MORE MASTERPIECES

Robert Brustein

n 1967, I wrote a controversial essay called “No More Masterpieces,” in which, following the French radical theorist Antonin Artaud (The Theatre and Its Double) and the Polish critic Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary), I argued against Islavish reproduction of classical works. I agreed that we had reached the end of some cycle in staging these plays, that actor-dominated classics, particularly Shakespeare, were beginning to resemble opera more than theatre, with their sumptuous settings, brocaded costume parades, and warbled arias. I believed that modern directors were now obliged to freshen our thinking about classical writers in the same way that modern playwrights (notably O’Neill, Cocteau, Sartre, and T.S. Eliot) were freely revisioning the Greeks.

My hope was for approaches that would revitalize familiar works wrapped in a cocoon of academic reverence or paralyzed by arthritic convention. Theatre, being a material medium, was settling too cozily into ostentatious display, disregarding the poetic core of a text, its thematic purpose and inner meaning. One way to avoid this, I thought, was through metaphorical investigation by an imaginative director, in close collaboration with a visionary designer, locating the central image of a play through visual icons and a unified style.

This was what Peter Brook was doing with the Royal Shakespeare Company in his revitalized productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (channeling its youthful energies into acrobatics and circus acts) and King Lear (translating its vision of old age and death into a bleak visual vocabulary influenced by Beckett). Such produc- tions were making Shakespeare our contemporary through suggestive associations, bringing audiences a fresh appreciation of classics in danger of dying from hardened stage arteries.

There was another modernizing technique already in vogue at the time called “Updat- ing.” This approach relocated a classical play in some later time and place, thereby demonstrating its “relevance” through a more contemporary environment. Updating was the style usually associated with Michael Benthall’s Old Vic and the Stratford Shakespeare Theatre in Connecticut and the early Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Guthrie himself called this process “jollying Shakespeare up.”

© 2008 Robert Brustein PAJ 90 (2008), pp. 1–7.  1

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 Jollying Shakespeare up gave us such novelties as a Measure for Measure set in Freud’s Vienna, a Much Ado About Nothing relocated in Spanish Texas, and a Troilus and Cressida occurring during the American Civil War—creating geographical transplants that managed to provide visual surprise and an illusion of immediacy without any particular insight into the heart of the play. (To my disgrace, I myself once directed a production of Macbeth set in Stonehenge, featuring extraterrestrial witches.) Updating was an improvement on traditional Shakespeare, but it was nevertheless a visual and histrionic rather than a metaphorical and imaginative act. I preferred an approach that would navigate between the Scylla of dry academicism and the Charybdis of empty fashion.

A few of my colleagues thought I had taken leave of my senses, among them John Simon, who believed that classical plays should be produced on stage exactly as they were originally written. My old friend Harold Bloom, battered by bad productions, preferred the theatre in his head, often wondering aloud whether his beloved Shake- speare should be staled on stage at all. I sympathized with Bloom’s frustration, but obviously plays had no real life unless embodied in the flesh of living actors. And to satisfy Simon’s demand for “original intentions,” Shakespeare’s women would have to be played by boys and his Cleopatra would be required to wear a hoop skirt. To me, these were prescriptions for embalming the classics in formaldehyde.

Partly as a result of such debates, we were beginning to witness major changes in classical production. While traditional and updated approaches continued to hold the stage, the succeeding years also saw the rise of the auteur director, claiming the same freedom in regard to theatre texts as the movie director had with screenplays. The result was a host of brilliantly reconstituted and recalibrated, if highly controver- sial productions. Among the most celebrated of these (after Brook’s original forays) were André Gregory’s Endgame set in a cage to emphasize its claustral atmosphere, performed in a vaudeville style punctuated by old movie comedy soundtracks (some years later at the American Repertory Theatre JoAnne Akalaitis would scandalize the playwright by placing Endgame in an abandoned subway station in order to literalize its post-nuclear subtext); Andrei Serban’s Fragments of a Trilogy, composed of three Greek tragedies returned to their choreographed ritual roots, not to men- tion a host of other brilliant Serban reinterpretations, including his post-industrial Cherry Orchard for Papp’s Lincoln Center and his commedia dell’arte King Stag for the A.R.T; and preeminently Ingmar Bergman’s totalitarian Hamlet and brutalized Peer Gynt, indeed any classical play he chose to put his inspired hand to.

