Armageddon in Boston

An artistic director recalls how a iconoclastic theatre took root in recalcitrant soil

By Robert Brustein

THE FIRST SEASON

On March 21, 1980, American Repertory Theatre opened A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its initial production at the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. It was the first day of spring, and it rained.

It had been raining on the arts for some time during the previous decade, with the major cloudbursts still to come. First had come a precipitous decline in support for operating expenses on the part of the major private foundations (the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation being a notable exception) with most of their money going to multicultural projects and the recruitment of minority audiences. Then, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that might have been expected to take up the slack, was instead being steadily eroded by a hostile legislature. Indeed, following the scandals over the Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano exhibits, Congress would later try to obliterate this agency altogether. And even some of those who supported a strong culture were grumbling about its domination by “dead white European males,” reflecting a growing conviction that America needed to turn its support to “nontraditional artists” of previously ignored racial, ethnic and sexual identities.

In the center of this maelstrom, American Repertory Theatre was born—American in its energies, European in its traditions, Modernist in its style and unashamedly devoted to the highest standards of advanced theatrical art. ART, to use the cheeky acronym by which our theatre was quickly known, was an integrated company of seventy actors, directors, designers, administrators and technicians that had decamped from Yale Repertory Theatre in 1979 after 13 seasons in New Haven, Conn. The move was a result of a celebrated dustup I had with the new Yale University president, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, a commotion that ended my long tenure as dean of the Yale School of Drama and founding artistic director of Yale Rep.

Whatever the unpleasant controversy attending my departure, we were now happily ensconced in new headquarters in Cambridge. Through the dedicated preparation of many good people, under the careful and tireless supervision of managing director Robert Orchard, we had accomplished what before had seemed unlikely if not impossible—the establishment of a not-for-profit resident theatre with a permanent company of actors in an area traditionally disinclined to support subsidized theatre. Over the years, many ambitious and even distinguished companies with historic names like Theatre on the Green (Group 20), the Massachusetts Repertory Company, the Cambridge Theatre Company, the Brattle Theatre Company and David Wheeler’s Boston Theatre Company, among others, had come and gone in the Boston area, leading the Boston Phoenix critic Carolyn Clay to quip “Boston is to first-rate regional repertory what the Bermuda Triangle is to small craft.” Still, here we were, the only large professional theatre in town, in the process of launching a rather sizable boat into the Bermuda Triangle—not only a season of classical and new plays, but the first credit courses in drama in Harvard history.

Two months before leaving New Haven for Cambridge, my first wife, Norma had died, leaving me alone with my 15-year-old son, Danny. But despite my personal problems, and the difficulty of the transition to a new city, a new community and a new culture, it was a benevolent time. We had the endorsement of Harvard’s Derek Bok, president of the university, and Henry Rosovsky, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We had been welcomed with considerable enthusiasm by the press, notably the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe, which ran an editorial celebrating our arrival. The major theatre critics, Elliot Norton and Kevin Kelly, were not disguising their pleasure over our presence in town. Mayor Kevin White had organized a huge party in our honor at the Parkman House. And in our very first season, before having staged a single play, we had amassed 13,000 subscribers, whereas in New Haven, at the height of our popularity, we had barely managed to attract 6,000. ART no doubt derived some luster from its novelty value and from all those media-soaked years at Yale. But we were also floating on the success of a tour the previous season to the Loeb Drama Center with two extremely well-received shows: Andrei Serban’s playful production of Sganarelle (consisting of four short Molière farces that portrayed one of his most famous characters at different stages of his life) and Walt Jones’s nostalgic The 1940’s Radio Hour featuring some of the most appealing songs of the period. As I noted in my 1981 account of the Yale years, Making Scenes, Cambridge had received our work like parched earth soaking up rain.

Our strategy in the initial season was to lead from strength without sacrificing our experimental thrust. We also hoped the opening productions would help define our artistic identity. Alvin Epstein’s staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Henry Purcell’s exquisite music from The Faerie Queene expertly played by the Banchetto Musicale, had already proven itself twice in New Haven as a signature piece of the company. It would not only illustrate our commitment to renovating classical plays, it would also demonstrate how a literary text could be enhanced by musical accompaniment. So would another season offering, the American premiere of the Elisabeth Hauptmann–Bertolt Brecht–Kurt Weill collaboration on Happy End, one of the musical triumphs of our years at Yale. In addition to featuring plays from our past repertoire, the first season was designed to demonstrate our devotion to young American playwriting with the professional premiere of a play by one of our former Yale playwriting students (Mark Leib’s Terry by Terry). And, finally, we hoped to emphasize our interest in talented young directors by providing 21-year-old Peter Sellars with his professional stage debut, before he had even graduated from Harvard. Sellars was commissioned to direct and co-adapt (with our Russian-speaking business manager) Nikolai Gogol’s famous 19th-century farce, The Inspector General.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was, if anything, better received in Cambridge than it had been in New Haven. Boston is a music-loving town, and the combination of Purcell’s resonating arias and choruses, Shakespeare’s soaring verse and Epstein’s inventive direction, proved to be irresistible. The production was performed by a gifted young company of actors and designers, most of them, like Mark Linn-Baker in the role of Puck and Marianne Owen playing Hermia, recent graduates of the Yale School of Drama. They were led by their former teachers, the dancer-actor Carmen de Lavallade as a sinuous Titania and the irrepressible Englishman Jeremy Geidt as Quince. New company members such as John Bottoms playing Bottom and Max Wright playing Flute were also prominent in the cast. And the whole event was performed on a gorgeous wooden scoop, designed by one of our graduated designers, Anthony Straiges, backed by a huge shimmering moon. Though the staging caused a little grumbling about what was perceived by some to be deviations from established traditions, the general refrain was ecstatic—letters and calls testifying to how happy everyone was that we were there.

The press response was equally positive, the one sour note being about my own performance as Theseus. I had undertaken the role partly to save a salary (I was already under Equity contract and we could not afford another Equity actor) and partly as a symbolic way of welcoming our new public to the theatre in the robes of the Duke. The symbolism seemed lost on the critics, and so was my performance. No doubt I wasn’t much good in the part, my attention that first season being deflected by others matters than rehearsals. When we reprised the production the following season at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, where WGBH videotaped it for national television, I exercised an artistic director’s discretion and replaced myself with another actor.

