Robert Brustein, an advocate for nonprofit theater, where he served at various times as critic, teacher, producer, director, playwright and actor, died on Oct. 29 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96.

Mr. Brustein was dean of the drama school at Yale and founded and ran the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, producing well over 100 plays. He taught at both institutions. He also reviewed stage productions for The New Republic for more than 50 years.

In many books and in countless newspaper and magazine articles, he argued for brave theater, intellectual theater, non-pandering theater, and he worried that the art form was being attenuated by the profit motive.

“The basic aim of the commercial theater is to make a profit,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990. “The basic aim of noncommercial theater, in its ideal form, is to create the condition whereby works of art can be known. And I don’t think these are compatible aims.”

As erudite and contentious as ever, Mr. Brustein continued to bemoan the state of theater in his later years. “…Our values have somehow gotten very skewed, and we’ve gone back — if we ever left it — to the notion that success is the highest value in this country. Not integrity, not quality, not intelligence, not spirit, not soul. Success, financial success. And this is a heartbreaker.”