(Updated 10/31 4:10 pm)
Robert S. Brustein, 96, died at his home in Cambridge on Sunday, Oct. 29. Born in Brooklyn, Brustein had been a seasonal resident of the Island since the early 1960s, living on Lambert’s Cove Road, not far from Seth’s Pond. He and his late wife, Norma, and later his wife Doreen Beinart, were frequent guests and dear friends of William and Rose Styron, meeting 60 years ago on Martha’s Vineyard.
A champion of nonprofit theater, he was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979, and founded the Yale Repertory Theatre. Later working at Harvard for more than 20 years, he founded and led the American Repertory Theater (ART) and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training.
The Styron-Brustein friendship grew even stronger, with the Styrons living in Roxbury, Conn., just 45 minutes from New Haven, where Brustein’s Yale Repertory Theater was growing.
“We stayed with the Brusteins whenever Meryl Streep was performing,” Rose Styron wrote to The Times in an email. “Our youngest daughter Alexandra became friends with Katy Feiffer, who often visited them at the same time. We never missed a performance by Meryl. That connection led to her becoming Sophie in the screen version of Bill’s novel ‘Sophie’s Choice.’”
What followed was decades of friendship between the two families, augmented by spring vacations in Jamaica, plus winter sails in the Caribbean with all their children. When they were on the Vineyard, Rose wrote, tennis at the Vineyard Haven Yacht Club was daily fun.
“Bob and Art Buchwald challenged Lucy Hackney and me to an annual summer match. Whoever lost had to perform a favor requested by the winning team. One summer when Bob and Art beat us, Lucy and I were commanded to clean their houses. I think I wrote in my memoir that we dressed in outrageous cleaners’ outfits and took a bucket of water and a noisy machine to the Buchwalds at midnight, the Brusteins’ at 2 am, scaring and finally delighting both families. Bob did not laugh as quickly as Art and Ann did.”
Rose Styron wrote that their lives in Cambridge and on the Vineyard intersected rewardingly with that of the Styrons. She often stayed with the Brusteins during her tenures as a Harvard fellow. Rose wrote that she was delighted to see Brustein marry again, with Doreen inspiring him to write poetry, among other things.
“He received the National Medal of Honor from Obama, Doreen in attendance. She turned their house in Lambert’s Cove into a spacious, welcoming home, inviting us each to wonderful lunches or dinners with Bob, indoors and outdoors, this past decade. Doreen was the splendid chef and director, Bob the always impressive humorous raconteur. I cherished being invited.”
She was able to sit and visit with Bob this past summer, Styron wrote, talking about “everything current and past, laughing and mourning.”
A prolific writer, Brustein reviewed productions for the New Republic for decades. He was a supporter of nonprofit theater, and criticized many commercial productions, introducing many audiences to edgy and experimental theater over the years.
The MV Times’ Arts & Ideas magazine featured an interview with Brustein in 2017, after he had turned 90. The story reads in part, “Brustein still gets up and writes most mornings, and often in the afternoons as well. If an idea hits him, he wants to be at his desk and ready for it. ‘Along with my marriage,’ he says, ‘writing is what gives me the most fun in my life, and I don’t think my age is affecting that.’ He admits to being a more regular napper than he was when he was younger, but he hastens to add that he works even when napping: ‘I often dream a poem. I keep an iPad by my bed so I can write it down.’”
The Hebrew Center hosted a birthday celebration for Brustein a half-dozen years ago, and Rabbi Caryn Broitman remembers his love of the Island.
“Bob Brustein was a longtime member of the Hebrew Center, and an enormously kind and warm human being who was very community-minded,” Rabbi Broitman wrote to The Times. “He spoke at the Hebrew Center a number of times about Jewish theater, as well as on his own play ‘Spring Forward, Fall Back.’ The Playhouse and the Hebrew Center had the great privilege of joining together to honor him on the occasion of his 90th birthday, when the Hebrew Center was filled to capacity with so many year-round and seasonal residents whose lives Bob had touched, including my own. All of us on the Island have been enormously blessed to have had Bob Brustein in our community these many decades.”
Brustein brought several plays he wrote to the Vineyard. “Spring Forward, Fall Back,” an autobiographical play, had both a staged reading at the Playhouse in 2004 and then was produced there in association with Theater J in 2006. In 2007, “The English Channel,” about a young William Shakespeare, was also produced at the Playhouse, this time in association with Suffolk University. Several of Brustein’s plays were presented as staged readings in the Playhouse’s Monday Night Specials series, including “Seven Elevens” in 2008 and 2012, “Mortal Terror” in 2009, and “The Last Will” in 2010. A staged reading of Brustein’s “Exposed” was also held here in 2014. Artistic and executive director of the Playhouse MJ Bruder Munafo says she learned much from Brustein over the years.
“I met Bob Brustein a few years after I became the artistic director of M.V. Playhouse in 1995. Of course I was in awe of him — he was a living legend in the American theater world,” Munafo wrote to the Times in an email. “I had seen memorable productions at the ART in Cambridge, and had read some of his essays and books. He was a distinguished and imposing figure with a brilliant and passionate love for live theater.
“Bob was always kind and supportive to me, and to all those lucky enough to be in his orbit. I remember an early conversation I had with him out in front of the Playhouse one day. He grabbed my hands, and said that I had turned this place into an important little theater, and that I wasn’t afraid of taking risks. Risk-taking was certainly a big part of his legacy. He encouraged me in my work, and became a beloved friend. I am honored to have known him, to have been just one of his hundreds of friends and colleagues, to have hugged him and laughed with him, and I will miss him enormously.”
A theater critic, author of numerous books about the theater, playwright, and visionary educator, Brustein was still a creative consultant into his 90s. He also wrote on politics for the HuffPost, and began penning poetry. As reported in the Boston Globe, he was a mentor to many, including Meryl Streep, Tony Shalhoub, Cherry Jones, Gideon Lester, Christopher Walken, Henry Winkler, Linda Lavin, Albert Innaurato, Rocco Landesman, and James Lapine.
Artistic associate at the M.V. Playhouse Joann Green Breuer spoke about her friend and colleague as well. Breuer taught at Harvard in Brustein’s department for more than four years, and she also directed a couple of pieces with the ART when he was there. Years later she connected with him on the Island through the Playhouse.
“He came and saw my work, and we became friends as well as colleagues,” Breuer said in a phone conversation with the Times. “He was a remarkable man in many, many ways. He believed in theater as an artform, not as something that would transform society but for people to appreciate theater as theater.”
Even when Brustein didn’t like a particular work, Breuer said, he was able to look at the long view, and had the ability to continue looking at things that did not please him. “He never turned away from theater, and that persistence matters. I have a feeling a lot of his reviews will be read and reread by students for years to come.”
Breuer said that Brustein believed in the benefits of audiences seeing the same actors perform in a variety of roles. She said that he believed that what matters is the variety of the prism of theater, “that seeing one actor perform in a variety of roles lets us see that we can have different views of one thing. And to be able to see in many different ways is a major lesson,” she said.
Times columnist and author Nancy Slonin Aronie, a friend of Brustein, wrote when she learned of his death, “Bob made you feel as if you were the only one in the room. He was love.”
Brustein married Doreen Beinart, a human rights activist and documentary film professor, in 1996. He is survived by Beinart, his son Daniel Brustein, who spent all his childhood summers on the Island, stepson Peter Beinart, stepdaughter Jean Stern, two grandsons, and five step-grandchildren.
