Remyentingthe Classics

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

At Harvard, Robert Brustein 's rep troupe instructs by example

A bit of backstage wisdom popular among targets of caustic review holds that every drama critic is a frustrated actor or director. By that measure, Rob ert Brustein may be the most serene critic in America. For nearly two decades, the longtime scholar and sometime reviewer for the New Republic and the New York Times has been able to cast himself occasionally as an actor, hire himself as a director, and indulge his critical precepts as producer of two celebrated and controversial theater companies.

As dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979, he installed a professional acting troupe that premiered such plays as Ted Tally's Terra Nova and Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-prizewinning Buried Child and trained performers as diverse as Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler. The company also tried some daffy updating of classics: the 1607 Revenger's Tragedy be came an essay on Viet Nam War protest, the witches in Macbeth came from a spaceship, and The Frogs of Aristophanes frolicked in a Yale swimming pool.

When Brustein was let go as dean in 1979 for reasons that are still disputed, he vowed to take the Yale Rep with him. To Yale's surprise, he more or less did; though another company now performs in Yale's name, Brustein's rechristened American Repertory Theater is in its fourth season at Harvard. This spring the university will consider whether to commit its patronage past 1984 and whether to endorse Bru stein's plan for conservatory training in drama. Brustein says he cannot continue without increased funds from Harvard.

In an academic community, Brustein's approach to literature verges on insurrection. Professors tend to cherish fidelity to a text and tradition in its interpretation. Brustein seeks to make every play speak to the present, and does not revere even Shakespeare's words as sacred. Often stimulating and insightful, his productions of masterworks are novelties that presume the audience knows the standards from which he departs.

Perhaps as incendiary an example of this revisionism as Brustein has ever offered is the A.R.T.'s current Three Sisters, a production by Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters -- to return to the gaiety of Moscow -- is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with antic energy and force. Serban adroitly manages a welter of themes: aimless ambition, futile romance, grotesque distortions of honor, loneliness in a crowd. The play becomes the raucous comedy that Chekhov always insisted it was and hurtles exuberantly toward a triumph of optimism over experience. Among a solid cast, including Jeremy Geidt as the pathetic Chebutykin, three performers achieve fresh insight: Alvin Epstein as a hyperkinetic but somewhat dim Vershinin; Cheryl Giannini as a hard, petulant Masha; and Karen MacDonald as a vulgar, manipulative yet curiously sympathetic Natasha, the sister-in-law who drives the three sisters from their family home.

The search for comedy in a gloomy landscape does far less well by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by another Rumanian emigre, Andrei Belgrader. The costumes and the actors' mannerisms intentionally recall Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and, most of all, alas, the Marx brothers. As Vladimir, the articulate center of the play, Mark Linn-Baker does not share in the painful remembering and pointless waiting that make up the absurdist "action"; instead, Groucho-like, he stands aside and comments. His youthful ebullience and controlled timing drain him of vulnerability. As a result, the production seems brisk witty but ultimately almost unfelt.

The season's other production to date 'Night, Mother (with The Boys from Syracuse and The School for Scandal to follow), is unusual for Brustein: a spare, suspenseful and entirely realistic dialogue between a mother and a daughter. They live in a cheerily disorganized country house. They speak about everyday concerns in flat, vernacular speech. They fill 88 minutes (recorded onstage by six unobtrusively placed clocks) with the precisely observed minutiae of life: sorting out drawers, brewing cocoa, making shopping lists. Yet near the beginning of the play, the daughter announces that she plans to commit suicide that night, and compounds her quiet resolution by insisting that her mother has no moral right to stop her. The daughter explains: "This is how I say what I thought about it all, and I say 'No.' " Playwright Marsha Norman's script, directed by Tom Moore, seems miraculously free of melodrama, in large part because Kathy Bates is utterly real as the lumpish, frustrated but pitilessly methodical daughter. Though Anne Pitoniak as the mother has a gamut of emotions to display, Bates' deceptive calm gives the play its force.

One joy of a repertory theater, and perhaps its chief contribution to a university setting, is the ability to juxtapose plays of different times and styles to point up common themes. As Brustein must have recognized in planning his season, Three Sisters, Godot and 'Night, Mother share a unifying realization: that life seems unbearably tedious and static as it is happening, yet in retrospect has sped by before it was fully begun. When fostered as skillfully and unintrusively as it is at the American Rep, such a perception is far more satisfyingly reached in a theater than in a library.

--By William A. Henry III This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.