Make that third-rate; Mortal Terror is third-rate most of the time, because it's stuffed with constant (and awkward) historical exposition delivered in a bizarre style of pseudo-Jacobean oratory.  Plus many scenes ramble on well past their fresh date, the major sub-plot (about the Gunpowder Plot) is reduced to little more than a skit, and as a character, Brustein's Shakespeare doesn't exist.   The fart jokes may save Mortal Terror from being fourth-rate; but it's certainly third-rate.

But then what really are the expectations one can entertain for it?  It has the air of a prep school revue, or the kind of vanity production you'd expect at the Hasty Pudding Club, or in some academic's living room after drinks.  And no doubt in such a setting it might seem campily clever, with all its in-jokes about the theatre and rumors about James I and references to the dean's pet theory about what the Greco-Roman goddess Hecate is doing in the Scottish Macbeth (a mystery, surely).

Still, even as an academic sketch, Mortal Terror isn't quite up to snuff.  Brustein has to fudge the dates around the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to work in a second sub-plot (the brief imprisonment of Ben Jonson over Eastward Ho) - which would be okay if the playwright actually had any thematic parallels to draw between these events (which, strangely enough, he doesn't).  But even if we buy that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1605 (it's possible), Brustein also has him chatting during its composition about writing the romances (1607?) and then even retiring! (1610?  1611?)   Meanwhile Brustein hints that Thomas Middleton supplied some of Macbeth (a current vogue in some scholarly quarters), without really treating the larger consensus that the play was revised over time.

Which gets us to a central problem with the script, which is that Brustein simply doesn't engage with Macbeth itself.  It's fun, in a small way, I suppose, to tease out connections between James I's superstitious, misogynist belief in witches and the "weird sisters" of Macbeth.  But it doesn't have much to do with what makes Macbeth great (millions have thrilled to its power without ever knowing anything about James I).  The essential conceit of Shakespeare in Love was that Shakespeare's personal experience of love inspired the lyrical flights in Romeo and Juliet.  So what inspired the hallucinatory terrors and grim fatalism of Macbeth?  Brustein seems to have no clue (beyond "misogyny," I guess, which feels like a stretch), and without this thematic spine, Mortal Terror is just a series of scenes strung from one of his hobbyhorses to the next.

Nevertheless, the playwright pretends to limn some sort of deeper, desolate meaning from this pseudo-Jacobean dramaturgical jumble (he even has Shakespeare quote the famously despairing Sonnet 66 at the climax!).  Brustein also confidently informs us (in the program) that he has "found a style that, while modern, could pass for Elizabethan."  Uh-huh - keep telling yourself that, Bob; I for one hope Shakespeare never sounded anything like this.

I must admit, however, that the sheer arrogance of this project has its own weirdly compelling subtexts.  First there's the strange fact that Brustein should so obviously be imitating a playwright he has long dismissed.  (He pulled the same trick with his earlier Nobody Dies on Friday, which in the name of O'Neill actually channeled Miller and Inge.)  What's all that about?  Does Brustein imagine he's pulling off some kind of meta-meta parody of these writers?  Or is he afflicted by a weird type of artistic and psychological blindness?  Methinks I better leave that discussion to the shrinks!

Meanwhile, in the political sphere, there's the fact that a vanity production of a play this bad only occurs because of some perceived power the dramatist in question still wields; so the existence of Mortal Terror is not so much an artistic statement as a kind of declaration from Brustein that yes, he is still very much on the scene, and yes, he still has friends.  So thank you, Comrade Brustein - message received and understood!  Indeed, seen this way, the incompetence of a vanity project only strengthens its underlying message  - so on its own terms, Mortal Terror is a kind of masterpiece.

Thus it's no surprise the Professor (he's now at Suffolk, although I thought he was still hanging around Harvard, too) has attracted a talented cast, all of whom manage quite well, considering their material (with the exception of Stafford Clark-Price, who's just a blank, rather than a sphinx, as Shakespeare).  Georgia Lyman has never looked lovelier (with her hair down, she's a ringer for Lauren Bacall), and Michael Hammond, Dafydd ap Rees, John Kuntz, and Christopher James Webb all get through everything they have to do, minute by minute (Kuntz even gets laughs as Guy Fawkes; they're cheap laughs, but they're laughs).  And the sumptuous costumes, by Rachel Padula Shufelt, are often gorgeous, while Jon Savage's set is effective in a sweetly naive, almost high-school kind of way.

But at the same time, the whole thing comes off as pathetic to those who couldn't care less about being in Brustein's good graces.  Because if you don't know who might cast whom, and who is writing a letter in support of whose tenure, or who could say a word to whom about funding whomever's project, then Mortal Terror just seems weirdly embarrassing (I winced more than once - and I hate the guy!).  In the end it's just one more piece of dramatic evidence that the curtain should have been rung down on Brustein's reign of error long ago.