Terry by Terry played in rotating repertory with Midsummer and featured some of the same performers. The author, Mark Leib, a graduate both of Harvard University and of the Yale Drama School, provided a highly literate evening of two one-act plays about the same character, first as a child who refuses to speak (Mark Linn-Baker again), then as a blocked writer caught in a raging Strindbergian relationship (Robertson Dean). Despite some walkouts during previews, the play was tolerated by our audiences and hailed by most of the reviewers (especially the Harvard Crimson) as the work of a very promising new talent.

Happy End, on the other hand, was nowhere near as successful in Cambridge as it had been in New Haven. It was a musical featuring some of Weill’s most appealing songs, Brecht’s gritty lyrics and a not very good book by Brecht’s mistress Elisabeth Hauptmann, partly derived from Shaw’s Major Barbara, about a group of inept Chicago gangsters colliding with the Salvation Army. But instead of treating it as a flawed but neglected work, virtually every reviewer felt compelled to tell us that Happy End was inferior to The Threepenny Opera. Our production, to be sure, was a less integrated performance than it had been in New Haven. But then very few of our Brecht offerings, with the later exception of The Threepenny Opera, were destined to attract large audiences or positive reviews in the Boston area—in marked contrast to New Haven where we were considered an American-style Berliner Ensemble, exploring the whole Brecht-Weill canon, including the monumental opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

At Yale, Brecht’s caustic ironies and mordant world view, not to mention Weill’s tinny syncopated rhythms, were keystones of our style. In Cambridge—a Tory stronghold during the Revolutionary War and just as infatuated with English culture two centuries later—the favorite playwrights were (and remain) Shaw and Tom Stoppard, not Brecht or Frank Wedekind or Georg Büchner or Heiner Müller, or any of the other avant-garde Germans I would be force-feeding audiences in succeeding years. This was not too surprising. New York didn’t feature a successful production of The Threepenny Opera until 25 years after it was written.

It was, however, our final production of the season, Sellars’s version of The Inspector General, that caused what might be described as a bit of a commotion. Although he always took great liberties with the classics, even as an undergraduate, Sellars was then, and has remained, a genuine favorite of the Harvard community, as well as of the Boston Globe. Nevertheless, at the first preview 200 people walked out during the first act. With Max Wright playing the mayor, Jeremy Geidt playing Osip and Mark Linn-Baker as Khlestakov, we had a fine cast stimulated by a strong if eccentric directorial concept. But the professional company chafed a bit over the inexperience of this young director, who was hitherto accustomed to working with undergraduates and puppets, and the reviews were mixed. Some critics chafed at the literal translation that Sellars had requested and helped create in order to simulate Gogol’s linguistic peculiarities, which yielded such nuggets as “I have outlived my own mind.” Some were turned off by what they perceived to be Sellars’s self-conscious and irrelevant effects, notably a huge pineapple residing on stage for no other reason than the fact that pineapple in Russian was a pun on one of Gogol’s recurrent words. Elliot Norton, particularly unhappy at the sight of what he took to be a huge head of Stalin passing upstage, felt compelled to remind us that Gogol had died a hundred years before the Soviet dictator was born. By contrast, Kevin Kelly of the Globe was won over by the show, and the undergraduate community was in ecstasy. But we were already getting a hint of the kind of controversy that would color our future work in Cambridge.

The debate was over the proper role of a professional theatre in an academic community. Our earliest productions were already arousing suspicions that we were disdainful of tradition and dedicated to corrupting the classics. ART was functioning in a community with dozens of distinguished educational institutions, many of whose members (reflecting the narrowness of watchdog agencies like L’Académie française) expected us to conform to certain academic rules and regulations. The majority of the professoriate were dedicated to preserving the past. We were more concerned with bringing the past into the present and thereby creating a theatre of the future. It was a timeworn conflict between the ancients and the moderns (now called theorists and practitioners) that neither side would ever resolve. Furthermore, ART was sharing the Loeb Drama Center with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, a well-entrenched undergraduate theatre society, which resented our coming because we had reduced the club’s time on the main stage from 18 weeks to 12. Although the HRDC had unlimited access to the smaller experimental theatre and rarely seemed comfortable on the more professional main stage, the issue was territorial. The undergraduates felt themselves expelled from their own theatre space, while our company was unhappy about having to abandon the Loeb for six key weeks in the fall and six in the spring with a corresponding loss in precious income.

Worse, we had just festooned the handsome, if institutional, exterior of the building with colorful banners, designed by Louis Bakanowsky, a Harvard professor of architecture and visual and environmental studies who was also a member of Benjamin Thompson’s celebrated Cambridge Seven Associates, which provided the design for Boston’s Faneuil Hall. This didn’t arouse quite the level of outrage I had provoked at Yale when we painted the green room red. Indeed, the design had been approved by Hugh Stubbins, the original architect of the Loeb. But although it was hardly an arbitrary move, it provoked the neighbors who raised the usual complaints you hear whenever anything changes on Brattle Street. It also annoyed John Loeb, the building’s chief donor, enough to remind us that the space he had helped endow for undergraduates was meant to be a “drama center,” not a theatre, and therefore should be free of decoration. It was a distinction that puzzled us at the time, though it seemed compelling enough to Mr. Loeb. His son John Jr. even suggested that the family might be more inclined to help ART if the offending banners were removed.

I demurred, explaining that we were trying to attract the paying public to living architecture, not to a mausoleum. I have since come to understand that this was precisely the problem. What Loeb was actually protesting was the professionalization of his building. An extracurricular academic space dedicated to amateur production and undergraduate workshops was being turned into a full-fledged professional theatre with a busy box office, fundraising appeals, subscription drives, advertising and, yes, attention-getting banners. Loeb eventually grew more friendly to us, and even provided scholarship money later (for a Harvard graduate) when we started a training institution. But I don’t think he ever really approved of our presence on campus performing a season of plays.

Neither for that matter did many members of the university community. During its 350-year history, Harvard had steadfastly refused to approve what it called “technical” or “vocational” courses in the arts (theoretical courses in the arts were of course permitted). It was, as a matter of fact, this resistance to practical theatre that led George Pierce Baker to abandon Harvard and move to Yale. While teaching his celebrated English 47 playwriting course to Harvard students that included Eugene O’Neill, Sidney Howard and Philip Barry, Baker had requested a space in which to stage their plays. This was rudely denied (“We don’t teach people how to butcher meat either,” one of his Harvard colleagues muttered). After a member of the Harkness family offered the university a million dollars to build a suitable space for Baker—and Harvard uncharacteristically turned down the bequest—Baker took the money to New Haven and founded the Yale University department of drama.

