Remembering Robert Brustein,

When Robert Brustein died, at ninety-six, he concluded not one but four stunning careers. A critic at The New Republic, off and on, for more than forty years, he was a university professor who founded two major theatres—the Yale Repertory Theatre, in New Haven, and the American Repertory Theatre, at Harvard. He authored more than a dozen books and produced hundreds of plays. Along the way, he supported and championed an entire American theatrical pantheon, including the playwrights David Mamet and Suzan-Lori Parks, directors such as Robert Wilson and JoAnne Akalaitis, and actors like Cherry Jones, F. Murray Abraham, and Meryl Streep. He himself was also a playwright: my favorite work of his is a klezmer-infused adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Shlemiel the First,” produced at the A.R.T. in 1994.