According to Robert Brustein, the theater should be taken seriously as one of the fine arts, but it should also be considered a means to reflect on our world, times, and culture from a different perspective. However, this presents a great challenge-the masses must come to appreciate the theater as a means of leisure, but also one of learning. If Word Plays tickles your funny bone as well as touches your mind, then Brustein will have achieved his goal. Word Plays, a collection of Brustein's articles, satires, and skits, is his attempt to both entertain and educate about the current political and cultural environment in America. Openly positioning himself as a left-leaning political observer, Brustein's material is wide-ranging and witty. His provocative views on contemporary politics and his ease with a broad range of subjects, from Shakespeare to The Sopranos, makes this an enjoyable, engaging, and reflective volume. The book is divided into three sections. The first is a set of short essays, many of which link political themes to the dramatic arts and others that are purely political commentary. The second includes a series of "dramatic commentaries"-short skits- lampooning contemporary politics and modern American life. The final section consists of "elegies and eulogies" honoring recently deceased icons of the American theater.

Mortal Terror is set in 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot, a terrorist conspiracy to blow up the houses of Parliament. Shakespeare, delicately balancing his allegiances to assure his own survival, is commissioned by King James to write a play to justify his right to the throne. That play is Macbeth. Mortal Terror is the second piece in a trilogy of plays by Robert Brustein about the life of Shakespeare. The trilogy begins with The English Channel and concludes with Th

The Last Will finds William Shakespeare retired at his country home on Stratford after decades of struggle and success in the city of London. In the last stages of a fatal illness, his deteriorating mind obliterates the distinction between fiction and fact, and the playwright begins acting as a character in his own plays. Richard Burbage, leader of Shakespeare's acting company, attempts to persuade him to return to London and to playwriting, as Will wrestles with his suspicions, delusions

Nominee for 2008 Pulitzer Prize. The English Channel examines the murky relationship between great writers and their proclivity to "borrow" ideas and material, tracing Shakespeare's relationship with The Earl of Southampton, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Christopher Marlowe during the turbulent months before Marlowe's death. The English Channe is the first piece in a trilogy of plays by Robert Brustein about the life of Shakespeare. The second installment is

Winter Passages is Robert Brustein's nineteenth book of criticism. It includes his considerations of culture and politics over the past four years of American life, demonstrating how the imperfections of the government and economy have plunged the country into an artistic winter in which there is a troubling lack of support for, and understanding of, America's arts and artists. In a section on "Cultural Passages," Brustein includes chapters on compromised theatre institutions, auteur productions, the American musical, generational idiosyncrasies, and China's growing theatre culture, which contrasts with American culture. The second section, "Dramatic Passages," addresses twenty-seven great playwrights from Aeschylus to August Wilson and demonstrates how they have influenced our sense of history and human character. In "Laudatory Passages," Brustein discusses great American artists, living and dead, who continue to influence our sense of self as a nation and as individuals. Brustein concludes that we will be judged, like all cultures, by the quality of our arts and artists, and by our willingness to allow their insights to influence our behavior.

Winter Passages is Robert Brustein's nineteenth book of criticism. It includes his considerations of culture and politics over the past four years of American life, demonstrating how the imperfections of the government and economy have plunged the country into an artistic winter in which there is a troubling lack of support for, and understanding of, America's arts and artists.

In a section on "Cultural Passages," Brustein includes chapters on compromised theatre institutions, auteur productions, the American musical, generational idiosyncrasies, and China's growing theatre culture, which contrasts with American culture. The second section, "Dramatic Passages," addresses twenty-seven great playwrights from Aeschylus to August Wilson and demonstrates how they have influenced our sense of history and human character.

In "Laudatory Passages," Brustein discusses great American artists, living and dead, who continue to influence our sense of self as a nation and as individuals. Brustein concludes that we will be judged, like all cultures, by the quality of our arts and artists, and by our willingness to allow their insights to influence our behavior.

A provocative look at Shakespeare in his age by one of our most influential theater figures This book is a masterful and engaging exploration of both Shakespeare's works and his age. Concentrating on six recurring prejudices in Shakespeare's plays-such as misogyny, elitism, distrust of effeminacy, and racism-Robert Brustein examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries treated them. More than simply a thematic study, the book reveals a playwright constantly exploiting and exploring his own personal stances. These prejudices, Brustein finds, are not unchanging; over time they vary in intensity and treatment. Shakespeare is an artist who invariably reflects the predilections of his age and yet almost always manages to transcend them. Brustein considers the whole of Shakespeare's plays, from the early histories to the later romances, though he gives special attention to Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and The Tempest. Drawing comparisons to plays by Marlowe, Middleton, and Marston, Brustein investigates how Shakespeare's contemporaries were preoccupied with similar themes and how these different artists treated the current prejudices in their own ways. Rather than confining Shakespeare to his age, this book has the wonderful quality of illuminating both what he shared with his time and what is unique about his approach.

According to Robert Brustein, the theater should be taken seriously as one of the fine arts, but it should also be considered a means to reflect on our world, times, and culture from a different perspective. However, this presents a great challenge-the masses must come to appreciate the theater as a means of leisure, but also one of learning. If Word Plays tickles your funny bone as well as touches your mind, then Brustein will have achieved his goal. Word Plays, a collection of Brustein's articles, satires, and skits, is his attempt to both entertain and educate about the current political and cultural environment in America. Openly positioning himself as a left-leaning political observer, Brustein's material is wide-ranging and witty. His provocative views on contemporary politics and his ease with a broad range of subjects, from Shakespeare to The Sopranos, makes this an enjoyable, engaging, and reflective volume. The book is divided into three sections. The first is a set of short essays, many of which link political themes to the dramatic arts and others that are purely political commentary. The second includes a series of "dramatic commentaries"-short skits- lampooning contemporary politics and modern American life. The final section consists of "elegies and eulogies" honoring recently deceased icons of the American theater.