After serving as dean of that school for 13 years, I had completed Baker’s circuit and returned the idea to Harvard. There I was to face some of the same resistance that had plagued my predecessor 50 years earlier—in kind, not in intensity. ART never entirely won the hearts of the Harvard faculty, but the momentum behind our arrival made it relatively easy in a short period of time for us to introduce practical credit courses in theatre, closely monitored by a faculty group called the committee on dramatics. The undergraduate courses (in acting, directing, design, dramaturgy, criticism and the like) were deemed acceptable as long as they conformed to what were called the “Bakanowsky guidelines” (named after committee member Lou Bakanowsky, the same genial professor who had designed our banners). Those “guidelines” essentially called for a reading list and a component of theory and history, easy enough to supply. But while we were empowered to offer a “Program in Drama” for undergraduates, we never managed to pass a drama major or even a drama concentration through the various Harvard committees. As for the graduate school in theatre that I had proposed when we first negotiated our contract, this was peremptorily rejected on the grounds that Harvard didn’t even have an undergraduate drama major. We would not develop our training program until after five years had passed, and we had discovered the secret codes and nomenclatures required to pull the Harvard behemoth around by its graying whiskers.

We were learning about the enduring power of tradition, about how ivy has the power to crumble stone. Harvard had been founded by some of the same Puritans who had colonized Boston, fleeing England following the restoration of the Stuart kings. One of Oliver Cromwell’s first official acts, during the Puritan Interregnum, was to shut down all the theatres and make production of plays illegal. And in true Cromwellian fashion, the Reverend Increase Mather, pastor at North Church in Boston, thundered that “The Natural Effects of Stage-Plays have been very pernicious…. Multitudes, especially of Young Persons, have thereby been Corrupted and Everlastingly Ruined.” In Cromwell’s time, the only way plays could be performed was if they included music and could be identified as “operas.” Clearly, music was sacred for the Puritans, while theatre was profane, being associated with harlots, orange girls, erotic behavior and (as a result of boys playing women’s parts) transvestism, an act expressly condemned in the Book of Solomon. I suspect that explains why Boston musical institutions have always been able to attract the funding and support that elude Boston theatre.

Most support for the arts in the area, however, came from private philanthropists. Even the Boston Symphony Orchestra had trouble raising money from private foundations or local corporations. There is, as a matter of fact, not a single arts funding agency exclusively in the entire Boston area and local corporate philanthropy has always been stingy and grudging. Boston banks and insurance companies make gifts ranging from $500 to $5000 to arts institutions with budgets ranging anywhere from $500,000 to $50 million. Boston is home to more arts organizations per capita than other city, including New York, Chicago and San Francisco. But the city is also unique in its niggardly government funding and its low level of foundation support (the city gives less that $1 million a year to arts and culture, ranking it 48th among the nation’s 50 largest cities). That was why some national foundations had initially urged us to forget about Boston and move to Chicago. After almost a quarter of a century in residence, ART is still not able to attract more than $40,000 in local corporate support. The area almost seems to pride itself on being last among cities of its size for giving in the arts, pointing to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra as evidence that Boston remains the “Athens of America,” for all its Yankee thriftiness.

And the state of Massachusetts has not been much better. Compared to arts agencies in New York, Illinois, California and elsewhere, the Massachusetts Cultural Council has been notoriously underfunded, except for one glorious period in the ’80s when, under the leadership of Anne Hawley, it grew in size and ambition to become second only to the New York State Council on the Arts in its enterprise and funding. Alas, it wasn’t long before the legislature slashed 62 percent from that budget, and Hawley, dispirited, left her post to become the leader of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The office of mayor Kevin White had a cultural department, but it was woefully underfunded as well. And while Harvard gave a subvention to the Loeb Drama Center for supervising undergraduate theatre, money that became of growing importance to us, the figure was well below the subsidy that Yale University gave to the School of Drama and Repertory Theatre. Derek Bok did not seem to have the financial autonomy at Harvard that Kingman Brewster enjoyed at Yale. Over the years, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science subvention would rise by inflationary increments, and in time the university would prove more generous in its support of ART. But it was very clear in the early years that my chief daily task was going to be the relentless pursuit of cultivated people with large pockets.

This unreliable climate threatened to make us considerably more dependent on the box office and the media than we ever were at Yale. It was also to have a sobering effect on the scale of our civic ambitions.

Soon after arriving in Cambridge, Rob Orchard and I got the idea that Boston could use a free outdoor theatre, similar to Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, and we believed that ART was ideally suited to provide it. Admittedly, we were possessed by motives other than civic virtue. From a fundraising perspective, we wanted to demonstrate that ART was not just a Harvard plaything but a resource for the entire city. From an image standpoint, we wanted to be perceived as native citizens rather than as carpetbaggers from another city. And from a budgetary point of view, staging the first play of every new season in the summer under the auspices of the city could help reduce production costs when we brought it to Cambridge in the fall. The price tag—a modest $20,000—would not only cover actors salaries during the summer but help shorten rehearsal time in the fall. I pitched the idea to Kathy Kane, the mayor’s cultural commissioner, who was so enthusiastic that she quickly organized a benefit to foot the bill.

The benefit—a performance of A Chorus Line—drew only 65 people and lost $2,000, reflecting Boston’s traditional indifference to new artistic ventures. Nevertheless, we were encouraged to proceed with our plans. Tremendously excited by the thought of a new cultural initiative in Boston, we started rehearsing Andrei Belgrader’s production of As You Like It for a two-week performance in the courtyard of Government Center. We didn’t have a Rosalind in our resident company so, after auditions in New York, we eventually cast a young actress from Tennessee named Cherry Jones, who seemed to have exactly the right kind of twinkle, mischief and wholesomeness for the part. She was to remain a crucial member of ART for the next 12 years, returning thereafter on an irregular basis to take parts with the company.

As You Like It opened in August to an audience of 2,000 cheering people. This charming pastoral comedy about love in the woods was accompanied by police sirens and low-flying planes while our actors had to battle wind, dust, rain and heat. Nevertheless, there was never an empty seat throughout the entire summer run. It drew poor reviews both from Kelly and Norton, which puzzled us. The production had been a rousing success in New Haven, with its Rumanian goofiness, its Arcadian charm and its ingenious use of miniaturized puppets in the forest scenes (actors were also employed to play the trees). But in Boston there was one visual effect that clearly annoyed a lot of people, including the critics. In the last scene of the play, when Hymen descends to bless the various couples, the actress playing the part was wearing a head dress consisting of female breasts and male sexual organs.

