Julia Glander, Eve Ensler, Ruth Crawford

So, if you’ve come in late, here’s what happened in Act One: The Michigan State legislature put so many restrictions on women’s healthcare choices, including requiring physicians who perform abortions to carry $1 million in liability insurance, that some clinics say they may have to close, leaving women, especially poor women, with few options. The New York Times called the measure sweeping and urged Michigan’s governor not to sign it.

When a state representative, Lisa Brown, spoke out against this, she was banned from speaking on the floor for two days. She noted that she didn’t expect anyone to follow the tenants of her religion and asked that nobody impose their religion on her. “Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’”

She’s been banned for using the phrase “my vagina,” not her protest against the bill apparently, but most wonder exactly how a word in science texts became so disturbing. Certainly, the word and the issue drew more attention than either has for a time. Vaginas noticed the ban. Even penises noticed. “Vagina” may have been the most tweeted word in America in the last few days.

Eva Rosenwald, State Senator Rebekah Warren, Courtney Jo-Dempsey Burkett, Carla Milarch

While most of us kvetched, Carla Milarch, associate artistic director of the Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor, mobilized Michigan artists and citizens to protest. Her work began with a series of Facebook posts on Friday morning. Milarch asked if her friends–she has 1,237 of them, and many are performers–would join her on the steps of the capital to read from Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. Most reposted her invitation and the number of participants grew throughout the day. By Friday evening, Ensler had gotten a plane ticket to Michigan to join the reading, too. A gaggle of state senators and representatives, all of them Democrats, have signed on to join the thespians.

The Vagina Monologues isn’t my idea of good theater, but it feels like a great political protest piece, made for this occasion.

The participating actors included: Q’Amara Black, Jan Blixt, Barb Christine, Ruth Crawford, Mary Jo Cuppone, Madison Deadman, Courtney J Dempsey-Burkett, Naz Edwards, Cecillia Fierro, Lindsey Ford, Julia Glander, Jennifer Graham, Lynn Lammers, Carla Milarch, Elitza Nicolauo, Sally Pesetsky, Suzi Regan, Jasmine Rivera, Eva Rosenwald, Chelsea Sadler, Dana Sutton, Emily Sutton-Smith.

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Top two photos by Mary Jo Cuppone.

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Earlier this week, NPR announced that the Magliozzi brothers—you may know them as Click and Clack—are retiring. Stations will air favorite segments of Car Talk as reruns.

I’m not all that interested in cars, but I’ll miss the show, which to me was always less about cars than relationships—between the bantering brothers, between callers and their spouses.

And that may have been what inspired Wesley Savick, a professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to create a musical around the show. Last year, SU and the Underground Railway Theater produced the story of Rusty Fenders, owner of a terminally ill ’93 Kia, Miata C. LaChassi, and the Wizard of Cahs. Car Talk: The Musical!!! features special effects, including an 8′x6′ puppet made entirely of car parts that speaks in the recorded voices of the Magliozzis. Michael Wartofsky wrote the music.

Those longing for more Car Talk may want to head up to Boston, where the musical opens June 14 for a professional run at Central Square Theater.

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Scenes from Boston:

David Wheeler Directs

“The party scene was dead, dreadful,” Bronia Stefan Wheeler recalls. The fellow playing her uncle in Chekhov’s Country Scandal listened from the wings, hearing and understanding what wasn’t happening. “He made his entrance on all fours, like a drunk dog, and the audience howled.” One actor told the producer to fire the kid who did the peeing dog, but David Wheeler appreciates an actor who changes a scene to save it. He kept Dustin Hoffman.

Wheeler who co-founded the Theater Company of Boston (TCB) in 1963 and served as its artistic director though its ten-year life, has a knack for finding talent as well as keeping it. One actor, who auditioned then and since, describes the auditioning experience: “First of all, he makes actors feel totally welcome. We all sit around in a semi-circle and read parts, and he’ll just switch parts on actors. You’d spend two hours in a room and you never felt you were being looked at, and then the part was assigned to you as though you were part of an ongoing thing. I was already in the play,” says Al Pacino.

Ralph Waite was tending bar and drinking too much when Wheeler gave him his break. He feels the director isn’t as well known as TCB actors because he’s egoless. “I’ve seen people blow up at David, and he doesn’t react. It’s not that he’s a wimp. He just doesn’t take it personally. Once, Bobby Duvall was dying and a song came on instead of a gunshot. It ruined the whole ending, and Bobby screamed as any actor who had given so much to a part would. David was good humored and contrite.”

