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 quite often a transparent imitation of Stoppard's screenplay (or co-screenplay) for the Hollywood hit 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, one or two 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 takes place 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 on display in 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 a kind of 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.