Cultural Calisthenics: Writings on Race, Politics, and Theatre - Hardcover

Brustein, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156663220X ISBN 13: 9781566632201

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1998

Synopsis

New writings on race, politics, and theatre, as well as Mr. Brustein's incisive theatre reviews and deft portraits of stage luminaries. Brustein is an elegant and eloquent voice in the wilderness of contemporary American culture. -Robin Lippincott, New York Times Book Review

About this title

About the Author

Robert Sanford Brustein (born April 21, 1927 in New York City) is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright and educator. He founded both Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a Creative Consultant, and has been the theatre critic for The New Republic since 1959. He comments on politics for the Huffington Post.

Brustein is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and in 2002 was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. 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.

Robert Brustein is married to Doreen Beinart, and has one son, Daniel Brustein, and two stepchildren, Peter Beinart and Jean Beinart Stern.

Reviews

Once one of the most vocal proponents of risky, status quo^-shaking theater in such quintessential 1960s-era writings as those in The Theatre of Revolt (1964) and Making Scenes (1981), Brustein in recent years has fought a rearguard action against multiculturalism and those who would use theater to advance social and political causes. Yet he is no cultural conservative of the Hilton Kramer^-John Simon stamp and in many ways remains an old-style Kennedy-Johnson liberal. You never really know which side of an issue he will land on, which drives his more doctrinaire detractors crazy--and makes him fascinating. In this collection of witty, tightly written essays, most dated 1996 and 1997, Brustein gleefully gores sacred cows left and right, chiding the right for stifling the National Endowment for the Arts and the left for its superstitious belief in the power of art to affect social change. The first third of the book contains Brustein's thoughts on race and politics and the ongoing culture war, in particular Brustein's feud with August Wilson regarding white and black theaters, which culminated in a public debate in early 1997. The rest of the book contains trenchant, exceptionally well-written theater reviews and miscellaneous writings on theater, notably a eulogy of the Group Theatre founder, Stella Adler. Jack Helbig

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156663220X
• ISBN 13: 9781566632201
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304