In 1960, Paul Benedict left the Charles Playhouse, which he had house-managed, to co-found the Image Theater. It ran out of money after three successful seasons. “About the time we folded, David came up from New York with Naomi Thornton to begin a company at the Hotel Bostonian, near the Fennway. Naomi produced. David Directed.” And Benedict acted and directed like never before.

An American history and lit major at Harvard, with a part-time production assistant job at a TV station and a husband studying at Harvard Business School, Stockard Channing says she was “the least likely candidate” for an acting career when she began “moonlighting on moonlighting” at TCB, She was to audition with a two-character scene. When nobody showed up to read with her, Channing did both parts, landing her first off-campus role and opening a new career possibility: “It was the atmosphere, the people, the endeavor. The Theater Company was all about new playwrights,” she says. “I didn’t realize how rare it would be. It was the tail end of what we took for granted in regional theater…the desire to be innovative, fresh.”

“Everyone loved to come to Boston,” Waite recalls. “We worked in scroungy places, but David picked wonderful deep material and gave us free reign. He’s very articulate about the complexities of the play. He would have been a major scholar if he hadn’t wanted to get into the dirt and nonsense of the theater.”

TCB did Brecht and Beckett, Campus and Sartre, Arden and Behan and several Pinters with the playwright’s blessing. When Pinter saw Wheeler’s production of Albee’s Tiny Alice at TCB, he stayed to talk to the cast. Wheeler directed Jon Voight in the American premiere of The Dwarfs, on a double bill with The Local Stigmatic, featuring Pacino. Playwright Heathcote Williams provided new transitional material for the 52-minute film Pacino later made of Stigmatic, which can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Wheeler has ongoing relationships with American playwrights, too. Albee once asked him to go to Paris in his stead to stage Zoo Story. Neil Barron, associate director of Trinity Rep where Wheeler has staged plays classic and modern, says the director never imposes an extrinsic concept: “The play is the concept,” says Barron. He’ll find the right ingredients [to realize it], watch what happens, then make it happen. I think of him as a kind of theater chemist.”

Wheeler says he urges playwrights to deal with the practical as well as the literary, to cut an element that has been worked enough, for instance, or to restructure scenes. When a playwright isn’t around, he does it for him. Recently, Wheeler heightened the witches in his PlayMakers Rep production of Macbeth, allowing them to enter individually, explore until each discovers a gourd of blood, raise the blood above them before an open trap, and pour it in as a bloody sergeant rises. “The witches dominate this world,” he says.

Some, but not all, living playwrights appreciate Wheeler’s contributions. “I hate to discover a playwright’s vision is narrower than mine,” Wheeler says, adding that he’ll only use actors who can work “in love and fun. This is the last cottage industry. We create as a group.”

Actors open to his process return after their careers take off. In 1975, Pacino did Brecht’s Arturo Ui for Wheeler, and he let the director convince him to tackle his first professional Shakespeare. Richard III was a huge success in Boston in 1973. Wheeler used mikes and flash cameras to suggest the paranoia of the Nixon White House, and staged the play in a Boston cathedral that he feels helped bridge the centuries. “Al wanted to recapture that in New York in 1979,” says Wheeler, and the two searched for a church, but weekend services interfered. Broadway producers, who felt Pacino could carry the show, didn’t invest sufficiently in other elements, Wheeler felt, and most critics trashed the Broadway production. Pacino has been interviewing Shakespearean players as well as spectators for a docudrama on Richard III. Wheeler’s son, Lewis, a student at the American Film Institute, was an assistant editor and camera man on the project.

Pacino says Wheeler’s shows mature with time because “he operated in such a way as to allow actors the freedom to develop things for themselves and to use their imaginations. He would set the stage for that. David’s productions usually manifest [themselves] after a month’s run,” he says, wishing critics had seen David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel into the run. “I think they would have recognized his momentous achievement.”

Wheeler and Pacino fared much better with Pavlo Hummel, however, in Boston in 1972 and later on Broadway. The pair waited five years for rights to pass from Joseph Papp’s control to bring it in, but the wait was worth it. “Pavlo Hummel was a major piece of work” says Pacino, who took the Tony for his role in it in 1977.

David Rabe loved the first production but felt that some things that worked in the three quarter round at the Charles Theater in Boston suffered behind a Broadway proscenium. “I asserted those opinions strongly,” says Rabe, who was impressed by Wheeler’s flexibility and has worked with him several times since. “He saw the problem and opened it right up.”