The reinterpretation of classical plays became such a popular activity in ensuing decades that it began to attract directors not normally interested in such material—Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines staged a controversial version of The Tempest at the New York Shakespeare Festival (co-directed by Ruth Maleczech) that had actors imitat- ing Mae West, W.C. Fields, and Sid Vicious. And Robert Woodruff, Sam Shepard’s chief director, contributed the first of numerous classical reinterpretations, a Lincoln Center Comedy of Errors featuring the Flying Karamazovs doing a juggling act. Alvin Epstein, previously known best as an actor, contributed a production of Midsum-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 mer Night’s Dream based on the Purcell/Dryden opera and the combat paintings of Uccello, Ron Daniels gave us a Hamlet where the title character spent the whole play in his pajamas, while an army of new young American directors, including Karin Coonrod, James Lapine, Anne Bogart, Emily Mann, Brian Kulick, Liz Diamond, Bill Rauch, Darko Tresnjak, and many others began embracing classical plays as a way of exercising new creative muscles. I even managed to persuade the celebrated auteur Robert Wilson to do his first classical productions—Euripides’ Alcestis and Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken after which he became as devoted to classical plays and operas as to his own original creations.

Such productions were enough to persuade me that reinterpreted classics were the highway to a new theatrical Eden. But it was not long before the garden was being blighted by a trace of plant mold. In 1968 the Living Theatre returned to these shores, after a nomadic period in Europe, bringing Paradise Now, The Mysteries, and Frankenstein. But despite the fact that its repertory featured one classic play, Antigone, reinterpreted as an indictment of the Johnson administration and the Vietnam War, the company that, before its exile, had staged Brecht, Lorca, Cocteau, and Pirandello now appeared to have lost its stomach for written plays and playwrights. During a New York symposium in the early seventies, Judith Malina announced that she would much rather play Judith Malina than Hedda Gabler, and she was soon sec- onded by one of her actors shouting his own scholarly analysis of the classics—“Fuck Shakespeare. Fuck Euripides.” During the same period, Richard Schechner and The Performance Group transformed The Bacchae into a group grope called Dionysus in 69 (curiously reminiscent of the The Living’s writhing Paradise Now), and it was growing obvious that classical theatre was being used less as an opportunity for understanding human destiny than as an invitation for physical intimacy between actors and spectators, in the chummy fashion of the time.

I look back on this age as a period of theatrical self-absorption, one which left a permanent imprint on our stage. Radical theatre had turned into a mode of institu- tionalized narcissism where the self-indulgent fantasies of directors and actors were often being substituted for the intentions of the play. Previous experimentalists had also taken great liberties with texts—but when the great Russian Meyerhold did a surrealist version of, say, Gogol’s The Inspector General, he was primarily trying to expose its dream-like roots. Now the production apparatus was replacing, rather than reinforcing, the playwright’s function, and the text was becoming a springboard for subjective directorial journeys. “To the tumbrels with the author,” as the critic Kenneth Tynan described it, after threatening to apply a lighted match to the bare feet of the next actor who clambered naked over his lap.

Under the influence of The Living Theatre and The Performance Group, and to some extent Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” with its actor-generated classics like The Constant Prince, the emphasis had begun to fall on the gesture rather than the word, on physical rather than vocal projection. Even Peter Brook was abandoning the process he had done so much to advance. Having produced a Living Theatre-type protest exercise with the Royal Shakespeare Company called US in 1966, Brook departed England

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 to set up his own experimental group in Paris, called the International Centre of Theatre Research. There he began working on a series of projects that were more likely to be adaptations of non-theatrical works than written plays, though poets like Ted Hughes sometimes contributed dialogue. The results were group-created projects, usually adapted from religious or sociological or anthropological or psy- chological tracts, like The Mahabharata, The Conference of the ,Birds The Ik, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Only occasionally would a Brook season include a classic play such as The Cherry Orchard (played on a Persian carpet) or a Hamlet (drastically cut).