Brustein in winter

Hub Review readers know I'm not a fan of Robert Brustein (above, in a wintry pastiche), and his tenure at the American Repertory Theatre (which he founded) I regard as a pretty profound failure - a long experiment which year after year, season after dismal season, disproved its own thesis.  For decades, in fact, Brustein wasted literally millions in public and private funds in a quixotic quest to "revolutionize" theatre in something like the way the wannabe communards of Columbia University (where he got his Ph.D.) thought they could transform politics in 1968.

Obviously, the A.R.T. managed no such feat.  Indeed, Brustein's idea that his critical eye could re-invigorate the entire American theatre (note the pretentious moniker he chose for his company) proved egocentrically overblown; America moved on without him, or his fellow travelers in Manhattan and the university circuit. After a strong start (with productions like The King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author, both of which were revived for years), the company soon found itself treading water, while clinging to a dated vision of the "cutting edge." It had the (very) occasional hit (like Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror), but subscribers still missed most everything that mattered in the theatre over the past generation; they never heard from Tony Kushner, or August Wilson, or Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Sarah Kane, or Tracy Letts (and they saw several musicals, but none by Stephen Sondheim). Tellingly, when a living writer of real stature (Dario Fo, Sam Shepard) graced the theatre's stages, it was almost always with work done in the 60's or 70's; because while the A.R.T.'s internal culture was militantly avant-garde, it was obviously nostalgic in what it thought of as avant.

Part of the problem was that Brustein's theories leaned heavily on directorial intervention, and thus turned his theatre into a formalist hothouse hostile to writers engaging with the actual culture. Inevitably, this theory (like all theories) forced the A.R.T. to retreat into an academic and political bubble. But of course Brustein was operating inside an academic and political bubble, at Harvard. And Harvard's king around here, of course - and if the king wants to stage an ersatz revolution every season, the peasants inevitably show up.  Meanwhile Brustein's career had made him superbly connected within the academic establishment, while his position as one of the country's last nationally-published drama critics made most reviewers loathe to cross him. So there was no way to stop him; his reign of error ground on until 2001.

When he finally left, there was a leap of interest in his successor, Robert Woodruff, and judging from figures recently published by the Boston Globe, moribund attendance at the A.R.T. suddenly jumped. But something went down between Woodruff and the university administration - and he was soon pushed from his post (why this occurred remains a source of rumor and debate). After a search that lasted over two years - and three seasons of further decline - Diane Paulus was installed as Woodruff's replacement.

But the soap opera only continued. Paulus quickly alienated - then eviscerated - her staff, and pretty much dis-assembled what was left of the acting company. She installed her husband, a burlesque impresario, as manager of A.R.T.'s second space, and opened their private moneymaker, The Donkey Show, which I think is still running there along with other New Age strip acts, including web diva Amanda Palmer, who's starring in a sold-out version of Cabaret directed by her high school drama teacher (which is resonant in just so many ways).

A backlash began to form, of course, but Paulus hired other business associates to bolster her power, and many local writers, who are essentially rock fans rather than theatre fans, responded to her embrace of the club scene. Plus Paulus had a trump card in her gender; dim "progressives" (with images of the fatuous Larry Summers still fresh in their memories) were sure to howl if she were to be fired - even though it was widely known that she was almost never at her theatre, but was instead attending to her New York career (as her buddy at the Huntington, Peter DuBois, is also prone to do).

But wait, the world's still turning for the young and the restless. As the actors dumped by the A.R.T. began to be seen more around town (by audiences too smart to waste their time at the Loeb), they began to be viewed as local heroes. One, Will Lebow, even wrote an open letter to Harvard expertly skewering Paulus's bad faith. Even more damagingly, Rob Orchard, a former member of the A.R.T. staff, began to gear up at Emerson College what you could think of as a kind of academic "third way" - a theatrical season of genuine intellectual challenge that was also emotionally satisfying, and thus commercially viable. (Last month it began with a BAM, if you will, with two hits, Fraulein Maria and the Laramie Residency.) Finally, word came out that Robert Brustein himself, in a gesture of profound dismay, had resigned from the A.R.T. board.

Not that that matters, really. But it's touching somehow; the dream is once again over, and once again we'll have to carry on. Brustein has had to abandon his brain-child, and I'm sure that hurt (as has its eventual artistic fate). In a recent exchange with former Globe critic Ed Siegel, Brustein even sounded a little defensive when Siegel hinted at what the rest of the city is saying out loud - that Orchard's ArtsEmerson has taken over the high-end cultural space Paulus's ART has evacuated. Which led Brustein to describe many ART productions as "light-hearted," a statement which I think made many readers' jaws drop. The ART was never light-hearted - not ever; it didn't know how to be; it just didn't have that generosity of spirit. That was part of why so many people hated it. In his comment, Brustein lists a series of shows (most of which I saw) which, it's true, were all intended as comedies, but generally relied on the crassest kind of humor to put over that idea; watching them was like watching Robespierre or Lenin do stand-up. And they were all so cold - "comedy" at the ART was seen as the formal flip-side of the theatre's usual chilly, rarefied post-surrealism. You could argue that at their best, the brutal shenanigans had a point - but then again, perhaps they were just playing to the cruelty of the Harvard home crowd (not for nothing did Harvard birth the legendarily nasty National Lampoon).

