ART founder finds Suffolk a more welcoming home

Robert Brustein says he would have liked to put on his new play at Zero Arrow Theatre, the second stage of the American Repertory Theatre, which he led for many years.

``After `The Onion Cellar' closed, I thought the set was so terrific I wanted them to leave it up and stage plays in that space," he explains. ``I think it would work perfectly as the Mermaid Tavern" in his play, ``The English Channel," which is about Shakespeare and his literary rivals.

But, Brustein says, ``they weren't interested in reading the script." So instead of the ART, the play's premiere will coincide with the reopening of the C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University, where Brustein is a scholar-in-residence this year.

Brustein says his experience is not unique. ``The struggle for playwrights today is not the writing, but the marketing of their new work," he explains. At Suffolk, Brustein says he finds himself surrounded by friends. Marilyn Plotkins, the head of the university's theater department, wrote a book about the ART called ``The Brustein Years." ``English Channel" director and Suffolk associate professor Wes Savick was one of Brustein's students.

What of the feeling of letting go of the theater company he launched more than two decades ago? ``I've started several theater companies throughout my career," Brustein says, ``and change is good. I think I got out at the right time, though. The bureaucracies can stifle creativity."

Although he didn't want to discuss the current search for a new artistic director at the ART (``That's another story for another time"), Brustein did say he was disappointed with some of this season's selections there.