Glenn Anders, Guild Star, Admires Harvard Indifference on Visit--Calls Proper Acting of O'Neill's Drama Difficult

"I had lunch at the Hasty Pudding in Cambridge today," said Glenn Anders, prominent New York stage star and one of the leading players in the Theatre Guild's presentation of Eugene O'Neill's "Strange Interlude", which is now being given at the Quincy Theatre following its recent ban in Boston.

"It was not my first visit to Harvard", he continued, "but it was my first visit to the Pudding. One doesn't find much warmth at your college, but rather an air of aloofness, which I like a great deal.

"I would much prefer lunching among the students in Cambridge to going to stuffy Boston parties. I'm not ancient, and I hate being regarded as a venerable member of the cast of 'Strange Interlude', complained Anders, who plays the 'role of Darrell', the doctor, in O'Neill's work.

"At Quincy we are finding it very difficult to play 'Strange Interlude' as it should be done. To begin with, we were accustomed to the small John Golden Theatre in New York, and find a motion picture theatre, which we are forced to use in Quincy, a bad place to put across our lines. Can you imagine shouting the asides of 'Strange Interlude' so as to make them heard in a barn of a theatre, after being accustomed to an auditorium of the most informal sort?

"A year of playing the part has also made a proper performance of the drama more difficult", he continued. "If you are familiar with the structure of 'Strange Interlude', you know that O'Neill's characters speak their thoughts in asides, these thoughts coming between speeches of entirely different import. Our difficulty, after playing the parts so long, is that we find ourselves listening to the asides, which, being thoughts, are obviously not meant for us as persons in the play. The result is that, unless we watch ourselves closely, we are in danger of misreading our next lines. When the play began its run this break was not possible. Constant performance, however, has made it necessary for us to avoid listening to the thoughts, and concentrate on the main speeches.

"Boston censors are peculiar; they banned our play, and let 'Volpone', in Zweig's version of Ben Jonson's rare bit, run merrily on when the Guild presented it here last spring. I don't see that 'Strange Interlude' is as bad for public consumption as 'Volpone'. Perhaps Ben Jonson's bad taste is classic, while Eugene O'Neill's is--well, the Boston censors have their opinion, it seems.