And at any rate, I wonder if Diane Paulus is really so far from Brustein's true legacy - that is the legacy of the "revolutionary" sixties filtered through Soho in the seventies. Amusingly, when Paulus does attempt a "straight" ART-style show, like Paradise Lost, she comes up with something remarkably like what Brustein used to produce on a regular basis (indeed, something like what she actually used to see when she was a student at Harvard!). Clearly, Paulus thinks these two modes are compatible - and I have a hunch she's right; or rather that all she has really done is commercialize the dream of orgiastic freedom that floated beneath the supposed rigor of so many ART productions. The few times I interacted with Brustein (he didn't know who I was at the time), he struck me as an avuncular, but inveterate, snob - and that snobbery certainly reverberated throughout his theatre. And it's that snobbery which gave Paulus her opening; all she has really done is down-market Brustein's vision to the bourgeoisie he despised. So sadly enough, the lion in winter set his own trap.

What's actually interesting about Paulus, in fact, is not her hand-me-down aesthetics, but the way in which in her commercial ambitions she's an avatar of the university system in general, which for the last generation has been talking about how important it was to "leave the ivory tower behind." Well, now they've left it, and taken up residence at the disco and the mall. And Brustein has seen his faux revolution put in the front window, with a price tag on it. The funny thing is - it was crass then. And it's crass now. Plus ça change, as they say in Au Bon Pain.

Does Bob Brustein think Samuel Beckett was a racist?

Sigh. The A.R.T. is doing Endgame again, which means we have to revisit one of the most ridiculous episodes in its history, its botch of the play back in 1984. For those of you too young - or too wisely concerned with other things - to recall, Beckett (at left) tried to put the kibosh on a misconceived version of his script by JoAnne Akalaitis, avant artiste and former paramour of Philip Glass. Akalaitis pasted her usual dim downtown appliqué onto Endgame - she dopily literalized its sense of apocalypse by setting it in a bombed-out subway station (she even wanted an "overture" by her ex), and she cast African-American actors in two of its four roles.

Once Beckett got word of this, he objected, and almost shut the show down (it's too bad he failed; it proved to be bombastic and, well, stupid). But his reasoning allowed an opening for the A.R.T. to cast a kind of shadow on his reputation.

First, some background. Beckett always disapproved of productions of his plays that "mixed" the races (or the genders in ways not specifically described), because he felt that power relations between the races and genders were not a part of the artistic material he was trying to present, and so he wanted to leave them out entirely, as he felt they would inevitably draw attention in performance from his central concerns. He was happy, however, to see all-black productions of his plays - or all-female productions of single-sex scripts like Waiting for Godot. I suppose it's easy for Cambridge types to pooh-pooh Beckett's worries on this score - like Stephen Colbert, they probably "can't tell" when someone's black. But since Beckett's death, mixed-race productions of his plays have appeared elsewhere - and unsurprisingly have been largely interpreted as meditations on race and colonialism. So it's hard not to feel that Beckett's critics weren't - and aren't - being a little naïve. True, Endgame doesn't lend itself to blunt parallels with the civil rights struggle. But then again, isn't the very air of downtown hipness that Akalaitis was reaching for in her production itself a distraction from Beckett's vision?

Of course all this was lost on the Boston Globe back then, and it hasn't learned much in the meantime, to judge from a recent article by one Megan Tench bemoaning the fact that this time around, the Beckett estate has wrangled a promise from the A.R.T. not to change a single word or stage direction in their new production of Endgame. (Egad - a production of the play as the author intended! Could this be a first at the A.R.T.?) In the article, Tench dwells on the earlier controversy at length, but without any real insight. And she quotes Robert Brustein, then Artistic Director of the A.R.T., in the following manner:

"I was really astonished," says former ART artistic director Robert Brustein in a recent phone interview. "Beckett was a playwright who we revered. We were shocked. We had black actors in the cast playing the parts of Ham and Nagg, and we were most upset about his objection to that."

Now perhaps Brustein then continued: "Of course we knew that he was not a racist, and that his concern was essentially born of his passion for the formal means of his work, which he had devoted his life to paring to their essence." Perhaps he said that, and Megan Tench left it out.

Or perhaps he never said it.

But he should have said it. Because not saying it leaves hanging the sense that Beckett was somehow some sort of racist, consciously or unconsciously - a slur that the Globe article hardly avoids by one weak mention of "the issue of miscegenation."

And on top of all the things I've always found wrong with the A.R.T., I'd really rather not add the calumny, "And they dissed the greatest playwright of the twentieth century."