Robert Brustein, theater critic and pioneer who founded stage programs for Yale and Harvard, dies

By MARK KENNEDY
AP Drama Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The theatrical world has lost a giant. Robert Brustein was a critic and playwright who founded two of the leading regional theaters in the country. He died Sunday at the age of 96. Brustein was known as a passionate and provocative theater advocate who pushed for boundary-breaking works and for classics to be adventurously modernized. He founded both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard. He was a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University, a professor of English emeritus at Harvard University and longtime critic at The New Republic.