It didn’t seem an inappropriate item of clothing considering that Hymen was the Goddess of Marriage. But during the summer, and later in the fall when we opened the show in Cambridge, we received a number of protests from audience members, along with a warning from the head of the committee on dramatics to think twice before doing Shakespeare again in this community. In an admonitory lecture that was no doubt intended as friendly advice, she also suggested that we hold a debate about the true function of what she called “academic theatre.”

As for our plan to bring outdoor Shakespeare to Boston every summer, this too foundered on the rocks of finances. We waited for the $20,000 check promised from the mayor’s office. And waited. And called. And waited. Finally, a check arrived, 10 months later, for $18,000, accompanied by an explanation that the city was passing on to the ART the $2,000 loss from the benefit it had organized to raise money for us in the first place. As a needy not-for-profit theatre we were in no position to add the city’s shortfall to our growing deficits, so we decided to abandon what could have been a really exciting civic venture.

It was a little worrisome that instead of subsidizing us, the city fathers were expecting us to subsidize the community. Another troublesome omen was a summer story in the magazine section of the Boston Globe which, while generally enthusiastic about our first season, predicted looming problems if we continued to flout the tastes of Boston audiences.

Furthermore, our fundraising efforts were not bearing much fruit, and we were projecting deficits between $200,000 and $400,000 at the end of the second season if things didn’t improve (“Anything over $100,000 will jeopardize the whole enterprise,” we were warned by Henry Rosovsky). Instead of declining, our subscription base actually managed to rise a little in the second season—to 14,000. But there were growing signs, as Carolyn Clay announced in the alternative newspaper, the Boston Phoenix, that “the honeymoon was over.”

The debate on “academic theatre” requested by our committee chairman took place in November. Director Alvin Epstein and professor of English Harry Levin represented ART while Stanley Cavell, an eminent professor of philosophy with an interest in film, and Robert Chapman, my predecessor as director of the Loeb Drama Center, represented Harvard. Moderating the debate was our new dramaturg, Michael Kustow. Kustow, former associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and more recently director of special projects at the National Theatre, was ideal for the moderator’s role because he was a gracious, intelligent and well-informed Englishman. But we were all taken aback by the ferocity of the objections to our work. Chapman launched a defense of amateur production calling it infinitely more exciting than any professional performance, while Cavell expressed his cheerful disdain not only for Belgrader’s As You Like It but also for Alvin’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Both productions could have been improved, he affirmed, had the Harvard faculty been consulted during the process. “Use us,” he urged with good-natured emphasis, “Use us!” Levin contributed his memories of how the Loeb evolved, how no one wanted a theatre on Brattle Street, and how the whole idea foundered until someone invented the rubric “ Drama Center.” I was learning how important it was to find the right nomenclature in this neighborhood, just as the 17th-century English playwright William Davenant had managed to fool the Puritans by putting on plays and calling them “operas.”

While certainly spirited, the debate was for the most part friendly. It may even have helped to lance some festering boils. After almost 30 years as a professor of English, I should have known that nothing upsets academics more than not being able to express their opinions, and we were obviously playing to a highly opinionated and literate audience that had strong feelings about what they saw. When we did a classic, some subscribers would even come to the theatre with a copy of the play, thumbing it like a musical score, marking any deviations from the original text. I don’t think more than handful of Harvard faculty shared Harold Bloom’s conviction that Shakespeare should be read in the study, not seen or heard on the stage. (Bloom in The Invention of the Human had written that the worst productions he could remember of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were those of Peter Brooks and Alvin Epstein, which he called “a Yale hilarity.”) But a great majority strongly resented any departure from the play they held in their hands or in their heads. Noel Annan, an English critic recently invited to Harvard, admonished us creative miscreants to, “Respect the verse, honor the text,” to great approval during an English department lecture. The debate had been a good way of letting off academic steam. Only later would I learn how to provide regular relief for the tensions between an intelligent, conservative audience and a progressive, impudent theatre.

THE SECOND SEASON

Nevertheless, our second season—the season of 1980–81—proved to be our Armageddon. We had refreshed the company with the next class of Yale School of Drama graduates—among them Tony Shalhoub, Tommy Derrah and Harry Murphy—who would make stalwart and distinguished contributions for years to come. But not only was the honeymoon over, a lot of people were talking about divorce. After the shock of As You Like It, we fell on our collective faces with another Brecht/Weill revival—Alvin Epstein’s production of The Seven Deadly Sins (half-sung, half-choreographed, a favorite of George Balanchine) on a double bill with the rarely performed oratorio The Berlin Requiem. Some reviewers found it too short, others too shallow. What had been a triumph in New Haven was dismissed as a frippery in Cambridge. “I foresee troubles with all the projects coming up,” I wrote in my diary, “and the community is beginning to turn against us.” So were the reviewers. ART was not only receiving sour notices but, unlike the previous year, when we dominated the arts section, the Globe no longer seemed interested in publishing feature stories about our upcoming productions.

We should have known that the Boston area, being so much further from New York than New Haven, would be less responsive to our particular species of theatrical experimentation. But nothing could have prepared us for the fury unleashed by Lee Breuer’s production of another German play, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu. Breuer, one of the founding members of Mabou Mines and a leading avant-garde director, had already done an interesting Lulu workshop with students in our last year at Yale. The concept he now proposed for Wedekind’s double drama about an amoral temptress who drives men to suicide fascinated me, but was also a potential minefield. One institutional road block was that not only did he want an African-American Lulu, he also wanted a totally black cast. The problem was that we only had two African Americans in our 10-person company at that time, notably Carmen de Lavallade and Ben Halley. Breuer’s solution, which I vetoed with a grim smile, was to ask Meryl Streep to play the title part in blackface.

Finally, we managed to cast Kathy Slade, an excellent black actress, as Lulu, and found an engaging young man, Courtney B. Vance, at that time a Boston University student, to play the student who gets kicked out of school.

The next hurdle that faced us was time. The translator, Michael Feingold, had managed to finish the first play, Earth Spirit, on time, but because Breuer had moved up his production date, the sequel, Pandora’s Box, would not arrive until well after the beginning of Lulu rehearsals. It was therefore necessary to go into previews with only one part of the two-part adaptation completed. Since Earth Spirit was by far the better known and more frequently produced play of the two (Alban Berg’s opera Lulu is based on it), I thought the best course was to forget about Pandora’s Box and only offer the material we were currently previewing.

Breuer was willing to open with Earth Spirit but wanted to reserve decision regarding Pandora’s Box. Still, even without the more difficult second part, the early response was troubling. We had more than our usual number of walkouts, and one irate spectator threw his program at an usher as he left. Opening night was greeted with a few bravos and even more angry departures. Things were shaping up for another commotion despite surprisingly good reviews from the major reviewers, who applauded both the production and our courage in staging it. (Kevin Kelly, noting that Lulu was likely to be the “whipping girl of the season,” added “even so, I don’t think you’ll be able to forget her”). On the negative side, the positive critical reception encouraged Breuer to rehearse the second part while the first was still in performance.

