A THEATER GENERAL AND HIS TROUPE

Robert Brustein began his rebellion against the American commercial theater in 1949. Eric Bentley’s book, “The Playwright as Thinker,” stirred Brustein and some of his classmates at the Yale Drama School so deeply that they pooled their money and opened a tiny theater of their own in New York’s East Village.

The theater failed, but the dream of one day creating an American acting company that would produce provocative versions of great classics and daring new dramas did not. Twenty years later, Brustein returned to New Haven and created the Yale Repertory Theatre. When in 1979 the new president of Yale objected to some of his methods, Brustein moved on to Harvard and established the American Repertory Theatre.

In eight seasons here and abroad (they have dared to play Moliere in France) Brustein and his troupers have proved themselves a major force in the resident theater movement. They are pioneers and pace setters--and they are good at what they do.

“The theater must free the audience’s imagination,” Brustein believes. “To do this it must unsettle the audience. It must shatter their usual way of looking at the world. I don’t want to affect just what people think during the day. I want to affect their dreams.”

“The King Stag” and “The Day Room,” which ART will introduce to Los Angeles audiences at the Doolittle Theatre this week, followed by a stand at UC San Diego, are representative of Brustein’s daring. The first, opening Tuesday, is a classic restored and revitalized. The other, opening Wednesday, is a new American drama, provocative, peculiar and in its way, very funny.

Carlo Gozzi wrote “The King Stag” for audiences of his time and place, 18th-Century Italy. In keeping with Brustein’s belief that the classics must be “freshly staged for contemporary audiences,” director Andrei Serban has restaged Gozzi’s fairy tale for audiences of the 20th--and possibly the 21st!--Century, in a translation by Albert Bermel.

The scene is the kingdom of Serendippo, where the good King Deramo, having auditioned lots of plain and pretty candidates for matrimony, decides to marry for love instead of policy, rejecting, among others, the ugly daughter of his ambitious and evil prime minister, Tartaglia.

Because he is afraid of losing power, Tartaglia persuades the King to go hunting in the fabled forest of Miracoli, and there plots to kill him.

The hunt fills the stage with elegant and sometimes awesome creatures of the wood, great cutouts that fly on poles carried by invisible couriers, enchanting and confronting the masked actors. (The costumes, masks and puppets--many of them life-size or larger--are by Julie Taymor.)

In this setting, a magician foils the plot by changing the King into the Prime Minister, forcing each to face the other’s problems in a crisis that is daringly moral and provocative.

“The Day Room,” by Don DeLillo, seems at first to be a conventional modern play. The scene is a semi-private hospital room with two patients, one of whom insists on talking, in the belief that talk opens the mind and the heart. The other patient prefers silence and privacy.

Just when the second fellow begins to talk, the door opens and a stern doctor and nurse appear to capture and take away the chatty one, who, they declare, is an escapee from a wing of the hospital called the Day Room, where the insane are treated.

A few moments later, what had seemed a conventional farce begins to turn into something darker and more mysterious. The “doctor” and the “nurse” are themselves revealed as patients of the same Day Room. The scene shifts to what may be the Day Room and/or may be a motel in the neighborhood, where at least some of the characters are members of an acting troupe, here to put on a play.

First produced last April at Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatre, this Pirandellian romp proved to be so perplexing and at the same time so entertaining that when a false alarm of fire was sounded, the audience took it as part of the action and until the actors began leaving the stage, sat and stared.

The dominant force at ART is the director, not the author. Brustein has, in effect, brought into the American theater the European concept of the auteur. His directors are encouraged to develop their own concepts of how a production should be staged. When that concept proves to be controversial, he supports them against whatever forces may be marshaled in protest.

In the company’s first full season Lee Breuer staged a production of Wedekind’s “Lulu” that was so far out, so incomprehensible in its succession of scenes and, at the opening, so jumbled, that playgoers walked out in indignation--and some of them never came back.

Brustein acknowledged the troubling fact that not all playgoers, even in Cambridge, were ready for that kind of wildly unconventional and unstructured drama. After that, he moved some of his most experimental shows into smaller theatres, where season subscribers might see them, or not, as a matter of choice.

But he himself backed Breuer forthrightly. When one of his other auteurs, JoAnne Akalaitis, staged Beckett’s “Endgame” as if the events were taking place in a decimated New York subway underground after a nuclear war, he defended her against Samuel Beckett himself, who roared in protest, by cable, across the Atlantic.

The ART production, in that instance, was threatened with closing by Beckett’s representatives. Brustein prepared to go to court against them, until somebody persuaded the author to let the play go on with a program insert stating that it wasn’t his play. His or not, it was most impressive.

Peter Sellars, whom Brustein discovered as a Harvard undergraduate, was similarly supported when he put on a spectacular but silly version of Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” and then was encouraged and applauded for a bold and beautiful production of Handel’s opera, “Orlando.”

Susan Sontag put on a charming but controversial production of “Jacques and His Master,” by Milan Kundera, and Jonathan Miller staged Sheridan’s “School for Scandal” which was not in the least charming and was also controversial. (Los Angeles saw it at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.) Brustein stood tall for both his auteurs.

The most accomplished, the most brilliant and surely the most adventurous of all the Brustein auteurs is Robert Wilson, to whom the ART has given a stage and a highly supportive audience, trained now by Brustein to appreciate dramatic adventures.

Wilson’s production of “the CIVIL WarS,” written with Heiner Mueller, proved to be a stunning succession of still pictures that Brustein described as “quite a different dramatic experience than the linear drama of psychological character and casual action.” Last year, Wilson put on a new and eerie version of Euripides’ “Alcestis.” This fall, he will be back at the Loeb with “The Knee Plays”--also to be seen at the Doolittle this month (Oct. 14-19.)

The Brustein acting company is small, and there are no names, no stars: this, again, has been part of the leader’s dream since Yale student days. “We tried to apply the collective company idea to an ambitious range of plays. Our model was not the English repertory system but rather that of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.”

The ART is such an ensemble, each actor playing a variety of roles, fat or slight; all dedicated to a success that can be measured not by hits or flops but by full seasons of success. In Boston and Cambridge, they have made it big.