Brustein Molds Thespians for 21st Century

The Loeb Experimental Theater, familiar to Harvard undergrads as the place to see their classmates perform, looks markedly different tonight. For once the crowd here looks like the crowd at the main stage next door, well-dressed and decidedly over thirty.

The reason has something to do with expectations. Though tonight's Ex production is still very much a student affair, these students belong to the Institute for Advanced Theater Training, a sort of graduate school for Harvard theater run by the A.R.T. They charge admission, they have a real budget, and most importantly, they've been professionally trained.

Though none of this guarantees a good show, anticipation is certainly greater than for an HRDC production. Every student at the Institute went through the college theater experience already or worked on commercial productions before. They had to demonstrate a lot to get into the two-year program, according to Institute Admissions. But they distinguished themselves by showing greater conviction and fresher ideas than the other applicants. Each year a mere 20 to 25 survive the cut.

Those numbers break down further when one considers that students apply to the acting, directing and dramaturgy programs separately. Only one or two applicants accepted for directing, two to four for dramaturgy, and some fifteen for acting, making this one of the most competitive drama schools around.

But unlike Harvard undergraduate life, getting in is not the hardest part. Once here, students work 16 hour days, six days a week, with Mondays, not weekends off. Graduates get no degree, only a certificate and perhaps an Equity card if they focussed on acting. Without the same name recognition as Julliard or the Yale School of Drama, real progress is still the biggest asset they can take with them into professional theater's carnivorous job market.

The Institute's faculty and staff help out a bit too. All are A.R.T. affiliates with impressive credentials, and some like Charles Levin have been on TV and appeared in feature films. At their head sits the insuperable Robert Brustein, a godfather to the business and one of the most important voices in American theater today. He founded both the Yale Repertory and American Repertory Theatres, he is Professor of English at Harvard (he requires Institute students to audit his theater classes) and The New Republic retains him as their drama critic.

Brustein's vision for the Institute somewhat resembles Harvard's approach to a liberal arts education--to teach approaches and methods to acting rather than a fixed body of works. He wants theater training to be both visionary and practical, sometimes experimental but always grounded in fundamentals.

Since 1979 when he first came to Harvard, Brustein has managed to transform theater education in much the same way he transformed the Yale School of Drama during his 13 years there, albeit on a smaller scale. The resulting curriculum takes a comprehensive approach to the essentials of staging a show, while liberally conceding that the students are artists, not just apprentices.

The training is exhausting, but the group focus, say students, takes the edge off the stress. Everyone spends mornings together learning cooperative, collaborative theater. They attend classes on all variety of acting methods, voice training, movement, singing, text analysis and dramatic literature. After that, the programs diverge. Dramaturgs research (they contribute to the A.R.T. newsletter and playbills), directors prepare productions (four per year) and actors rehearse. Many of them play supporting roles in the A.R.T. productions in addition to the four projects they do each year entirely by themselves.

Each play gets three months preparation time, yet the atmosphere on this opening night is exceptionally casual. Last minute tidying up around the set, lights testing and the chorus' presence onstage before the show all give it the feel of a dress rehearsal. At second glance, family and friends of the Institute seem to constitute the bulk of the audience. Even publicity has been kept low-key, with no press night provided and reviews kindly prohibited.

Tonight's production is Seamus Heaney's only play, "The Cure at Troy," written in 1991. After the Ex's expressly experimental purpose, the students have trussed up the Nobel laureate's adaptation of Sophocles' "Philoctetes" with smartly tailored costumes, special effects and a few playful hypotheticals all their own: With scripts at hand would the Greek Chorus, like the Three Fates, look more like directors than a traditional chorus merely commenting on the action? Could you make an Odysseus speech look extemporaneous if the chorus frantically flipped through their scripts looking for lines that weren't there?

The students also played with the physical space, common Ex fare, but here again, the experiments were novel. The light table and operator sat on the stage below the audience rather than behind it, and the chorus had their own table to sit at like a committe or a review board. Adding a bit of awkward confusion, two of the actors froze the last moment of the final scene before intermission straight through intermission to the opening of the next act. No one knew when to applaud and when to stretch.

For special effects, Institute productions also get frills like smoke, fire and a moving stage made possible by budgetary scraps the A.R.T. can throw their way. "The Cure at Troy" even has a special surprise made feasible by those titillating Harvard connections everyone loves to work. Heaney himself threw in, probably without his normal speaker's fee, his very own marvelous voice, taped, reciting a bit of verse from his very own play.

It's a good example of how Brustein allows his students to make innovation the only expectation they consistently satisfy. Everything else can feel like a work in progress so long as the audience goes away thinking about conventions overturned. "If we don't encourage our young artists," Brustein recently told the Harvard Gazette, "we will have a country without a civilization, without a culture." Next fall the Institute moves into its 10th year, a landmark for any school, but a referendum of sorts on how well the Institute lives up to its own expectations.