Author Description

Making Scenes is Robert Brustein's own dramatic account of his turbulent tenure as head of the most important and controversial theatrical venture in the last decade - a candid, absorbing, and superbly written memoir of life in the arts. In Making Scenes, Robert Brustein - for thirteen years, dean of the Yale School of Drama and founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre - traces the development of these two institutions during the period he helped build them into what the Washington Post has called "the preeminent alternative theatrical enterprise in the country." It was a time of ferment, and Brustein's efforts to forge a new American theatre through daring production and comprehensive training took place against the background of significant events in the history of both the university and the society: the anti-Vietnam war activities of the sixties; the tour of the Living Theatre and the arrest of some of its members in New Haven; the disruption of play production by radical action; the May Day rally in support of the Black Panthers. All of these events in vivid prose by one who was both a witness and a participant. -- from dust cover.