Recently back from Portugal, where he directed Camino Real, Wheeler lives in a Boston suburb with his wife, Bronia. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he currently introduces Harvard undergraduates to the elements of theater and directing; he teaches only one semester each year so he can guest direct outside Boston the other.

Although he tells students how he works with actors, he doesn’t often tell the performers. Jeremy Geidt, a senior actor at the American Rep in Cambridge, where Wheeler has been a resident director since 1984, finds him a “gentle and encouraging director. He is disciplined but not a disciplinarian” who can work under great pressure and get terrific performances. How exactly? “He’s a theatrical mystery man,” says Geidt.

“I tell my directing students, ‘Know during rehearsals what’s there in front of you isn’t enough. Stay open and keep dreaming over possibilities,’” says Wheeler. Sometimes, actors see him in this state. “There are times when you’re in the middle of a scene in rehearsal and he nods off,” says Pacino. “David’s always on his way to someplace else, and yet he is magnificent and I love him very much.”

Wheeler completed a pre-med program and studied psychology while majoring in English at Harvard. A fellowship took him to France to pursue psychiatry, but a close look at the distance between psychiatrists and patients convinced him he belonged in literature. He returned to Harvard to do a master’s in comparative lit, where his classmate, critic John Simon, recalls that he did “terrific impersonations of our teacher Harry Levin” and others.

After Harvard, Wheeler took a workshop with Jose Quintero, who hired him as his assistant for at time. Wheeler’s foray into psychiatry was part of his directorial apprenticeship, too, for it taught him that “another person has a mind and history that’s entirely different from yours.” He sees the director as a kind of shrink, and rehearsals can resemble group therapy sessions, for good psychiatrists and directors both set people free. Wheeler says his job is to “keep imaginations active and energies working all the time…That way, you will not be looked to as the source of all answers. You won’t be exhausted by rehearsals. You’ll be nourished by their thoughts.” Wheeler has directed more than 150 plays without ever canceling a rehearsal. After a fall once, he showed up on crutches.

He appreciates actors who are open, and when faced with one who isn’t, Wheeler sometimes turns an open actor loose. “If someone goes to work in a surprising way, you can create change,” he says. Barron says Wheeler sometimes whispers an instruction to one actor designed to elicit a response from another when put into motion. In 1971, Wheeler served as Michael Langham’s assistant at the Guthrie, where he directed A Touch of the Poet. The show drew raves from local critics and from Clive Barnes, who came from the New York Times to see a production that had been in deep trouble. The lead, “a terrific actor with terrific stresses” didn’t connect to the character until Wheeler set a creative actor free.

“I insist on creating life,” Wheeler says with an intensity that is unusual for this mild-mannered man. “I’m not going to be bored in the theater or at rehearsals. I want surprise and challenge.”

Spontaneity often saved shows at TCB. Once, an actor didn’t show for a performance of Endgame. Wheeler recruited Benedict, who didn’t know the play, put a script and flashlight in the barrel with him, and told him to pop out, deliver a line, go under, and learn another. Benedict recalls the moment an intense actor “with an amazing face” looked down at him. Dustin Hoffman continued to act as he looked deep in the barrel and “emitted this amazing laugh.”

Another night, when an actor failed to show for Pinter’s The Room, “David went into the lobby and brought a large black man on stage,” Benedict says. He gave the man a script, told him to stand with his back to the audience, and the play went on.

Spontaneity improved shows for the audience, too. “Blythe [Danner] cut into the row where Elliott Norton, the distinguished white haired critic from the Globe sat,” and she suddenly threw herself on Norton’s lap, screamed. ‘This man pinched me’ and slapped him. None of us knew she would do that,” says Benedict. Norton raved.

Wheeler lost many actors to Hollywood, replacing the best with more of the best. Venues were not so easy to replace. The TCB moved every two years at least, and worked under traumatic conditions. Once, after finding space in a second hotel and announcing a season, the bank foreclosed on the building. Trustees allowed the theater to occupy the vacant space until the end of the season. Building codes required $42,000 in repairs on TCB’s next home. The theater never drew the support needed to replace that money, even though it played to enthusiastic critics and audiences. “Boston has always been an odd town for theater,” Benedict reflects. “They claim they support it, but the Puritan days hang on.”

Alumni have gotten together to do plays Wheeler directs at assorted not-for-profit theaters and in New York. Benedict believes the TCB is still alive in that way: “David Wheeler,” he says, “is the Theater Company of Boston.”