I objected to this for a number of reasons, among them the fact that the company had to get on with its next project. I was also anxious about adding a whole new play to what the public perceived to be a finished production. Breuer insisted on taking a vote of the actors, who unanimously supported his position. Torn between the possibility of offending the public or inhibiting a director and disappointing the company, I chose the former, remembering a remark of Stella Adler to the effect that “We’re here to serve art, not have art serve us.” Pandora’s Box was added to the evening less than a week later. Pandora’s Box proved even more provocative than Earth Spirit. The first part had been significantly updated, with Lulu, a model turned torch singer, performing to the accompaniment of a raucous rock band (not our audience’s favorite form of entertainment) that rose out of the orchestra pit in a cloud of smoke. But the second part turned out to be even more experimental. Breuer changed the location to Rio, with Lulu hanging around a plastic blue pool in sunglasses. Then, taking artistic advantage of his reduced rehearsal time, he staged the entire last scene with the cast sitting with their backs to the audience, reading their parts from music stands into hand-held mikes. The device gave the ending of Lulu the feel of a radio play, the visual aspect being provided by slide projections of vacant highways, all-night restaurants and gas stations, the kind of motel culture Nabokov evoked in Lolita. At the end of the show, Jack the Ripper, having stabbed Lulu and her lesbian lover, the Countess Geschwitz, washed the blood off his hands in a toilet bowl, and walked through the audience muttering “I’m so lucky, I’m so lucky.”

Kevin Kelly re-reviewed the entire production a week later and after repeating his praise (“ART has cut a famous, if creaking play into the shape of a contemporary classic”) went on to question our professionalism. Although we were offering early audiences the opportunity to return for the whole show, Kelly believed that to drop part two without warning them in advance was “unconscionable, unfair, beyond apology.” He was also angry because we told subscribers of our plans to introduce Pandora’s Box before we had told the press. Kelly was right, of course, but the audience weren’t feeling cheated by Lulu so much as insulted by it. People didn’t throw their programs at me, but I was being urged at cocktail parties and funding events to “do something more traditional,” to “entertain” as well as “educate.” Henry Rosovsky stopped me in Harvard Yard to reflect about how even the BSO usually mixed its Stravinsky with a little Tchaikovsky. Rob Orchard was whispering in my ear that if we were going to survive, we had better think about change.

This was painful. I had always conceived of ART as a seminal theatre, dedicated to the explorations of artists rather than fulfilling the entertainment needs of audiences. I tried to argue through analogies that serious art is not determined by majorities—did Picasso have to cater to middlebrow taste?—only to be reminded that Picasso was not obliged to sell tickets. In my heart of hearts I was beginning to have serious doubts about our purpose, which were not relieved when the next production of the season, Charles Wood’s Has “Washington” Legs?, received perhaps the most blistering reviews in our history. The play was a farce about an autocratic, crazed American film director making a Revolutionary War movie in England in order to save money. It also happened to feature a long and (to me) hilarious speech by an irate focus puller that used language apparently never before heard on a Cambridge stage. The ART community proved to be about the only ones to find this obscenity funny. In fact, Jeremy Geidt and I told each other the production was a winner. Obviously, our crystal balls were clouded. We soon received a deluge of angry mail that occupied a lot of man hours in response every day for three months. (“No bad letters today,” I note with relief in a mid-February diary entry.)

Four shows in a row that offended the audiences, the critics, or both. Quite a record. The general depression was only temporarily relieved by Jack Kroll’s Newsweek review calling Lulu “the most inventive and exciting production I’ve seen this year.” To be sure, Lulu was much admired by avant-garde cognoscenti, but these did not include many of our subscribers. Most of them were furious and not reluctant to let us know it. “What makes you think you are right and the whole world wrong?” asked one woman in a typical letter of the time, while others accused me of trying to make people feel stupid.

In a radio interview, I made the ghastly mistake of saying that I had apparently underestimated the theatrical sophistication of tradition-bound Boston. Although I believed this to be true, it was not something one admitted publicly unless in a state of delirium. Another round of furious letters. The press had concluded that I was a man unable to take criticism, though perfectly able to dish it out. Tom Winship, editor of the Globe, advised I was “going too fast for this town.” Smelling the possibility of a resignation, Kevin Kelly called to ask if I was “disenchanted” with Boston.

The associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who had eased our passage to Harvard, told me we were in “big trouble” in the community. The committee on dramatics chairman warned that ART is on trial, and the judges are the reviewers and the faculty. Henry Rosovsky made the not unsympathetic observation that I was a green fish in a gold fish bowl, though he added that he would never have invited us if he knew it was going to be “costly” or if we were going to “tamper with the classics.” A corporation executive to whom we had applied for money exhorted me, “We’re the king and you’re the jester. Shape up!”

Alvin Epstein said that it had been exactly the same at the Guthrie before he was fired as artistic director. That was little consolation. My life had taken a considerable turn for the worse. Perhaps I had invested too much in the success of ART but I didn’t have a whole lot else to engage my energies. After Norma’s death, I was left alone in a big house with a teenage son trying to assuage his sense of abandonment and loneliness by running after the Grateful Dead. My social life was entirely consumed by fundraising events and powwows with potential donors. My very personal book about the Yale years, Making Scenes, an account that culminated in the death of my wife, had received a mixed response, including a Sunday Times review that said another production of The Seagull was not worth dying for, and an especially cutting sidebar from Mel Gussow that, among my other derelictions, rebuked me for disagreeing with critics. People were also chiding me for being aloof and arrogant, and, even worse, indifferent to the available women in town (I had just been voted the fifth most eligible bachelor in Boston). “Don’t worry, Dad,” my son advised me, “things will get worse.” He was right as usual.

They did. In fact, even nature seemed hostile that year. On Martha’s Vineyard, where we spent our summers, many of the trees were barren, having been defoliated by canker worms. I was plunging into uncertainty and self-doubt. Milan Kundera speaks of a condition he calls “litost,” meaning rage over a self-perception of inadequacy or unpleasantness. That seemed a good way to describe how I, and no doubt most of the company, were feeling at the time. Robert Kiley, the expert on mass transportation who became the first chairman of our new board of advisors, urged me to “stick to my religion.” But I was beginning to seriously question the correctness of our cause and the quality of my character, doubts which I didn’t always successfully hide from my friends and colleagues.

