
Winner of Five Obies, now back in print after fifteen years, a stage adaptation of classic stories by Hawthorne and Melville
In the three plays in The Old Glory--Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno--the most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. / England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno, take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno, the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge."Robert Sanford Brustein (born April 21, 1927 in New York City) is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright and educator. He founded both Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a Creative Consultant, and has been the theatre critic for The New Republic since 1959. He comments on politics for the Huffington Post.
Brustein is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and in 2002 was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2003 he served as a Senior Fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and in 2004 and 2005 was a senior fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts Arts Journalism Institute in Theatre and Musical Theatre at the University of Southern California.
Robert Brustein is married to Doreen Beinart, and has one son, Daniel Brustein, and two stepchildren, Peter Beinart and Jean Beinart Stern.
Robert Sanford Brustein (born April 21, 1927 in New York City) is an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright and educator. He founded both Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains a Creative Consultant, and has been the theatre critic for The New Republic since 1959. He comments on politics for the Huffington Post.
Brustein is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University and a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and in 2002 was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2003 he served as a Senior Fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, and in 2004 and 2005 was a senior fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts Arts Journalism Institute in Theatre and Musical Theatre at the University of Southern California. Robert Brustein is married to Doreen Beinart, and has one son, Daniel Brustein, and two stepchildren, Peter Beinart and Jean Beinart Stern.