=Photo: Left to right, Al Pacino, David Wheeler, Robert Brustein. Photo courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre

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The projected revival of the century-old hit created unprecedented hype, with some television channels previewing the opening 24/7, and fans tweeting about it through the night. Some jaded NYC residents, tired of the hype, couldn’t get out of town quickly enough when they heard Irene was on its way.

Most anticipated it eagerly. It was to be a Brechtian event, with spectators eating and drinking in the theater. Many prepared for the show by purchasing bottled water and canned fish the day before. One couple, prepared with beer and junk food, found the show a wash out. “This hurricane is a big disappointment,” said one, echoing the thoughts of many ticket holders. “I’ve already eaten a half a bag of Cheetos and there is not even a storm.”

There was talk of innovative effects that included no lighting or sound design, indeed no light on the stage as well as in the house. Many thought it would bring down the house.

When excitement lagged, the office of Gov Andrew M. Cuomo tried to revive interest with a report that some 400,000 residents would be without electricity power for much of Sunday. One film maker said he wished he had been in New York for the early scenes, to shoot footage for a disaster film. In his radio show, Glenn Beck called Irene a “blessing.”

In pre-show announcements, critics may have jinxed the show’s success, downgrading Irene to a tropical storm before it swept through the area Sunday morning. Yes, it caused some flooding, toppled a few trees, and left many residents without power. But according to a New York Times review that made the front page, “it never dealt the kind of punch that forecasters had feared.”

Irene was a near total flop. Although the show made an impact in the Carolinas and New Jersey, it opened and closed in New York on August 28, making it one the shortest running shows in Broadway history, competing with such gems as Moose Murders, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow, and Glory Days. (Note, the show is not to be confused with the musical about a young woman who yearns to experience the world beyond Ninth Avenue; the production that earned Debbie Reynolds a Tony nomination in 1973 had a healthy run.)

The Producer, asked why He spared a city full of homosexuals and artists, commented that to prevent future disaster, the country should stop interfering with those who want to marry and must restore full funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. “And you better do something about global warming,” He cautioned.

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How tragic and shortsighted–We’ll be spending money locking people up longer because we didn’t spend less to provide access to the arts. Strikes me as cruel, though not unusual in American life.

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In the few weeks leading up to the Tonys, theaters have cancelled seasons or shut their doors entirely. The Florida Stage declared bankruptcy this week, after reporting a 1.5 million dollar debt. The Denver Theater Center will phase out its conservatory over the next two years.

The saddest in my view—I’m a Craig Lucas fan—is the demise of Seattle’s 2006 Tony-winning Intiman Theatre, which put out a desperate call for a million dollars earlier this year. They couldn’t raise the cash, and the theater closed its doors a few months later. The story is a sad one, and it isn’t uncommon.

When money is short, tempers grow shorter, and people start to blame each other. A theater is closing because of something the artistic director, or even the former artistic director, did or didn’t do. The executive director must have messed up. The board members are to blame. In Florida, some fingers pointed to Madoff, since Floridians who he had bilked could no longer afford to support local theater.

But none of these folks are responsible for the steady demise of the American theatre.

Maybe you are.

“Wait,” you cry. “You’ve got the wrong person! I go to the theater. I subscribe to a theater. I even wrote an extra check when I heard my favorite theater was floundering.”

Seems to me by crying out to their communities for extra support, theaters may fill the hole in the dyke momentarily, but unless people in a community have very very deep pockets, that hole is likely to burst later on. A theater that is given the support it should have will not need to go begging.

And when a theater goes begging, when it relies on its audiences for subsidy, it is in danger of becoming compromised artistically. Think about it. If a theater asks you for money, are you going to provide extra support if you don’t like what you see there? You want good productions of good plays, however you define ‘good’, don’t you?

Here’s the thing: Theater grows and flourishes when artists take risks, when they try something without knowing if you will like it or even if they will like it in the end. A new play by an unknown writer, a unique approach to a classic, a new kind of theater nobody has heard of as I write. The freedom to create can lead to self-indulgent garbage, but in the hands of serious artists, it also leads to the best theater we have. Theater artists can’t depend on audience support if they’re to be, well, artists.

So what can you do?

Chip in a few pennies a year, less than you’ve probably contributed in the last ten years. And make sure everyone else in the country does, too. Call your representatives and senators, write letters to the editor, and insist that funding for the National Endowment for the Arts doubles, triples even. It still won’t be enough, but it’s a start.

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Davi Napoleon’s book, Chelsea on the Edge, chronicles the demise of a theater that broke boundaries–and its budget–when funding for the arts began its downward spiral.

