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Masked

It's fun for the whole family

as American Repertory Theater artistic

director Robert Brustein introduces

"The King Stag" to metro

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me

Detroit audiences.

SUZANNE CHESSLER
Special to the Jewish News

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10/13
2000

84

Iff eryl Streep, Henry
Winkler, Sigourney
Weaver, Deborah
Winger,
Christopher Walken and a host of
other stars have all studied acting
with Robert Brustein. Founding
director of both the Yale
Repertory Theatre and Harvard

University's American Repertory
Theater, where he currently serves
as artistic director, he is the force
behind The King Stag, the
American Repertory Theatre's sig-
nature production. It will be per-
formed next weekend in Ann Arbor
as part of the University Musical
Society's International Theater Festival.
Brustein has supervised more than
200 productions, acting in eight and
directing 12. He also has written 11
play adaptations, 12 books on theater
and society and drama criticism for
The New Republic.
Although he has been a guest lectur-
er at the University of Michigan,
Brustein will not be returning with his
touring show. The man who has taught
at both Yale and Harvard is busy
preparing for the current season at his
home base, where The King Stag con-
tinues to be one of the American
Repertory Theater's most popular pro-
ductions.
"The King Stag has a fantastical and
imaginative nature," Brustein says
about the 18th-century Carlo Gozzi
play appropriate for adults and chil-
dren. "It is so creative and so full of
fun, color, excitement and surprise that
audiences find themselves drawn into
it every moment.
"Children will respond to the pup-
pets, shadow play, costumes and masks
[designed] by Julie Taymor, who did

Above: American Repertory Theater Artistic Director Robert
Brustein: "Masks and puppets are shortcuts to creating character"

Left: "The King Stag" features movement, costumes, masks and
puppetry by Julie Taymor, Tony Award-winning costume
designer and director of "The Lion King" on Broadway.

the New York production of The Lion
King. Adults will respond to the story,
as the children will, which is a lovely,
romantic and exciting tale of love that
leaves us with the theme that beauty is
not just skin deep."
The play is set in the Oriental king-
dom of Serendippo, where the hand-
some young monarch King Deramo
searches for a woman who will marry
him for love and not just to be queen.
A conniving sorcerer conspires to have
his unwilling daughter chosen.
The piece draws on theater across
time and culture and includes the spe-
cial traditional puppetry of Japan and
Indonesia, Balinese temple dancers and
Italian Renaissance street theater
known as Commedia dell'Arte.
"Realism has been a [theater] form
only in vogue since the 19th century,"
explains Brustein, whose most recent
book, Cultural Calisthenics, deals with
political influences on theater.
"This play reawakens our love of
magic and what theater can do in the
way of magical transformations.
"Masks and puppets are shortcuts to
creating character. The actor takes his
or her character from the mask, and

this allows more to be done with
dance, movement and vocal effects.
"The puppets and shadow play are
all very helpful in the way they fold so
easily into the mask work. An actor
wearing a mask can live in the same
world as a puppet who speaks, and you
don't see any distinction between the
two of them."
Brustein, 73, has been interested in
theater since age 6, when his parents
sent him to elocution lessons to correct
a speech problem. Cast in plays as part
of the program, his attention was fixed
on the stage.
Continuing his interest through high
school, Brustein went on to study at
the Yale Drama School and joined a
professional company for 10 seasons
while teaching at a variety of schools
and going for his doctorate.
After instructing dramatic literature
students at Columbia for nine years, he
was invited to become dean of the Yale
Drama School, a post he held for 13
years before moving on to Harvard,
where he was named director of the
Loeb Drama Center and professor of
English.
Brustein's accomplishments have

