IN HIS LATEST BOOK, Making Scenes. Robert S. Brustein, director of the American Repertory Theater (ART), describes how he gathered his tribe from the Yale Rep in 1979 and led them to Cambridge, a land of milk and honey, and Harvard, an enlightened temple of learning. "I ambled through the town, admiring the openness of the Harvard campus, marveling at the vitality and variety of Harvard Square...." he writes about a 1978 visit while on tour with the Yale Rep. In a letter he sent Dean Rosovsky first proposing the move to Harvard, he wrote. "I have always been convinced that Cambridge in general, and Harvard in particular, are the ideal locations in America for the kind of serious intellectual-professional activity I have been describing."

After two years here and a season and a half of ART plays at the Loeb Drama Center, it would be surprising if Brustein didn't feel like toning down his enthusiasm a bit. The ART has had its successes--paramount among them, the twin achievement of introducing a high-quality non-commercial repertory theater to a city that badly needed it, and creating undergraduate theater courses in a University that has shunned them in the past. In both cases, the success and failure of individual productions and courses matters less than the survival and growth of the company and the curriculum. The ART has solid roots: blossoms will only be a matter of time.

The troublesome question already emerging from the brief spell of this company's residence at Harvard is neither artistic--are the shows good or bad?--nor academic--do the courses do their job? It lies between these two concerns, in a grey area where the professional and academic ideals of theater clash.

THE PROBLEM, surprisingly, is not friction: with undergraduates. When news of Brustein's impending arrival at Harvard first leaked out two years ago, some students heard reports of Brustein's insensitivity to undergraduate needs at Yale, and feared a repeat performance. The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club opposed his appointment. But the HRDC board members missed the point: Brustein the theater director and English professor at Harvard would naturally feel more responsibility towards undergraduates than Brustein the graduate dean at Yale. So far, in his new post. Brustein has apparently assured most of the student theater community that he has an open door and a willing ear.

Some students also suggested the ART's arrival would inhibit undergraduate drama by reducing the number of student productions at the Loeb from seven to four a year. The numbers do tell a tale of reduced opportunity for students: but, in truth, the Loeb has swallowed up student productions in the past far more often than student talent has managed to fill its confines. A huge theater, it tends to dwarf mediocrity into oblivion.

This year showed that four Mainstage productions is plenty of room for student actors, designers and directors to show off their talents. There's also been a side benefit: by pushing over-ambitious students into the more manageable confines of the Loeb's versatile Experimental Theater, the ART's presence has provoked a true renaissance there. The spring season boasted mostly first-rate productions, and two in particular that rivalled the best I've seen, on the Mainstage or off--Bill Rauch's The Visit and David Edelstein's The Father.

Undergraduates already owe the ART a great deal. Students have performed many small parts in ART shows and a couple of middling ones; no doubt as the acting curriculum expands, and they take advantage of it, they will move into more prominent roles. The existence of that curriculum itself is a boon made possible only through the presence of Brustein and his company. The general survey course offered this year will need revision to be successful; the more advanced acting, directing and criticism courses, however, all went far towards proving that theater is a valid, important academic pursuit.

BUT BRUSTEIN'S VISION of the benefits theater and university offer each other goes beyond the details of courses and shows. The exchange is meant to be scholarly, intellectual, academic in the most benign sense: the university shelters the theater, gives it space, limited financial support, and a presumably interested audience; the theater gives the university a "living library" of drama for its members to consult.

"Just as no one would dream of teaching Dostoyevsky or Hegel without access to their books in Widener, so no one could properly teach Sophocles or Shakespeare without access to their plays on the stage," Brustein writes in Making Scenes. This is sound reasoning to anyone who understands the difference between studying dramatic texts and studying drama. But if the ART is presenting itself as a sort of dramatic library, much of the Harvard faculty seems to believe that its texts are corrupted.

I first became aware of faculty dissatisfaction with ART last fall during the run of Andrei Belgrader's farcical production of As You Like It. I had reviewed the show favorably--it seemed to poke fun at pastoral conventions no one today can stomach, in the same spirit Shakespeare had half-mocked them in his writing. It was a wild show, full of excesses, including a Hymen with four breasts and phalluses for hair, but it brought As You Like It to life on stage more fully than more cautious productions.

Several acquaintances on the faculty mentioned that the English department was "up in arms" over the production, and, in fact, later that fall several Faculty members participated in a debate with ART personnel at a Monday night forum at the Loeb over how Shakespeare ought to be produced. The preoccupation of that debate--fidelity to the text--was echoed this spring by Noel Lord Annan of the University of London, invited here by the English Department. Faculty here, directly, and Annan, indirectly, were criticizing Brustein and his theater for abandoning their duty to the author in orgies of directorial license.

The problem is, everyone believes in the text. Enshrining the words begs the far more important question: what do you do with them? The academic can ponder this without forcing the issue, but the director faces it each working day. If you search back in Brustein's writings to his earlier, theoretical broadsides like "No More Master-pieces," you'll find there an outspoken defense of the text against directorial depredations. Brustein argued that the text was the director's treasure house--by mastering it, he could find the appropriate way to direct a play, the right metaphors, emphases and designs. The only other options are to impose external ideas on the play's words--abhorrent. I think, to ART professionals and Harvard faculty alike--or not to direct at all. Some academics might dream about that--ideal communication between playwright and audience, with no interference from pesky directors--but they're thinking of lyric poetry, not drama. The modern theater needs its directors: they should be disciplined to become the text's students, not its slaves.

HERE'S A BRIEF LOOK at the high points of the ART's season-and-a-half record, with attention to how closely the company and director followed or strayed from the given text:

* A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Alvin Epstein. The premier ART production--revived from the Yale years--stripped away decades' worth of accumulated glitter from Shakespeare's play, revealing a darker fairy world than we're used to. Epstein uncovered hidden streams of conflict--between fairy and fairy, fairy and man, man and woman--with the aid of Purcell's fine-woven Baroque score. These emphases, however, were just that; there were no placards. Costumes and sets had a somber beauty. No one could have left the Loeb feeling Shakespeare's text had been tampered with or betrayed.

* The Inspector General, directed by Peter Sellars '80. In his best--and last--production here, Sellars picked up the stone of politically-influenced readings of Gogol's play and found a bed of grotesque worms and grubs underneath. Sellars made Gogol's townspeople universal types of small-mindedness, highlighted by every variety of physical and spiritual deformity. And he did so through an almost too-painstaking devotion to his author's words: the new translation he used rendered literally Gogol's Russian folk adages and gnarled figures of speech. The translation missed occasionally and frequently hit--but the production cannot be faulted for infidelity to the author.