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Brustein

You don’t have to share a gene pool to be someone’s kid. He doesn’t have to adopt you. Hell, he doesn’t even have to know who you are.

I hadn’t met Robert Brustein when he started shaping the way I think. By the time we met, I’d already purchased a second copy of The Theatre of Revolt, the first too dog-eared and underlined and notated in the margins to read yet another time. I’d already spent a lot of time picking the brains of two of his former students, who were running an off-Broadway company in New York. But what I learned from Bob, through his writings and after I got to know him, went way beyond a deepened understanding of Ibsen and Pirandello, even beyond an understanding of the place of theater in our culture, what it is and what it should be. His willingness to say what he knows to be true, no matter which friend or colleague or editor or university president he might alienate in the process, showed me just how I ought to approach my work.

Lately, I’ve been learning from him that you don’t have to retire just because you turn 65. Or 84, for that matter. Bob has two new books out, one that makes sense of Shakespeare, the man and his times, by looking at his plays, the other a collection of recent writings, Rants and Raves. And he has had time to write more plays since his retirement from his professorial post at Harvard and his leadership of the American Repertory Theatre, which he founded in 1980 and directed until 2002, just after he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

But this isn’t about what I learned. It’s about Bob and his two dads. Recently, when he received the U.S. Medal of Arts from President Obama, I couldn’t help thinking: Lionel Trilling would be proud. Maybe Max Brustein would be, too.

This story appeared in TheaterWeek magazine on November 7, 1994. Note that Rocco Landesman is no longer head of Jujamcyn and Brustein is happily remarried:

Schoolbiz: Two Fathers and Their Son

Max Brustein owned a wool factory in Rhode Island, with an office in New York’s garment district. A graduate of the fourth grade, he didn’t appreciate intellectual pursuits and once turned down his younger son’s request for a book. “You already got a book,” he reasoned.

He counted on taking his two boys into the business, and Marty, the elder, agreed. Bob refused, reducing Max to tears. But when the young boy started writing books, the wool maker tried hard to read them. It was painful for him though, when Robert Brustein announced he would go off to New Haven to head a drama school. “How much is Yale paying you?” the wealthy entrepreneur queried. “Twenty-four thousand,” the new dean of Yale Drama said. “I’ll give you $24,000 to stay in New York,” said Max.

Brustein rejected the offer, but not his father. After stormy times, the two became close, and Brustein recalls warm moments together, sometimes watching Lawrence Welk on television.

Marty, who gave up an interest in medicine and became a successful stock broker, said his brother “did the right thing” by going his own way: Better to risk alienating a father than to lose the chance to find out what you want to do.

Later, Brustein would risk relationships with artists he wanted to work with by writing honestly about their productions. And he would be an exceptional teacher, able to assert his own strong values without crushing other visions.

***

Robert Brustein’s first hero was Artie Shaw, and when he enrolled in what then was Music and Art High in New York, he studied clarinet and dreamed of becoming a swing band conductor.

At Amherst, he encountered Allen Gilmore, for whom medieval history mirrored the modern world. This time, he was sure his future lay in the distance past.

But after graduating from Amherst, Brustein wandered through the Ivies in pursuit of a teacher and a subject. At Brown, he discovered medieval history wasn’t for him. He apologized to Gilmore, who let him know it wasn’t necessary to imitate his teacher to retain his high regard. At Yale, Brustein discovered a stodgy drama school wasn’t a good place to develop an acting talent.

And at Columbia, he discovered a second father.

In Dumbocracy in America, one of Brustein’s wonderful collections of illuminating reviews of stage and society, ends with a piece about his mentor and model, Lionel Trilling.

The literary critic cared about culture as well as art, defining a nation not by its apparent consensus but by its internal debates. “It is nothing if not a dialectic,” he wrote. He feared an intellect divorced from experience and a democracy separated from the individuals and artists within. “A democracy that does not know that the [artistic] demon and the subject must be served is not a democracy at all.”

In Trilling, Brustein found an “intellectual father” with whom he could share a deeply felt humanism along with an aversion to sentimentality, which simplifies and homogenizes authentic experience. The two had one little quibble:

Trilling found dramatic literature frivolous.

Brustein already knew a true teacher accepts those who don’t follow in his footsteps and that the best students forge their own paths. He would go on to share values and aesthetics with his own students, but his students would internalize his strength more often than his ideas, making their own marks on the theater.

Not everyone knows how well Brustein takes it. Rocco Landesman, who heads Jujamcyn, fears he’s disappointing his teacher/father-figure, much the way Brustein once worried over Gilmore’s response. “I’m outside the world and the world he cares about,” Landesman says.

