"[8] He was educated at The High School of Music & Art,[9] and Amherst College, where he received a BA in 1948[10] (briefly studying in the medieval history graduate program), the Yale School of Drama for a year studying dramatic literature and criticism, and Columbia University, where he received an MA in 1950, and a PhD in 1957, in dramatic literature and cultural criticism, supervised by Lionel Trilling.

[11] During a break from university, he served in the Merchant Marine on tankers and Victory ships, and later at Kings Point Academy on Long Island.

[12] After teaching at Cornell University, Vassar College, and Columbia, where he became a full professor of dramatic literature in the English department, he became Dean of the Yale School of Drama in 1966, and served in that position until 1979.

In 1996 and 1997, Brustein was involved in an extended public debate – through their essays, speeches and personal appearances – with African-American playwright August Wilson about multiculturalism, color-blind casting, and other issues where race impacts on the craft and practice of theatre in America.

[30][31][32][33][34] "The feud," wrote Bruce Weber in the New York Times, "... reached a climax in 1997 with an extraordinary public debate in front of a sold-out house at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan.

During his tenure at ART, Brustein wrote eleven adaptations, including Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck,[38] The Master Builder,[39] and When We Dead Awaken, the last directed by Robert Wilson; Three Farces and a Funeral,[40] adapted from the works and life of Anton Chekhov; Luigi Pirandello's Enrico IV;[41] and Brustein's final production at ART, Lysistrata[42] by Aristophanes, directed by Andrei Serban.

Adaptations which he also directed while at ART include a Pirandello trilogy: Six Characters in Search of an Author,[43] which won the Boston Theatre Award for Best Production of 1996, Right You Are (If You Think You Are), and Tonight We Improvise; Ibsen's Ghosts,[44][45] Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Strindberg's The Father, and Thomas Middleton's The Changeling.

[47][48] After the original presentation in 1994 at ART[49] and in Philadelphia at the American Music Theatre Festival, who co-produced the show, Shlemiel the First was revived several times in Cambridge and subsequently played at the Lincoln Center Serious Fun Festival, the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco,[50] and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles,[51] as well as touring theatres on the east coast of Florida and in Stamford, Connecticut.

[55] Brustein's full-length plays include Demons, Nobody Dies on Friday, The Face Lift, Spring Forward, Fall Back, and his Shakespeare Trilogy The English Channel, Mortal Terror, and "The Last Will."

Nobody Dies on Friday was given its world premiere in the same series[56] and was presented at the Singapore Arts Festival and the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow.

[61] Brustein was also the author of Doctor Hippocrates is Out: Please Leave a Message an anthology of theatrical and cinematic satire on medicine and physicians, commissioned by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement for its 2008 convention in Nashville.