Theater: Disorientation As An Art Form

A tall man in a tweed sports jacket walks back and forth along the aisles of the theater, gabbling into a microphone about the auteurist theory of stage direction. Then he drags recalcitrant actors from the wings and introduces them by their real names. After angry debate, they undertake to improvise scenes that will define their 1920s Sicilian characters, only to have the speaker break in and say they have talked enough. All the while, an impish man uses a video camera to record the proceedings and simultaneously project them onto a screen at center stage. The cameraman narrates a “documentary” of random black-and-white footage of Sicily, reaching a comic apogee by intoning about Gestalt psychology as the film shows pigs being slaughtered.

That bizarre sequence opens Tonight We Improvise, a play by Luigi Pirandello, adapted and directed by Robert Brustein for his American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Brustein also plays the impresario advocating auteurism; the cameraman is Frederick Wiseman, renowned for such PBS cinema verite documentaries as Canal Zone and Meat. Their monologues, just serious enough to be plausible — Brustein actually does believe that directors have as creative a role as writers — eventually become self-mockingly funny. But the jokes seem to go over the heads of much of the audience; instead of laughing, many spectators stare deadpan as if trying to catch up. Later sequences offer conventional, tell-me-a-story pleasures: a mother with a toothache tries to dispel it through elaborate religious ritual; a drunken father comes home and dies in a poignant scene made all the more impressive by the fact that moments before, the actor had stepped out of character to label his role unplayable.

The net effect is a powerful display of theater’s seductive capacity to disparage illusion one moment, then compellingly restore it the next. Still, many Cambridge viewers remain baffled. They appear not to grasp that most of the scenario is Pirandello’s rather than Brustein’s and that despite the title, most is scripted rather than improvised. By Brustein’s standards, the show is a success: it arouses rather than coddles audiences, forcing them to ponder the nature of theater — not least the potential for being manipulated while happily submerged in a story. Says Brustein: “Audiences are responding correctly: they are being disoriented. The more we achieve Pirandello’s intentions, the more people don’t get what we are up to.”

Tonight We Improvise opens A.R.T.’s 20th season and typifies the way Brustein’s troupe has alternately exhilarated, frustrated and befuddled — but rarely bored — its audiences while building a reputation as perhaps the nation’s most prestigious regional theater. Although Brustein routinely disparages Broadway, some of his productions end up there, including the 1983 Pulitzer prizewinner, ‘Night, Mother. The troupe received Broadway’s highest accolade, a Tony Award, last June. A.R.T.’s luster has been augmented by its affiliations with universities — Yale from 1966 to mid-1979 (another ensemble now performs as the Yale Repertory Theater) and since then Harvard. But its main claim to glory is the quality of its work and the actors who have performed there, from Meryl Streep and Christopher Walken to current Members Elizabeth Franz (a Tony nominee for Brighton Beach Memoirs) and Ken Howard (TV’s The White Shadow ).

One of the company’s goals, Brustein says, is to demonstrate for audiences “what is unique about theater, what can happen intellectually only in that environment, as opposed to illusions that could be bettered on film or videotape.” That translates into virtual exclusion of such naturalistic writers as Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill and of what Brustein calls “verbal, academic playwrights like Shaw, Wilde and Tom Stoppard.” Adds Brustein: “We are not interested in the theater of totally resolved emotions.” Instead the company has emphasized new nonnarrative plays, obscure classics infused with directorial pyrotechnics, political tracts and works at the borderline between theater and opera. The results have often enraged purists. Last season Brustein staged a Jacobean tragedy, The Changeling, minus its major subplot; Andrei Serban’s 1982 staging reduced the Three Sisters’ yearning for “Moscow” to an endearment crooned to an infant.

Brustein’s latest step is to establish at Harvard what he inherited at Yale in 1966 as dean of its drama school: a conservatory for training actors, directors and designers. The Institute for Advanced Theater Training opened in October, and will become a two-year, nondegree program with a total of 40 students, mostly recent U.S. college graduates.The training will include performing in or working backstage at A.R.T. shows.

Brustein, 59, has taught English at Columbia, Yale and now Harvard and is the longtime drama critic for the New Republic, but he prefers the practical side of drama. Undaunted by some early failures at Yale, including his science fiction Macbeth in 1971, he has gone on to direct or produce productions of wit, energy and visual sophistication. Although he has been “a little taken aback” at the response to Tonight We Improvise, he argues, with the tenacity that has made him a godfather of the regional repertory movement, “Any theater that believes and persists in its vision will eventually draw an audience.” The A.R.T. is a compelling case in point. Occluded storytelling cost it nearly half its subscribers between the second and third seasons at Harvard. The rebuilt audience, if still sometimes off-balance, is passionately loyal: the company played to at least 95% of capacity in each of its past two seasons.