Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Brustein

Brustein’s line is a quiet provocation aimed at two comfortable temptations: institutional vanity and audience pandering. By insisting a theater should neither “please itself” nor “even…its audience,” he flips the usual customer-service logic on its head. The shock value isn’t in dismissing audiences, but in demoting them from being the theater’s boss. In Brustein’s framework, the theater becomes an engine for artists, not a mirror for donors, boards, critics, or ticket-buyers.

“Serve talent” is doing a lot of work. It’s not romantic fluff about genius; it’s an argument about infrastructure. Talent needs rehearsal time, risk budgets, dramaturgy, apprenticeships, a sane calendar, and leadership willing to absorb short-term backlash. Brustein, a major American theater educator and institutional builder, is speaking from the long view: art ecosystems collapse when they optimize for applause metrics. A theater that exists to flatter its own brand grows cautious and self-referential. A theater that exists to please its audience too literally becomes a content factory, chasing comfort and familiarity because those sell.

The subtext is disciplinary: artists, too, are being warned. “Serving talent” isn’t the same as indulging it. It implies standards, craft, and a willingness to tell performers and directors “no” when work isn’t ready. Brustein’s ideal theater is a steward: it protects experimentation from market panic while holding artists to rigor. The bet is that audiences are ultimately served best indirectly, by institutions brave enough to prioritize the conditions that make great work possible in the first place.