The Federal Theatre Project, a 1930s relief project of the Roosevelt administration, brought more theater to more people in every corner of America that at any time in U.S. history. The Project had units in every region of the country, including groundbreaking African American troupes, and staged productions from daring dramas like "The Voodoo Macbeth," "Waiting for Lefty," and "The Cradle Will Rock "to musicals, vaudeville, and puppet shows. It was canceled in a firestorm of controversy that gave birth to the damning question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?"
This book documents that vibrant, colorful, politically explosive time, which gave rise to bitter debates about the role of government in American art and culture. It includes interviews with such Federal Theatre actors, playwrights, directors, designers, producers, and dancers as Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, Jules Dassin, Katherine Dunham, Rosetta Lenoire, John Houseman, and many others.
"Voices from the Federal Theatre" is a tie-in with the public televison special "Who Killed the Federal Theatre?" hosted by Judd Hirsch and coproduced by Schwartz with the Educational Film Center.

Wide-ranging, discerning essays and reviews in which Mr. Brustein finds that the theatre has been quietly reinventing the nature of its art.

Winner of Five Obies, Now Back In Print After Fifteen Years, A Stage Adaptation of Classic Stories By Hawthorne and Melville

In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno--the most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. / England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno, take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century.

The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno, the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge."

A major figure in the world of theatre as critic, playwright, scholar, teacher, director, actor, and producer, Robert Brustein offers a unique perspective on the American stage and its artists. In this wise, witty, and wide-ranging collection of recent writings, Brustein examines crucial issues relating to theatre in the post-9/11 years, analyzing specific plays, emerging and established performers, and theatrical production throughout the world. Brustein relates our theatre to our society in a manner that reminds us why the performing arts matter. Millennial Stages records Brustein's thinking on the important issues 'roiling the national soul' at the start of the twenty-first century. His opening section explores the connections between theatre and society, theatre and politics, and theatre and religion, and it is followed by reviews of such landmark productions as The Producers and Spamelot, Long Day's Journey into Night and King Lear. In his final section, Brustein reflects on people and places of importance in the world of theatre today, including Marlon Brando and Arthur Miller and Australia and South Africa.

The founder and director of the Yale Repertory theatre, as well as Harvard's American Repertory theatre, and a drama critic for more than thirty years, Robert Brustein is a living legend in theatrical circles. Letters to a Young Actor not only inspires the multitudes of struggling dramatists out pounding the pavement, but also reinvigorates the very state of the art of acting itself.

Using his extraordinary grasp of the theatre, Robert Brustein, Dean of the Yale Drama School and prize-winning critic, examines campus turmoil, radicalism versus liberalism, the fate of the free university, and the new revolutionary life style. Brustein sees American society as profoundly decadent, and those radicals from whom creative and rational alternatives should come as being increasingly dominated by sentimentality and false emotionalism. His observations are often controversial, always timely and interesting.

By far Strindberg's most aggressive work, The Father is a feverish nightmare of the struggle he saw between defiant masculinity and the "treacherous weakness" of woman. No matter how paranoid he may seem on the surface, Strindberg manages to anticipate most of the issues arousing women today, particularly the idea that marriage is motivated by politics as much as by romance. The prize in the war between the Captain and Laura is their daughter Bertha, and what must be resolved is which of her parents will determine her future.

Despite its domestic setting, The Father is a large-scale heroic drama, with two mighty opponents. "There are large forces at work here, which rattle the walls of the bourgeois drawing room, " Robert Brustein writes in his introduction. "And the unconscious strains of paranoia, hallucination, even dementia, associated with Expressionist drama, are never too far from the surface."

Mr. Brustein's adaptation takes account of modern feminist sensibilities without diminishing The Father's relentless power and furious conclusion.

In a new edition of this now-classic work, Robert Brustein argues that the roots of the modern theatre may be found in the soil of rebellion cultivated by eight outstanding playwrights: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O'Neill, and Genet. Focusing on each of them in turn, Mr. Brustein considers the nature of their revolt, the methods employed in their plays, their influences on the modern drama, and the playwrights themselves. "One of the standard and decisive books on the modern theater.... It shows us the men behind the works,... what they wanted to write about and the private hell within each of them which led to the enduring works we continue to treasure."-New York Times Book Review. "The best single collection of essays I know of on modern drama... remarkably fine and sensitive pieces of criticism. "-Alvin,Kernan, Yale Review.

The theatre as mirror of our peculiar politics - this is the theme of Robert Brustein's engaging new collection of writings. In essays, reviews, and profiles, Mr. Brustein uses the prism of the American theatre to explore the motivating impulses behind rampant political correctness and to assess government efforts to regulate the arts. His complaint that the critical function of drama is now to arouse the remorse of a guilty audience is brilliantly illustrated.

No theatre critic in America is more informed by ideas than Robert Brustein, and no critic does a better job of relating theatre to the larger culture. In this new collection of essays, reviews, and profiles (some of them appearing here for the first time), Mr. Brustein uses the prism of the American theatre to explore the motivating impulses behind rampant political correctness. "Art and politics belong in separate compartments," he writes. "Creative activity is almost invariably diminished when it is politicized." He laments the prevailing belief that the critical function of drama is to arouse the guilt of its audience; he abhors the efforts of multiculturalists to discredit other groups in order to validate their own existence. Ranging widely over the American cultural landscape, Mr. Brustein considers government efforts to regulate the arts; the rosy retrospectives of American radicalism; and the undue influence of the New York Times, and offers his intelligent and clear-eyed assessments of the theatre's productions and people that have been notable and sometimes notorious over recent years. As always, he is both a pleasure to read and a cultural education."