Maybe, but Brustein is delighted when his former students succeed on Broadway. Or when they accept their Emmys and Oscars. He hopes they “will retain the hunger to express whatever brought them into a training program,” but he understands the realities that sometimes separate his students from the idea of resident repertory theater.

Landesman isn’t the only Yale DFA who took another road. “I think that program succeeded more than anyone has recognized,” says Joel Schechter, who chairs the theater department at San Francisco State and edited YaleTheater for many years after doing his doctorate there. He notes that in an era of declining daily papers and space for theater reviews, many of his classmates have published books instead. They have become dramaturges or teachers, or like Landesman, participate in other areas of theater. “Rocco is a fully literate and articulate producer,” Schechter points out.

Some of Brustein’s most loyal students are those who didn’t study with him. Gregory Boyd, artistic director of the Alley Theatre, opted to go to Carnegie, where he was accepted into a directing MFA, instead of Brustein’s Yale, which admitted him into the acting program. But Boyd learned to read plays by reading The Theater of Revolt. “Bob is in many ways the reason I’m still in theater,” he says. “After Shakespeare and Brecht and the promise of meeting girls, there has to be something that keeps you there…Bob demonstrates that an intelligent world view of the theater can still exist and can still be about quality and not about community outreach and all that horseshit…he was my mentor more than anybody else.”

Playwright Shelley Berc, who co-directed the Playwrights Lab at the University of Iowa, graduated from college as Brustein left Yale. Anxious to study with him, she postponed graduate school to do an internship at the American Repertory Theater—even though the A.R.T. had no internships then. “He let me use his library,” she recalls. He also gave her a chance to assist Lee Breuer on an adaptation of Wedekind’s Lulu, then advised her to study with Richard Gilman at Yale. “Now Bob reminds me I’m a critic as well as a playwright,” says Berc. “He makes me realize I can put those worlds together.”

***

When Robert Brustein flips a coin, it comes up heads and tails. He is a critic and a producer, an educator and an artist. In each of these roles, he can’t be labeled liberal or conservative. He is a tough rationalist who still feels the corporal presence of a wife who passed away almost 15 years ago. He is committed both to tradition and experimentation.

Brustein’s vision is complex. It often encompasses extremes rather than compromising between them. In his discussion of Ibsen in The Theater of Revolt, he foreshadowed his future work. One Ibsen play may suggest one set of values, another the opposite. Together, Brustein suggests, they present an unsynthesized dialectic, revealing irreconcilable sides of the playwright’s psyche. Some students feel betrayed when Brustein produces something that doesn’t mesh with the ideal he describes in his writings; these writings are sometimes extensions of his work at the A.R.T., but at other times, they are a corrective to it.

Brustein gives company members freedom to try what he’s not sure about. “Sometimes it turns out to be positive and brings us to areas I never could have imagined, and sometimes the freedom takes us down a dead end,” says Brustein, who knows that if he were reviewing some of his own shows, he would review them unfavorably. (In fact, he has disturbed some other critics who raved about his productions by commenting negatively about them in essays later on.)

Students who hope to sit at the feet of a guru discover his powers are limited. They come to understand not just his views but the difficulty he sometimes has arriving at them, not just the productions, but the problematic process behind some of them. And that, maybe more than anything, frees them to find the power within themselves.

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This isn’t a pretty story.

I don’t go around telling it, even to good friends. But a journalist’s job is to convince people to reveal what they wish they hadn’t, and I don’t let anyone with a hot story off the record easy.

Back in the early 70’s, before the Drama Department at New York University became Performance Studies and you could pick up basic theater history, theory and crit courses, I did class time. I managed to get through comprehensive exams, even proved I had a reading knowledge of French, which I don’t. Then I took a 15-year study break to write features and reviews, and one day I discovered I wasn’t all-but-the-dissertation, I was a writer.

In 1986, I was chronicling the onstage triumphs and offstage turmoil at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn, then in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, worrying that no trade house would publish a book about a little theater that folded. Actually, I started to suspect that when 14 such houses said they wouldn’t. Maybe a Ph.D. would help me secure a university press? I figured I’d submit the first draft as a dissertation and pick up the old doctorate.

I figured wrong.

My matriculation had long since lapsed, but NYU agreed to waive time limits. There was still a matter of back matriculation fees that I could handle by selling my house and kids. An administrator said I’d need new classes, too, since the curriculum had changed. I wailed that I lived 750 miles away now. We compromised. I would write a tuition check for $1,212 for a class I would not have to take.

