Man with a Mission
BERMEL, ALBERT
Man with a Mission The Culture Watch: Essays on Theater and Society, 1969-1974 By Robert Brustein Knopf. 197 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, associate professor of theater,...
...She made an impact all right, but her much-reprinted essays on, for example, Macbeth and The Wild Duck take many a beating for wrongheadedness, if not outright stupidity...
...he advances on them...
...High culture has to be actively sought out and won...
...Like the apostles he must preach, and people begin to say of him what Shaw's Dauphin says of Joan: "If only she would keep quiet, or go home...
...Peering too intently into the past, moreover, may create impossible and inappropriate longings that cramp our appreciation of new forms...
...Harold Clurman's reviews have "grown fatigued and his judgments flaccid.' John Simon's crusade "to preserve high standards has become vitiated by his uncontrolled savagery, his punning style, his peculiar prejudices, his personal attacks on the physical appearance of actors, and his obsessive campaign against real or imagined homosexuality on the stage...
...I want to encourage undergraduates to read and enjoy Robert Brustein and the tragedies that he and I prize...
...Yet if "The Culture Watch" sounds like an editorial conceit, it does remind us that the author, more than any other specialized critic today, unhesitatingly handles his chosen art form as a synecdoche for cultural activity in general...
...But it is hard to do, and getting harder all the time...
...This tragic sense he defines as "the capacity to live without salvation, to accept the hard consequences of being human," for "even in the most perfect [sic] society devised by men, there will always be loss of youth, incertitude and death...
...But it can be predicted, and prophecy inevitably calls for the dismantling of some old standards to give new ideas room to breathe...
...Pop songs and rock and country music are childish...
...Schools and colleges have a lot to answer for in this...
...Teachers treat what we call high culture as rote-learning, examination fodder and other forms of sadism when it could more easily make for excitement, delight and feelings of accomplishment and fulfillment...
...Zola foresaw the advent of Naturalism...
...Brustein, too, has been a force for improvement in the theater, getting his formidable presence behind the early efforts of the Living and Open Theaters, Jack Gelber, Sam Shep-ard, and other experimenters, although he has sometimes professed himself let down by their failure to support his expectations...
...An eventual ideal might be a conversion of the populace into a nation of critics...
...He does the same thing in putting Mary McCarthy on his list of strong vanished critics...
...At Yale he has commissioned worthwhile work from certain actors, directors and writers he had admired as a critic...
...We are suffering from soul-pollution, large-scale arrested development...
...They will have neither the background to understand his references nor the patience to get through his opening paragraphs...
...He takes himself as seriously as ever, aiming to irritate and galvanize, sharpening his alternating anger and disgust with wit and (for the most part) meticulously wrought sentences...
...Eric Bentley redirected our attention to a string of neglected or misunderstood playwrights from Strind-berg to Pirandello, and waged what looked for a time like a one-man campaign on behalf of Brecht...
...they recede...
...Commercial culture homes in on the eight-year-old in every one...
...For possibly we are not a tragic but a farcical nation, as our present and last administrations in Washington suggest...
...indeed, until we ourselves can learn to be tragic men, our lives will be disappointed, delusionary, confused...
...Broadway musicals and plays are childish...
...By forcing Antigone, say, to play Lynette Fromme they inadvertently widen the chasm between Sophocles' world and today's...
...It is accessible to the point of asphyxiation...
...The chance of a university "creating out of inherited and invented dramatic materials an art significant for our time" has a powerful appeal...
...Maybe Brustein will hammer the combined Yale enterprise into a shape that conforms with, or even clinches, the positive part of his mission...
...Shaw, compelling the future to happen, championed the innovations of Wagner, Ibsen and himself...
...Television is childish...
...Brustein's mission must have governed the individual pieces from the time they were written, for it ties together such apparently disparate items as his reports on the English theater during his year as critic for the Observer in London, a couple of addresses to students at Yale, where he is both dean of the drama school and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, and some state-of-the-theater "think pieces" that must have made readers of the Sunday New York Times sit up straight in their hammocks...
...In lamenting the disappearance of tough critics, he lets fly some justified kicks at contemporary rivals...
...Probably a legion of prophets at least as dedicated as Robert Brustein is to blasting whatever cheapens and falsifies experience, whatever glorifies indolent "fun...
...Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, associate professor of theater, Lehman College A critic who does not quite take himself seriously may win tolerance, admiration, perhaps affection...
...If Brustein is right, we now await the coming of the supreme tragedian who can awaken our tragic sense, or, strictly speaking so as to pay due meed to Eugene O'Neill, reawaken it...
...Until our theatre can learn to absorb the tragic sense, it will always be subject to fads, cults and fashion," Brustein wrote in 1969...
...Nonetheless, the title of this book seems misleading...
...Here Brustein himself may be of two minds: He includes in his book an analogy, provoked by a trip to Greece in 1973, between Thebes and Watergate, between the tragic hybris of Oedipus and that of Nixon, whereas in 1974, in the revue Watergate Classics at Yale, he wrote and played the part of a bumbling pretender called Oedipus Nix...