As it happened, our next two shows were much closer in style to the community’s taste. Alvin Epstein’s production of Beaumarchais’s 18th-century comedy The Marriage of Figaro (with Tony Shalhoub in the title role) was hailed as “theatre as it should be,” and John Madden’s beautiful staging of Jules Feiffer’s comedy about marital discord, Grownups, drew a rave (and a personal thank-you note) from Frank Rich of the Times. For once, the ringing of the phone brought positive news. Grownups was the first of our Cambridge works to go on to Broadway. But the Cambridge audience had simply stopped coming. The house reports were gloomy, many subscribers were no-shows, and those who arrived were inclined to be hostile. After two weeks of mailings, we had managed to attract only a thousand subscription renewals. One of the local actresses who had recently joined our company (Karen MacDonald) told me that the Boston area had always been thus—initial love followed by anger and withdrawal. Boston was like a Doberman Pinscher that licked your hand, then went for your throat.

But it was too easy to put the blame on the environment. My own decisions were obviously to blame as well. And although I was beginning to lose faith in myself and my leadership, we were not the only theatre in difficulty in the year of 1980. The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s attempt to start a repertory company had foundered. The Denver Center Theatre Company was in trouble. San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater was not allowed to open its season until it raised an additional $400,000. New York’s Direct Theatre and the IRT had gone out of business. All of this, no doubt, was related to the massive cuts in funding at the NEA. Rereading The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman’s inspiring account of the short but brilliant life of the Group Theatre, I was a little consoled to learn that it had always been thus in America—that perhaps we were a country in which serious theatre was “against nature.”

THE THIRD SEASON

ART managed to attract only 7,000 subscribers for its third season. Half our audiences had defected in anger and disappointment. Boston Magazine, which does annual best and worst awards, called us “the worst rep theatre in town” (actually, we were the only “rep theatre” in town), “a debacle,” while the Globe noted that, “after all the ballyhoo” (much of it from that newspaper) “the season was uneven to put it charitably.” Cherry Jones made me feel a lot better by saying we were the best theatre in the country and offering to come back for another season.

But I was beginning to learn the etymology of depression—a mental state created by the impact on the human psyche of a bad press, of being depressed. It was therefore inevitable that during this period Boston University president John Silber would announce that he was starting a rival theatre. He had invited the Hartman Theatre of Stamford to stage its work at B.U. before opening it in Connecticut. This was obviously intended as an appealing alternative to the avant-garde provocations associated with ART. From the first, it was clear that the new theatre was not going to ruffle any feathers. The Hartman’s artistic director, Ed Sherin, in the course of announcing that he would kick off the season with his talented wife, Jane Alexander, playing the lead in Hedda Gabler, told the press that he didn’t believe in “theatre as revolution” (an obvious shot at ART and perhaps at the title of my first book, The Theatre of Revolt, a study of nine radical modern playwrights). Perhaps it was being catty to notice that this was the first time in history that Boston was being used as a tryout town for Stamford, Conn.

Rather than troubling us, Rob Orchard and I took this new development as a positive sign. From long experience sharing New Haven audiences with the Long Wharf Theatre, we had come to believe that, rather being competitors, two companies in town increased the appetite for theatre exponentially. More important, the presence of another company in Boston would remove the obligation of ART to be all things to all people. That is where I believe we had failed most dismally—not in the quality of our productions so much as in our failure to communicate that our work was not designed for every taste. Now we were no longer the only show in town. Those who wanted more traditional theatre could subscribe to the Hartman. Those willing to take some risks could stay with us.

My spirits began to rise the moment I realized that I had been looking in the wrong direction. I was mourning the 7,000 people who left us when I should have been celebrating the 7,000 who remained. Those loyalists would be the future core group on which we would build our support base, the ones who would always remain the most engaged with our work. True, they would never prove to be a weak collection of rubber stamps. These audiences were, in fact, an extremely feisty, argumentative, intelligent group of people. But in future they would be more likely to criticize us for failing our principles than for sticking to them.

Having reached this understanding, I began to grow a bit less defensive, which meant I could turn my attention not so much to the failings of Boston as to my own mistakes and miscalculations. There was no question that ART had developed a haughty image, and, insofar as an institution reflects its leader, that this was my fault. Rob Orchard said that in future we would have to launch the equivalent of a political campaign with me as the candidate—which meant shaking a lot more hands, becoming a lot less aloof.

After enjoying the packed houses and cheering crowds at the last performances of Figaro and Grownups, I met with Rob in the summer and told him I foresaw three possible scenarios: 1) We could compromise our programming and survive, 2) We could compromise our programming and go down anyway, or 3) We could stick to our principles and almost assuredly go down. Since the second scenario seemed the most likely, I proposed we follow the third. To my surprise, Rob agreed, though he still thought that even if I couldn’t change the nature of the repertory, I could change my public image.

For once, our spirits that summer were buoyed by some good financial news. Henry Rosovsky, who liked to say that “if it can’t happen at Harvard, it can’t happen anywhere,” helped make it happen by agreeing to pay my academic salary. This was an annual savings of $50,000 of funds we had previously been forced to raise elsewhere. Also, our deficit proved less than anticipated, a mere $170,000. The NEA gave us a reasonably sized grant, though it could easily have considered us a “new” company, rather than a continuation of an existing one, and turned down our application. Furthermore, we were beginning negotiations with a number of cable companies for what was at the time considered the salvation of the nonprofit theatre, namely selling TV rights to productions for what seemed like astronomical sums. These plans never materialized, despite countless promises that a huge check was in the mail (arts programs were unable to draw sponsors), but they kept us hoping. In my diary, I recorded an unfamiliar feeling—happiness.

I began cultivating individual donors through rounds of what I called “customer tennis” (though I still could not purposely lose a point). And despite my habit of falling asleep at board meetings, we were managing to attract a few new members with generous pocketbooks. I lowered the hostility level of smaller theatres first by inviting Boston Theatre Works to perform one of its shows at the Loeb—and then by forming an association of local theatre leaders who met on a monthly basis to discuss common problems (mainly the Boston press and Boston funding). We had no common solutions but it made us feel better just to share common experiences. I started a protest against arts cuts in Reagan’s new budget, and won some strong support for my position at a theatre conference in New Haven. I even agreed to speak at the local Rotary Club, and joined the Rotarians in a chorus of “America the Beautiful” (lucky there were no cameras, though some years later I was caught on stage at the Tony Awards, hiding behind Elaine Stritch, singing “Give My Regards to Broadway”). People were commenting on what they perceived to be a change in my nature.