I was only beginning to understand schoolbiz.

I sometimes think I’d have had a better education if I hadn’t taken any classes at NYU. Michael Kirby said he never read plays and favored “non-matrixed” events involving “compartmented physical effects created by actors and objects;” his projects had more to do with art installations than theatrical events, I think, though he would have said they were a different kind of theatrical event. Richard Schechner thought plays were the enemy. To fight them, he sent actors howling across the stage, often dragging howling spectators, out of some confused notions of what Artaud meant and what the more disciplined Grotowski tried.

Me, I prefer plays with most of the words left in. I got my education at Chelsea, hanging out at rehearsals and meetings and in the greenroom, gabbing with everyone.

Kirby was kind enough to agree to direct my dissertation, since we had little in common intellectually and he couldn’t have found what I was doing stimulating. I liked him, though, and I found him to be fair. He said it didn’t matter that my style was “cutesy journalistic” as long as my research was thorough and accurate. Some months later, he said I was ready to defend the dissertation.

I made sure Schechner was out of the country, on sabbatical. Then I relaxed, not understanding yet that when someone calls something a defense, you ought to have a lawyer.

Ted Hoffman, who liked plays and appreciated my thinking, would have been my dissertation advisor had he not retired by the time I got around to being advised about anything. He took on the advisor role briefly, though, inviting me for coffee the day before to plan a defense strategy.

I half listened, obsessed with strategies of another sort. The impulse for the book had not been so much a desire to document history as to change it. Three zany and brilliant guys, who sometimes called themselves a three-head monster, ran Chelsea. It would take a book—it did take a book—to explain their relationship and the different theories people have for why it went sour. But by all accounts, they were a remarkable team.

Bob Kalfin

Okay, they drove each other nuts, and in the end, Bob Kalfin fired Michael David, who was ready to quit anyhow after Burl Hash walked out. Okay, they didn’t want to work together again. They didn’t even want to talk to each other. No matter. I would give them back to each other, and the American theater would thank me. I would remind them of who they were together, and if that didn’t work, I’d find a way to get them into the same room, and they would remind each other.

I invited them to the defense.

Bob and Burl said they’d come. Michael, who co-founded Dodger Theatricals after his Chelsea years, was busy putting together around 85 Broadway shows and 62 touring companies and had an opening that week. When I stopped by his office for a Pepsi, he looked like he’d been sleeping in the same pair of jeans for a month. But when he said he couldn’t make it, I knew the real reason was the book made him crazy, and he didn’t want to spend a morning with Bob, Burl, a wacky journalist who knew what play they should do for their reunion project, and a dissertation committee. I told him the time and place, should he change his mind.

Chelsea to the Defense

Michael Kirby thought it was fine for me to invite people—the event was public, although in the tradition of scholarly curiosity, usually only those who had to come came. Still, it shocked other committee members when the characters in my book walked into the room. How could they talk about them if they were there? In the academy, I realized later, you discourse about contemporaries behind their backs.

I explained the visitors had let me observe them at work and mumbled something about Brechtian demystification of the scholarly process. “Feel free to say anything,” I told them.

One committee member ventured there were two Bobs in the dissertation, a good guy and a bad guy. Bob rejoined that he wasn’t all good; he was human. Another said some of my stories might be libelous—“this really should go through legal.” A third brought up the serious matter of contractions. Apparently, you cannot say “can’t” in a dissertation. It is not scholarly. It is not appropriate. Nobody said it is not moral, but I had the feeling they were getting there.

Burl Hash

Michael David

Before I knew it, Burl was on his feet, rallying to my defense. “Aww, take a risk!” he implored. Bob was with him. Together, they explained how my style supported the substance and the stories ought to stay because the events really happened and pointed to something larger. They were finishing each other’s sentences! I was so high, I even stopped looking at the door to see if Michael would show, which he didn’t.

The committee asked us all to leave the room while it debated my fate privately, and Bob and Burl abandoned me, taking off for lunch together! All at issue now was the degree, and who cared?

I did, it turned out.

So did the committee, which wanted me to succeed. All anyone asked was that I make the dissertation responsible and respectable and indistinguishable from anybody else’s, after which they would welcome me into the community of scholars.

First to go would be my style. I was writing a Brechtian story with a Candide-like protagonist, and my chapter titles were a cross between placards and 18th-century titles. We agreed I’d substitute Chapter One, Chapter Two, and on for these. I’d take out subtitles and dump clever leads, and I would eliminate contractions.