...What would it take to wither shlock culture in America...
...censorship and such unearned freedoms as the right to display frontal nudity and under-rehearsed copulation...
...Meanwhile, far off on the horizon stand sturdy, ancient, richly fruited palms...
...Our tragedy is a compound of Vietnam, of deteriorating cities, of poverty and suffering and racial strife, of drug abuse and violence, of political assassination—and, further back, a heritage of the original sin of our country, the institution of slavery...
...Of course, we do not go to Brustein for upbeat sentiments, but for the negative part of his mission, and it is a pleasure to see how energetically he lights into mercantilism in the arts and the media, into its causes (the lust for fame), its puppets-cum-victims (jerry-built personalities like Norman Mailer's), its symbols (Daniel Boorstin's "pseudo-events,' which Brustein calls "news theater...
...He may get to be an accepted feature of the artistic landscape he works on...
...The Yale Rep, his child by adoption and transformation, does superior stagings...
...Which may be another way of saying I find Brustein persuasively apostolic, not least when I differ with him...
...Three years later, he found that America "is now in agony as a result of its past, and the afflictions of our nation are directly traceable to the errors and crimes of our history...
...Still, I believe it fair to say that he has not offered wholehearted, sustained allegiance to any movement or dramatist, as earlier critics and producers emphatically did...
...They are the ghost of Tragedy Past, tokens of what we have to live up to if we insist on talking about an art or a culture of our time...
...On the other hand, in maintaining that "Stanley Kauffmann writes too irregularly to have much impact," Brustein reveals a disquieting tendency to assess artists and critics by their notoriety or infamy, rather than by their discernment...
...Robert Brustein has made it clear from the start of his critical career that he has prophetic ambitions...
...the difference between American and British acting styles...
...the drama school has midwived a venturesome, student-run magazine, yale/theatre...
...More important, however, is Brustein's mission...
...Brustein picks a sure path across acres of other theatrical ground, too, a lot of it thorny and overgrown with commentaries: the role of the university in teaching and promoting drama...
...So are best-sellers, and worst-sellers, and reviews of them...
...As a round-up of material already published, the book's parts cohere surprisingly well...
...Most movies are childish...
...Or they modernize high culture's implications too blatantly, so that it becomes the more remote and unapproachable...
...I much prefer The Culture Watch to the two previous collections, The Third Theater (1969) and Revolution as Theater (1971), wherein Brustein kept at the younger generation for first, sharing his distaste for the older generation's theater, and second, coming up with alternatives he had not okayed and initialed ahead of time...
...Does this ideal stand at least as distant from us on the horizon of the future as Greek tragedy does on the horizon of the past...
...The junk, by contrast, is everywhere...
...and what he calls "cultural schizophrenia," the twin urge to be respected as an artist and rich...
...As a result, I believe, we are becoming, perhaps without quite knowing it yet, a truly tragic nation...
...I hate to think so...
...As time passes, though, he will decline into a minor stylist or a benign opinion-mongerer, standing for little and counting for nothing...
...In such a condition, we would have come close to meeting what Matthew Arnold called "the need in man for conduct and the need in him for beauty...
...Yet what if the artist we are awaiting proves to be Aristophanes or Plautus rather than Sophocles or Seneca, The Farceur instead of The Tragedian—will Brustein still recognize him (her...
...neither can it be reinvoked, except to produce pale copies of the originals...
...He expends a great deal of indignation on commercial hypocrisy and pretense, though I kept wishing he would hit out more strenuously at the broadest and, to me at least, most tormenting aspect of commercial culture, its pervasiveness, its numbing availability...
...But the rare critic who persists in taking himself seriously sooner or later comes upon his mission, which carries him beyond reviewing and into prophecy...
...In The Culture Watch, his fourth collection of essays, his missionary fervor burns unabated...
...Young people regard its in-escapability as a sign that it is democratic, art for the masses, the people's choice rather than the people's curse...
...Bru-stein's assortment of reviews and longer writings deals almost exclusively with theater, not with film, novels, dance, music, sport, poetry, macrame, architecture, chess, painting, or graffiti, and is more in line with the subtitle...
...Art, as we constantly recall, cannot be legislated...
...Within about 10 years, many young people won't have a glimmering of what he is talking about...
...in the guise of "relaxation" it depletes people, denying them the opportunity to grow up or be grown up...
...All strength to him...
...Brustein, in any case, is going it alone and undeterred...
...Looking about mournfully in the theatrical wilderness, he notices everywhere the thickets of commercial weed that spring up, die and replace themselves with ever more luxuriant, more garish growths...
...But I doubt that anything resembling old tragedy will be one of the vital ingredients, and I am convinced that Brustein will have to ally his theater with some budding artistic cause before it can acquire a memorable identity...
...But if we blame the teachers (of whom I am one) too much as they try to cope with their students' passivity, we overlook the real offenders, the concocters and vendors of the mindless, soul-bleeding commercial trash...
...They wave and beckon...
...He becomes filled with the Word...
Vol. 58 • December 1975 • No. 24