A lot of people were calling me “nice.” Was I losing my reputation as a curmudgeonly dissenter? It is true I was making a special effort with the public. But at the same time that I was trying to charm audiences and donors, I found myself getting more difficult with some of our visiting artists, especially if I thought they were neglecting the acting company or contemptuous of the audience.

I had always supported a theatre oriented towards the artist rather than the consumer, even when the artist was difficult and unruly. It was harder to support artists who were randomly insulting or needlessly provocative. I had to decide whether a director was trying to push the envelope of the art or, still stuck in the sixties, was just sticking a thumb in the audience’s eye. My judgment was not always correct, and a lot of the time I must have seemed like a meddlesome twerp, making critical judgments in the middle of the process.

Let me interject a quick aside about our artistic purpose. A lot of people, and a lot of critics, have always assumed ART to be a sandbox for directors because so many auteurs have been invited to experiment with our company. But the object of these visits has always been to stretch the talents of our actors, and the imaginations of our audiences, which is why new directors were always asked not simply what they would like to direct, but what they would like to direct with our resident company.

As a result, it was inevitable, I guess, that I would occasionally lock horns with a director who I believed, rightly or wrongly, was following his own needs to the exclusion of the needs of the theatre. This first happened with Lee Breuer during the production of Lulu. It was to happen in subsequent years with Peter Sellars, Andrei Serban, JoAnne Akalaitis, Yuri Lyubimov, Yuri Yeremin—indeed with most of the strong-minded auteurs we invited (though, curiously enough, never with Robert Wilson).

As a typical example, Sellars and I had a falling out over his production of Handel’s fantastical opera Orlando during our third season. In collaboration with the conductor Craig Smith, Sellars wanted to produce this work entirely in Italian, a proposal to which I consented, though it had the potential to tax the patience of a theatre audience. He and Craig also insisted on playing it with all the repeats and da capos intact, which threatened to make the evening interminable. Sellars has the gift of appearing to be in agreement with you while continuing to pursue his own agenda. For some reason, it had become very important to him to stage the first “uncut” version of Orlando in the United States. I agreed not to ask for cuts if he and Smith could keep the show under three hours. When the previews ended up closer to four, I threatened to call off the national press unless they agreed to make some minor cuts. Smith looked very pained; Sellars threatened to take his name off the program. Eventually, in a pretense of compromise, Smith and Sellars agreed to cut four minutes out of the opera, though not on opening night. When the singers protested, even those four minutes went back in.

On opening night, nobody complained of length. Orlando was a triumph. Set in Cape Canaveral, partly in the Okefenokee swamps, partly at NASA, and featuring a huge spaceship that actually seemed to be lifting off, the opera was a cunning combination of absolute fidelity to the music of Handel and total departure from his libretto. Although the New York Times called it “sophomoric,” Orlando received smashing reviews in the Globe (“unique in the city and the country”) and standing ovations from the audience. Henceforth, Sellars would be a culture hero both to Harvard and to the city of Boston.

What did I think of it? I was already on record regarding the updating of the classics. If the director could discover a poetic entrance into a text by means of a contemporary metaphor, then more power to him. But if the updating was simply a clever way to impose modern similes on the material, then we were watching the gestures of the interpreter rather than the insights of the creative artist. Sellars was an extremely intelligent young man who would later do some very accomplished work, particularly in theatre. But his tendency to transfer operas to other times and places—setting Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, for example, or his Marriage of Figaro in the Trump Tower—usually struck me as the act of a director who was signaling for attention rather than truly investigating a work of art.

Orlando, nevertheless, was a huge success, which helped signal our triumphant return into the good graces of Cambridge. Indeed, virtually every production of that third season was popular with critics and audiences alike. Well, not every one. A visiting one-woman production of the 19th-century poem Enoch Arden starring Luise Rainer (a two-time Academy Award winner in the 1930s) attracted a lot of Cambridge ladies, but its creaky production values put theatre back about a hundred years (“I know ART is supposed to be daring,” jested Jeremy Geidt at the opening, “but this is ridiculous”). It also drew a highly personal attack from Kevin Kelly, focusing on the wrinkles in this lovely but aging woman’s formerly porcelain face. Since Ms. Rainier was a highly sensitive individual, we feared that, if she saw that review after the matinee performance, she would not be able to perform in the evening. When some well-meaning patron handed her the Globe at the afternoon reception, I managed to get her producer to furtively remove it from her hand as she was gesticulating to her admirers. To my knowledge, Luise Rainer never learned how badly she had been mugged in Boston.

Since we had been invited to major festivals in Europe and Israel in the summer of 1982 with four productions, we decided to open our third Cambridge season with one of them—Andrei Serban’s extremely popular interpretation of Sganarelle, drawn from past repertory like Midsummer. Everyone welcomed Sganarelle except Kevin Kelly who called it a “delightful leftover,” and I spent a lot of time in correspondence with this reviewer trying to formulate distinctions between what he called a “retread” and what we considered a repertory staple. I argued that the Met and the City Ballet didn’t consider their revivals to be “retreads.” Why couldn’t a repertory theatre company be treated the same as a dance or opera company? I think Kelly was annoyed that we were reviving a show he had already seen a few years earlier at the Loeb, even though it was new to most of our audiences.

Still, in the course of praising our next show—Ronald Ribman’s adaptation of a Turgenyev story called The Journey of the Fifth Horse, directed by Adrian Hall of our sister Trinity Repertory Company—Kelly proclaimed that we had achieved a “trifecta,” meaning three hits in a row.

The run of Sganarelle was playing to standing room only; Orlando was a sellout; we were finally beginning to play to full houses. And although a 18,000-piece fundraising campaign managed to net only $4,000 (a return of .003 percent on our mailing!), Harvard was now agreeing to pick up our accumulated deficit of $500,000. This was still a pretty tightfisted community, to be sure (we managed to raise only $129,000 from all sources that year, including a $50 check from the president of the State Street Bank). But the mood had definitely shifted. We were finally out of the slumps.

All the signs were good, and our spring new-play series (henceforth produced in a space rented from the Hasty Pudding Club) was very well-received in a city not particularly hospitable to new work. It was around this time, when most of the company was in Chicago touring Sganarelle, that I began to direct my first production at ART—Ibsen’s drama of fate, biology and superstition, Ghosts, with Kathleen Widdoes as Mrs. Alving, Alvin Epstein as Pastor Manders, Cherry Jones as Regina, Jeremy Geidt as Engstrand, and a gifted young Harvard student named John Belushi as Oswald. It featured a superb glass setting by Tony Straiges in which the rain poured down the walls outside, and the final image—in which Mrs. Alving lets out a piercing scream, amplified electronically as the entire set is illuminated by a blinding white light and all the doors of the Alving house fly open all by themselves—brought gasps on opening night.