We went on to correct the substance. My willingness to document some unsavory incidents involving African American actors might make people think I was a racist, they explained. They knew I wasn’t a racist, they assured me, but you can’t be too careful what you write. Other racy anecdotes would go, too. They also suggested I interview a couple of people who weren’t among my original 72 sources, the only advice I took later on, when I revised Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater, the book version.

Tears came as I sat in the room, not because I thought I couldn’t get the degree but because I knew I would. I wondered if conformity of style leads automatically to conformity of thought. I considered that they call it a terminal degree because in the process of getting it, you stop thinking.

In 1988, after I did what I did, the kids called me Dr. Mama for a few days, and we all forgot about it. I taught playwriting for a while in an adult ed program for six dollars an hour, fun because the students were there to learn, not for credentials. A year or so later, I applied for a college teaching position, a few blocks from home, and I felt relieved when I didn’t get it. There are people with the courage and strength to stay centered in an environment that encourages conformity, but after what I did, I wasn’t sure I was one of them.

Like I said, this is not a pretty story.

Afterword

This story first appeared in the September 27, 1993 issue of TheaterWeek magazine, the first in a column I wrote for four years that we called Schoolbiz.

Since I wrote this, I had the opportunity to teach at two schools. I spent one semester as a visiting assistant prof in theater at Albion, a small liberal arts college in Michigan. I had a chance to direct a play and teach modern drama, and though I clashed with the department chair more than once because I didn’t direct the play the one right way, I loved the students, I loved sharing ideas, and I wished I’d actually used my degree to teach. I followed by becoming an adjunct, all that was available to me at the time, in the English department at Eastern Michigan University for the next three years, teaching everything from Shakespeare to Writing the Magazine Article. It was a hoot.

After I wrote about my own trauma in Schoolbiz, I started looking at what was going on in theaters across the country—programs in colleges and conservatories, issues and trends in theater education. Looking over these columns, I find that some are dated, others still resonate with me today. So, I’ll share others with you here, from time to time.

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Spring Awakening

In the last few months, I visited some of the theaters in Southeast and Central Michigan, and what’s going on is unprecedented in this region. Theaters are popping up all over, and many are doing exciting work. I reported some of my findings in the Feb 2011 issue of American Theatre Magazine. No sooner did my story see print than Michigan’s newly anointed Republican governor decided to deal a blow to the emerging theater scene that ought to stop it in its tracks.

With the encouragement of local and national luminaries—film star and local theater producer Jeff Daniels, for instance, and Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom—Michigan has been enjoying the results of a tax incentive program that

Best of Friends

encourages Hollywood teams to set up shop in the state. It’s good for the economy because when film folks come to town, they live in local hotels, eat at local restaurants, buy lumber for their sets and general merchandise for themselves from local vendors. When producers want to save money by leaving their crews at home, they hire Michigan talents, including actors, and create jobs.

Most of the arguments in favor of film tax incentives point out these economic benefits, but the most important benefits hide beneath the bottom line. The chair of the theatre department at the University of Michigan recently wrote an op-ed pointing out that students are given priceless opportunities to develop their craft by participating and observing artists and crews at work. UM’s isn’t the only state university that benefits from this. And for those who need this translated into dollars, imagine the cost to public universities were they to job in film directors and designers to describe what they do, in seminars that are a pale imitation of what students get on location.

There’s more, and this is where it hurts Michigan residents the most: Artists who would have left for the coasts stay in the area because they can get jobs in films to subsidize the work they do in small

It Came from Mars

not-for-profit arts companies, and even in difficult times, these companies are flourishing. I’ve lived in Michigan some 30 years, and the theater in Southeast and Central Michigan has never been better. Never. Michigan is fast becoming a serious cultural center.

I can’t think of a better reason for Michigan’s film tax incentive.

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For up-to-date lists of theaters in the area and current productions, visit www.encoremichigan.com

Photos: Caleb Kruzel and Luna Alexander in the Keith Paul Medelis production of The Spring Awakening Project at The New Theatre Project, photo by Amanda Lyn Jungquist; Alex Leydenfrost and Michelle Mountain in Jeff Daniels’ new comedy, Best of Friends, photo by Danna Segrest ; Joseph Albright, Sandra Birch, Alysia Kolascz and Jacob Hodgson (seated) in Tony Caselli’s production of Joseph Zettelmaier’s It Came From Mars, a co-production of the Performance Network Theatre and the Williamston Theatre. photo by Peter Smith.

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