The Lively Art: Twenty Years of the American Repertory Theatre

By: Jan Geidt

Book Overview

The resident repertory company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, affiliated with Harvard and known as the American Repertory Theatre, has long been considered one of the country's most innovative cultural resources. The quality of its productions and the issues it has raised about the nature of the creative life have distinguished it among American theatre groups. Here is a treasury of criticism, reflection, observation, and insight from the ART's post-production symposia, and pre-show talks, illustrated with photographs and drawings from ART archives. The notable contributors include a great many brilliant poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, scholars, lawyers, theatre directors, designers, and clowns, many of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners. Whether Susan Sontag reflects on Milan Kundera's Jacques and His Master, or Jonathan Miller on Sheridan's School for Scandal, or Jan Kott on Hamlet, or Carlos Fuentes on Calderon's Life is a Dream, or Derek Walcott on his musical Steel, or Harold Bloom on Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler, or Anatole Smeliansky on Bulgakov's Black Snow, the discourse is heightened and passionate. The book also includes revealing interviews with major theatrical figures--Dario Fo, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Andrei Serban, David Mamet, and many others--and lively articles from the ART's founding artistic director Robert Brustein, its managing director Robert J. Orchard, and a variety of literary directors and dramaturges. In all, The Lively A.R.T. is a bountiful theatre experience, better than two on the aisle.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566632447
• ISBN13: 9781566632447
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A rich compilation of articles and interviews.

THE LIVELY ART is an amazing collection. The names in the table of contents include many of the greatest artists today: Peter Sellars, Andrei Serban, Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes, Marsha Norman, Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, Heiner Muller, Dario Fo, JoAnne Akalaitis, Don de Lillo, Elliott Goldenthal, Liviu Ciulei, David Rabe, David Mamet, Paula Vogel, and Christopher Durang. Through interviews and articles written by the artists themselves, the pieces in this anthology provide an invaluable insight into the creative process and also an overview into contemporary theater practices. Some of the selections, like the acrimonious exchange of letters between Samuel Beckett and artistic director Robert Brustein, have great historical importance and raise important questions about the relation of any production to the text that inspired it.In addition, distinguished scholars have contributed provocative essays: Robert Brustein, Harry Levin, Richard Gilman, Stephen Greenblatt, Jan Kott, and Harold Bloom. These articles provide interesting examples of current critical approaches from the new historicism (Greenblatt on King Lear) to production history (Kott on Hamlet). And in the symposium excerpt about The Taming of the Shrew sparks fly when a great theater director (Andrei Serban) confronts three formidable Harvard English professors: Greenblatt, Brustein, and Marjorie Garber. I particularly appreciated the remarks on Brecht by Harvard law professor Martha Minow as well as Arthur Holmberg's urbane essay "Machiavellis of the Bedroom--an Erotic Endgame." Also, the interviews with Janathan Miller, Philip Glass, and Robert Wilson are illuminating. The production photographs are a giant bonus.This book is indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary drama. I can think of no other theater in the world that could have put together such a collection. Charles Gunnard Thomas, New York City.