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Robert Brustein
Robert Brustein

Robert Brustein

Robert Brustein (1927-2023) served as the founding director of the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theaters, and supervised well over 200 productions, acting in eight and directing 12. He wrote 11 adaptations for the American Repertory Theater and was the author of 13 books on theatre and society. His book The Tainted Muse: Prejudices and Preconceptions in Shakespeare’s Works and Times, was released in 2009. Mr. Brustein also served for 20 years as director of the Loeb Drama Center, was a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University and drama critic for The New Republic. He was a member of the American Theatre Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the George Polk Award in Journalism, the Commonweath (Massachusetts) Award for Organizational Leadership, and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Tao House Award for serving the American theatre with distinction.

His Six Characters in Search of an Author won the Boston Theatre Award for Best Production of 1996. His play Demons, which was broadcast on WGBH radio in 1993, had its stage world premiere as part of the A.R.T. New Stages. His play Nobody Dies on Friday was given its world premiere in the same series and was presented at the Singapore Festival of Arts and the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow. His play Spring Forward, Fall Back was performed in 2006 at Theater J in Washington, D.C., and at the Vineyard Playhouse. His play The English Channel was produced in 2007 in Boston and at the Vineyard Playhouse. In the fall of 2008, it played at the Abingdon Theatre in New York, where it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Brustein also wrote Shlemiel the First, based on the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and set to traditional klezmer music, which was directed and choreographed by David Gordon. After the original presentation in 1994 at ART and in Philadelphia at the American Music Theatre Festival, which co-produced the show, Shlemiel the First was revived several times in Cambridge and subsequently played at the Lincoln Center Serious Fun Festival, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, as well as touring theatres in Florida and in Stamford, Connecticut. The play has also been produced at Theater J in Washington, DC.

His short plays Poker Face, Chekhov on Ice, Divestiture, Anchor Bimbo, Noises, Terrorist Skit, Airport Hell, Beachman’s Last Poetry Reading, and Enter William Shakespeare were all presented by the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. Brustein was also the author of Doctor Hippocrates is Out: Please Leave a Message, an anthology of theatrical and cinematic satire on medicine and physicians, commissioned by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement for its 2008 convention in Nashville.

Brustein was a professor and Senior Research Fellow of English at Harvard University, a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University in Boston, the drama critic for The New Republic, and dean of the Yale School of Drama. In 2003 he served as a Senior Fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and in 2004 and 2005 was a senior fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts Journalism Institute in Theatre and Musical Theatre at the University of Southern California.

He was the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater and served for 20 years as director of the Loeb Drama Center, where he founded the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. He retired from the artistic directorship of ART in 2002 and then served as Founding Director and Creative Consultant. He was also a regular blogger for the Huffington Post and the Open University.

During his tenure at ART, Brustein wrote 11 adaptations, including Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken, the last directed by Robert Wilson; Three Farces and a Funeral, adapted from the works and life of Anton Chekhov; Luigi Pirandello’s Enrico IV; and Brustein’s final production at ART, Lysistrata by Aristophanes, directed by Andrei Serban. He also directed numerous adaptations while at ART, including a Pirandello trilogy: Six Characters in Search of an Author, which won the Boston Theatre Award for Best Production of 1996, Right You Are (If You Think You Are); Tonight We Improvise; Ibsen’s Ghosts, Strindberg’s The Father, and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling.

Over the course of his long career as director, playwright and teacher, he participated in the artistic development of such theatre artists as Meryl Streep, Christopher Durang, Christopher Walken, Cherry Jones, Ted Talley, Michael Feingold, Sigourney Weaver, James Naughton, Mark Linn-Baker, Henry Winkler, James Lapine, Tony Shalhoub, Tommy Derrah, Rocco Landesman, Linda Lavin, Michael Yearga, William Ivey Long, Derek Maclane, Steve Zahn, Peter Sellars, Santo Loquasto, Tom Moore, Albert Innaurato and many others.

Mr. Brustein was the recipient of many coveted awards, including: a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Nottingham, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, twice winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the George Polk Award for Journalism (Criticism), The Second Elliot Norton Award For Professional Excellence in Boston Theatre (formerly the Norton Prize) presented by the Boston Theatre District Associatione, the New England Theatre Conference’s Major Award for outstanding creative achievement in the American theatre, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Career Achievement Award for Professional Theatre, the Commonwealth Award for Organizational Leadership, induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame, the United States Institute for Theatre Technology Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Corporate Theatre Fund Chairman’s Award for Achievement in Theatre, the Gann Academy Award for Excellence in the Performing Arts, and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Tao House Award for serving the American theatre with distinction.

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