Letters to a Young Actor

Robert Brustein is a theatre giant and a prolific artist. His devotion to the integrity of theatre both as an art form and a sacred tradition has placed him alongside giants like Uta Hagen, Stella Adler, and Lee Strasberg. Giants whose names you probably don't recognize because they have rarely worked in film, such was there devotion to the theatre. He has published numerous works on the theatre, his own adaptations of major plays, and his memoirs. He has worked as an actor, director, playwright, and critic. His career is a trail of peaks which would leave anyone in the theatre envious.

And yet there is this. This Letters to a Young Actor thing (I hesitate to call it a book). It is a spurious collection of name-dropping anecdotes that goes nowhere, carelessly balanced somewhere between a nauseatingly reminiscent memoir and a self-help book geared to high school-level theatre teachers. It jumps so quickly from quip to quip that it reads more like a drunk hunched over a bar as he recounts the tales of his former exploits like some discarded Billy Joel song than as the inspiring and reinvigorating tome for actors that it purports to be.

If Brustein had taken the time to linger over any of the stories of his students long enough to make a point some moisture may indeed have been drawn from this stone. He is gracious enough to admit at one far-too-late point that he has 'wandered a bit' but by that time so have you. As he gets more wrapped up in telling us how good Meryl Streep is or how whatever it was that made him want to be an actor the more you will drift away in the manner you do as grandpa's stories become longer and his train of thought jumps the track. He spends too much of his time looking backwards recounting memories now filtered as through a Vaseline-smeared lens and almost none on finding any relevance within these digressions for the young actor reading, patiently waiting, for some sage advice.

In between anecdotes that often begin with "A good friend of mine," Brustein takes the time to make sure you understand the idealism and esteem he still holds for the theatre. These moments are when he is at his most lucid and enjoyable and it is clear that these are the moments that he is enjoying the most himself. His reverence is admirable and it's only too bad that it is presented in such a poor framework. The audience this is geared to is too young to know who he is and for them to read this without an already established appreciation for the theatre he reveres is to squelch it before it begins.

As an actor and a lover of theatre myself I looked forward with great anticipation to these 'letters'. It is not with an easy hand that I denounce it but it is quite easy for me to recommend Brusteins adaptations of Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, and Strindberg. He has collected far greater writings with much more depth and it is merely this, this Letters to a Young Actor which should be passed over.