Brook’s influence, along with the lingering influence of performance groups, has been incalculable on modern theatre. But in my opinion, and I should emphasize that mine was a minority opinion, his international company, expertly trained though it was, seemed to me less devoted to artistic communication than to group therapy, less concerned with dramatic breakthroughs than with inspirational statements about world brotherhood. To my mind, Brook had replaced the director’s chair with the guru’s rug. And I thought I detected a touch of neo-colonialism in the way he was arranging so many different nationalities, cultures, and languages on the same stage. I longed for the director who had once reimagined great plays, who had managed to evolve a magnificent Marat/Sade out of workshops on the Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud and Genet), who had taught us how the works of the past could be seen afresh through the lens of contemporary playwriting.

In short, four decades after my original article, I am now ready to concede that the postmodern movement may have gone too far, and that instead of helping to illu- minate classical plays, the auteur director is often obfuscating and obscuring them. Let me cite two off-Broadway productions that recently increased my anxiety—Ivo van Hove’s The Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop, and Elizabeth LeCompte’s Hamlet at the New York Public Theater.

Van Hove has been responsible for a number of exciting, if provocative produc- tions over the years, including a galvanic version of Streetcar Named Desire in which Blanche’s bathtub became the central image of the play (Stanley almost drowned her in it), and a reconstruction of O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions that transformed an ungainly, unfinished goulash of a play into a powerful piece of stagecraft. I was not so happy with van Hove’s recent Hedda Gabler, where he perversely deconstructed the luxurious Tesman mansion into a rundown hovel composed of crude dry wall strewn with graffiti, obviously ready for demolition.

His Misanthrope was even more perverse. As usual, van Hove managed to assemble a fine company of actors, led by the powerful Bill Camp as Alceste. But he rarely allowed them to investigate their characters. Instead, he insisted on loud, jarring, stacatto performances that seemed to be exploding in every direction. This often made the dialogue inaudible in Tony Harrison’s excellent adaptation, even harder to hear when the actors were compelled to compete with their own (delayed) images on a large screen. Let us mourn the day when theatre first discovered video! At one

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 point, Alceste chases Celimene out of the theatre onto Fourth Street, followed by a cameraman who films him upbraiding her in front of astonished passing pedes- trians. Indeed, the entire production was relentlessly technologized. Apart from the on-stage video technicians, van Hove had actors talking to friends on cell phones or booking restaurant tables or playing computer games. He even recast the foppish Acaste (played by the excellent Joan MacIntosh) as a modern lesbian who was also sleeping with Celimene.

Camp’s Alceste first appeared on stage in bare feet, reading (for some unexplained reason) an Arabic newspaper, on the verge of psychic breakdown. It is easy to make the case that Alceste is neurotic, but I doubt if Moliere intended him to be a candi- date for a psychiatric institution. Yet, in one long ill-conceived banquet scene, Camp was required to spread whipped cream over a rival, then smear chocolate syrup and ketchup on his own face, then parade around the stage, like an ambulatory Jackson Pollock painting, with half a watermelon and a bowlful of spaghetti on his head. I have heard this scene compared with Animal House, but food fights are a lot less fun without John Belushi.

So here was a prime example of how a fine director was exceeding his function and usurping the prerogatives of the playwright. The issues of theThe Misanthrope—how a man of honest and uncompromising, if rigid, principles could live in a society dominated by flattery and insincerity—were completely buried under technological distractions, screeching dustups, frenzied behavior, and hysterical shit-fits.

Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group is another accomplished stage direc- tor who has lately grown a touch too infatuated with stage technology. A former member of Schechner’s Performance Group, she has extended that group’s interest in putting postmodernist signatures on classical plays. But she is a genuine artist who has produced some wonderful theatrical work—Routes 1&9 (a deconstruction of Our Town), a mesmerizing Hairy Ape, a powerful Emperor Jones, and a version of The Crucible called L.S.D. . . . Just the High Points that forced Arthur Miller to sue it off the stage. In her more recent efforts, LeCompte’s growing fascination with the pyrotechnics of stage machinery has distracted audiences even further from the plays. This was becoming obvious in her last piece, Poor Theatre—a homage, as its title suggests, to Grotowski, as well as to William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet, performed with the aid of highly intricate and, despite the title, extremely costly technical equipment.

