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Few have shaped the American theatrical landscape more drastically than critic, producer, academic, and former artistic director Robert Brustein.  Brustein is truly a Man of the Theater, a rare epithet to bestow on the splintered profession that the theater has become today.  A rare public appearance as part of the Peak Performances 09/10 season will no doubt be studded with his trademark intellectual and cultural provocation.  A talk entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Cultural Apocalypse” suggests no less than the fractious and provocative rhetoric for which Brustein is known, both as a critic and formerly as an artistic director. Read more »

In his essay “On Cultural Power,” taken from remarks made at a 1997 debate with black playwright August Wilson, Robert Brustein states his belief in theater as a springboard for political action and the importance of inclusion when it comes to audiences’ experience:”We have had some sour experience in the twentieth century regarding efforts to regulate or improve human nature through the agency of a political system: 

Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Iran under the Ayatollah, to name a few … “’All revolutions,’ as Eugene Ionesco wrote, ‘burn the libraries of Alexandria.’ Today in American we see a similar development in what is called political correctness—which in its overzealous crusade to purge our language of offensive terms sometimes seems to be leading to what one critic has called ‘freedom from speech.’  Read more »