The New York Times Magazine

JUNE 21, 1970

# When The Panther Came to Yale

By ROBERT BRUSTEIN

NEW HAVEN.

WHEN all the tumult began at Yale over the New Haven trial of the Black Panthers, I was deep in rehearsals for a production of "Don Juan" at the Yale Repertory Theater. The conjunction of events seemed to me significant at the time, and nothing that followed was to alter my sense of tortured symbolic contrasts. Social and political issues were helping to mobilize the campus toward a commitment that declared all other activity "irrelevant," and here we were proceeding with the provocative business of trying to formulate works of theatrical art—from another century and civilization, no less.

This uneasy confrontation of culture by politics—of free expression by social action—was occurring in the classroom as well. On the morning that a minority of radical students had decreed a three-day moratorium on academic activity so that the university might discuss the fate of the Panthers, I was holding a seminar with 13 doctor of fine arts students from the School of Drama on John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, "The White Devil." A student report was in progress when through the open window climbed an undergraduate from the Branford Liberation Front (a radical cadre of students from Branford College in whose oakpane-ed Fellows Room our seminar was being held).

"What can we do for you?" I asked.

"You shouldn't be holding classes today," the student replied. "You should be talking and thinking about the Panthers and how to free Bobby Seale."

"Should?" I said.

"There's a reality happening out there," the student replied. "And you should be dealing with it."

"There's a reality in here, too," I answered. "There are 24 hours in each day; our seminar meets two hours a week, so there's plenty of time left for political activity without interrupting us."

One of my students asked the young man to sit

ROBERT BRUSTEIN, dean of the Yale Drama School and artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, is the author of the forthcoming "Revolution as Theater."

PROTEST, YALE, 1970—When Black Panther supporters demanded that the university close indefinitely to show sympathy with the cause, Yale seemed headed for the biggest blowup any U. S. campus has yet seen. The story lies in the fact that it never happened. . . . The author, a faculty member, took part in the highly charged debates that led to the strategy that prevented it.