Poor Theatre was an example of what Lionel Abel has called “metatheatre”—theatre that reflects back on itself, feeding off its own methods and techniques. Pirandello treated this sort of thing magnificently in his theatre trilogy, where we were not always sure what was real and what was being fabricated. But in lesser hands, metatheatre can make theatrical technique seem less like the medium than the massage. I mean no disrespect for LeCompte’s creative powers. They are full of grace and imagina- tion. But she has lately seemed too interested in substituting technical gesticulations for creative gestures.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 The problems besetting Poor Theatre were compounded in her Hamlet. The produc- tion was conceived as a kind of modern commentary on Richard Burton’s 1964 stage performance, directed by John Gielgud, preserved, very imperfectly, in a grainy archival video. This movie is the centerpiece of LeCompte’s conception. Her stage is dominated by a giant screen on which are seen, materializing and dematerializing, the ghostly images of the 1964 cast. The voices of these actors are rarely heard, and then not very clearly. Instead, the Gielgud cast is impersonated by ten stage actors in modern dress, duplicating the filmed action on a relatively bare stage.

LeCompte’s actors perform with fine discipline under her controlled direction, especially such Wooster Group regulars as Scott Shepherd as Hamlet and Kate Valk doubling as Gertrude and Ophelia, and Bill Raymond as Polonius. But it is ulti- mately the metronomic interplay between stage and film that holds the attention, rather than any special insights into the play. Or perhaps one is meant to reflect upon the evanescence of screen acting—as well as on the paradox of juxtaposing it with what is usually considered the more ephemeral medium of the stage. What- ever the concept, two hours of parallel Hamlets might have been intriguing; three hours of these juxtapositions are tiresome. I began to long for a single uninterrupted reading of the part, whether by Burton or Shepard, or even by Harpo Marx (the screen appearance of Hume Cronyn as Polonius was especially frustrating when you couldn’t hear a word this excellent actor said). In this production, LeCompte has left Elsinore for Media City, a technological complex that is located out of literature, out of culture, indeed out of history.

Both of these productions display an unexpected merging of two previously divergent classical approaches—modern updating and postmodern reconstruction. It is not the jaded professional but rather the experimental auteur who now seems to be jollying Shakespeare up. I have considerable regard for the technical accomplishments of such productions—they are brilliantly rendered, beautifully executed, highly imaginative. But they do not allow us to enter the play.

This may be more evidence of our growing indifference to the written word. In a recent speech, Richard Nelson, then head of Yale’s playwriting department, com- plained that the American theatre is eager to give readings, workshops, seminars, and conferences to American playwrights, but very rarely willing to produce their work. Since Broadway remains preoccupied almost exclusively with new and revived musicals, the obligation of non-profit companies to do new plays should be increasing rather than fading. And yet, although a number of resident theatres still welcome playwrights, the number is dwindling, and we are in danger of failing a precious creative resource.

We are also in danger of losing our connection to classical theatre, for some of the reasons I have been describing. Do I sound like a cranky old conservative, abandon- ing my previous commitment to radical reinterpretations, and joining a chorus of critical naysayers? Perhaps. But I am hardly calling for the abolition of auteurism. I am simply suggesting alternative approaches that maintain the integrity of a classic,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.3.1 by guest on 30 September 2021 neither by freezing nor misreading it, but by reviving its original energies. The great plays of the past still have much to teach us—about the fallibility of leaders and the fickleness of followers, about the nobility and brutality of human nature, about the sometimes tortured relations between the sexes, about the impact of destiny on the individual will, indeed about every possible kind of human transaction. Most classical productions today are showing no interest in those issues or are failing to clarify them. More masterpieces, please.

ROBERT BRUSTEIN is a playwright, adaptor, director, actor, teacher, and critic. He is a past Dean of the Yale Drama School, and the found- ing director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, where he served for twenty-three years. He isnow Distinguished Research Fellow at Suffolk University. Robert Brustein is the author of fifteen books on theatre and society, including Millennial Stages, Reimagining American Theatre, The Theatre of Revolt, Making Scenes (a memoir of his Yale years), Who Needs Theatre(a collection of reviews and essays), Dumbocracy in America, Cultural Calisthenics, The Siege of the Arts, and Letters to a Young Actor. His newest book, Shakespeare’s Prejudices, will be published next year.

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