It was an eerie culmination of a play I treated throughout like a ghost story presided over by the hovering spirits of Captain Alving and Regina’s mother. But despite what I thought to be a good central metaphor, I didn’t much help the actors, some of whom complained that many of the scenes were barren. Kelly was wowed by the final image but didn’t like the acting. Norton liked the acting but disliked the final image (he devoted his final TV theatre program, concluding a run of 24 years, to an interview with Epstein and Widdoes). I agreed and disagreed with both of them.

Our final production of the year, before the European tour, was the American premiere of Carlos Fuentes play about the Mexican film stars Dolores del Rio and Maria Casares called Orchids in the Moonlight. I had entrusted this production to a well-regarded local director very popular with Harvard students whom I had chosen to supervise undergraduate work at the Loeb Experimental Theatre. I think the size of the main stage daunted her, and so did the two African-American actresses she had cast to play the two leading parts. At all events, rehearsals proceeded behind doors that were barred even to the artistic director. When I finally saw some rehearsals during techs, the notes I offered were refused on the pretext that the “hierarchy” was being “condescending.” Fuentes arrived a few days later, expecting to see a run-through of his work. One of the actors refused to comply with his request. When I ordered it anyway, the actor, claiming that her voice was strained, spoke in such a whisper that she was virtually inaudible. The director told Fuentes that he mustn’t talk to the “nervous” actors who were refusing his cuts and the new ending he had written. “That’s it,” Fuentes replied, “I’m leaving Cambridge.”

I begged him to stay, and tried to persuade the director not to isolate this show from the entire ART community. But she was having as much trouble as I was with a pair of divas who were preparing for their roles for hours by burning incense behind locked dressing room doors. When the show opened to tepid reviews, there was enough blame to go around. The critics blamed the playwright; the playwright blamed the director; the actors blamed the “overeducated” audience, not to mention the artistic director for not knowing how to treat artists; I blamed everybody. At the last performance, the ladies reluctantly accepted my compliments on their (considerably) improved performances and went back to New York, no doubt to spread the word that I was a racist.

My flap with the director of Orchids caused another breach with Peter Sellars, who considered her his mentor at Harvard. Previously we had agreed on another opera—Peter Maxwell Davies’s modernistic The Lighthouse—even secured the rights and announced it for our next season. In the summer, out of the blue, I received a mailgram from Sellars, saying “Our interests have grown so far apart that it makes no sense to have further collaboration. Have given Lighthouse to the Public Theater.” I immediately called Joe Papp, artistic director of New York City’s Public Theater, to discuss the situation with him. He replied: “I would never do anything dishonorable towards you, Robert.” He did, however, later tell me that since Sellas did not want to work with me any more, he would be doing the The Lighthouse over our protests. I gave up the rights to Joe without an argument.

When Joe finally got around to listening to Davies’s strongly atonal opera, he dropped it from the Public Theater schedule, admonishing Sellars that the work was not for the “the common man.” Like the dog with the bone in his mouth who dropped it when he saw a reflection in the river of dog with an even bigger bone, Sellars ended up with no production of The Lighthouse at all (though he later gave the opera a worthy staging during his brief stint as artistic director of Boston Shakespeare Company). During a chance encounter on a airplane, he told me that he had pulled The Lighthouse from ART because of a simple scheduling problem, not personal rancor. I advised Sellars to repress his impulse to give high-minded reasons for careerist ambitions, to restrain his gifts for creative opportunism.

I escaped to the Vineyard, happy that despite a few missteps ART had turned a corner—though our comeback, I fear, may have been partly responsible for B.U. dropping the Hartman Theatre after only one season (it was succeeded by the homegrown and considerably more successful Huntington Theatre Company, which survives to this day).

We reinforced our local success with our international tour to major festivals in England France, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Scotland and Yugoslavia, where we performed Lulu, True West, Rundown, Sganarelle and a cabaret evening featuring the musical talents of our company. Although Robert Auletta’s antiwar Rundown proved a little inflammatory when it opened in Jerusalem during the war in Lebanon, the tour was a smashing success in most of the places we visited. In Asti, we were hailed as one of the great companies of the world. And in Avignon, our production of Sganarelle was called, “the best thing in the festival,” by France Soir, “more Molière than Molière—totally American…the pearl of the festival,” by Le Monde and “a miracle from the U.S.,” by La Marseillaise, whose reviewer added, “Those damned Americans. It would be them to discover the comic force of these four plays.” High praise indeed from a country that is very proprietary about Molière.

Once again, Lulu proved to be the problem. In Asti, Breuer had startled the audience by yelling, “Don’t overact!” at one of the performers. And he failed to show up for the tech rehearsals in Avignon, having been trapped in Paris for nonpayment of his hotel bill. The opening provoked the usual audience divisions—alternating cries of, “Bravo” and “Bullshit.” Breuer, despondent, refused to talk to the cast. The reviews were unanimously bad, but one in particular amused us by saying Lulu, a show that had alienated so many conventional theatregoers, was “worthy of the worst Broadway production.”

It was curious how differently the various European cultures responded to our work. Amsterdam called the ART, “a synthesis of the resident theatre movement and the avant-garde,” though some reviewers found us insufficiently experimental, while in Edinburgh our repertory provoked reviews that were either tepid or condescending. The London Times reviewer actually walked out on Sganarelle while the reviewer for the Observer called it the product of a “university theatre” with me as the “headmaster.” As for Lulu, Breuer tried to anticipate the bad press by disowning the production, but the notices were horrid nevertheless. I consoled myself for this complete critical washout with a lovely automobile ride through the Highlands.

In Israel, in the middle of a war with Lebanon, we flopped in Jerusalem and triumphed in Tel Aviv. The Jerusalem Post called Rundown a “Bloody Mary” and Sganarelle a “Raspberry Souffle.” But despite the controversy, Sganarelle was taped for television in London’s Duke of York Theatre. And best of all, our tour earned us new respect from the Boston press and the Boston audiences, especially after Jeremy Geidt’s eyewitness pieces for the Boston Globe.

We had survived. The seeds were beginning to take root in the recalcitrant soil.

Robert Brustein is the founding artistic director of American Repertory Theatre, now in its 28th season. His book Shakespeare's Prejudices is forthcoming from Yale University Press, and his play The English Channel will be produced in New York City in October.