Harvard Theater: Puritans in Greasepaint

In the late fall of 1762 seven stern-faced Puritans gathered in the drafty study of President Holyoke's house to ponder a recent rash of "frivolity" fast spreading through the Yard. After an hour of heated discourse the Corporation unanimously ruled:

"Whereas the attending upon stage plays, interludes and theatrical entertainments tends greatly to corrupt the morals of a people and particularly with respect to the college must needs . . . be highly detrimental to their learning by taking off their minds from their studies, drawing them into such company as may be very ensnaring to them, expensive to their parents and tending to many other disorders: Therefore, Voted that if any undergraduate shall presume to be an actor in, a spectator at, or any ways concerned in any such . . . plays . . . in the town of Cambridge or elsewhere he shall for the first offense be degraded according to the discretion of the President and Tutors and for repeated offense shall be rusticated or expelled."

In the late fall of 1952, 190 years later, this severe regulation was still on the books and although the penalties had been allowed to lapse, its basic bent, though mellowed over time into a sort of apathy, lingered on in the University's administration.

Pusey Brings Hope

In the late fall of 1953, with the statute still there but a new president in the chair, indications are that the last remnants of this Puritanical crust, have disappeared from all but the record books and that the theater is at last about to emerge as a respected and vital part of University life.

The two centuries of history which lead up to the changes of this year are by no means theatrically arid. Quite the contrary, they are filled with a rich, varied dramatic heritage which, although rarely encouraged and often actively trammeled by the University, has managed to persist.

The existence of theatrical activity at Harvard is evident even before the regulation of 1762 and evinced by the very need for such a regulation. There are written records which show that in 1690 Gustavus Vasa, by Benjamin Colman '92, the first play written by an American, was performed at commencement. This must have had the blessing of the College, though probably not of the Commonwealth, since as early as 1665 there is record of amateurs being summoned to court for presenting a play.

In the 18th century we have the first indication of clandestine theatrical activity among students here. From the diary of Nathaniel Ames '61 come the notations in 1785: "July 6, Cato to perfection;" "July 14, Cato more perfect than before." In 1760 he wrote, "Acted Tancred and Sigismunda for which we are likely to be prosecuted," and, five years later, "Scholars punished at college for acting over the great and last day in a very shocking manner, personating the June, Devil etc."

But shortly after the Corporation ruling of 1762 there are indications that the College did allow some theatrical activity. For in 1765 the regulation was explained "as not to prevent such exercises as shall be performed under the direction of the President and Tutors." Following this there is in the Faculty Records for the '60's a notation that "This day was the Public examination and the Overseers being present, Oliver and Antington were allowed to exhibit a scene in Terence before the Committee, they desiring it, but in Private, in the library none being present but the Committee, the President and Tutors."

The gradual liberalizing of the regulations in the College followed soon after similar changes in Commonwealth law. In 1792, John Gardner came to the defense of the drama in a speech in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in which he said that "the illiberal, unmanly, and despotical act which now prohibits theatrical exhibitions among us, to me, Sir, appears to be the brutal, monstrous, spawn of a sour, envious, morose, malignant and truly benighted superstition." In 1794 the first theater opened in Boston.

But the change did not come at once. In 1794 President Dwight of Yale was speaking for Harvard as well when he said in his "Essay on the Theatre" that "to indulge a taste for playgoing means nothing more or less than the loss of that most valuable treasure, the immortal soul." And as late as 1821 the Faculty Records show that three students were fined ten dollars each for attending the theater in Boston.

Gradually the College's forbidding attitude toward theater softened, and various forms of drama slowly developed here. The two most prevalent forms during most of the early and middle 19th century are at the extremes of the dramatic spectrum: classical plays in either Greek or Latin, and burlesque musicals. The former were produced by a number of Classics clubs, while the latter flourished among a seemingly endless series of social and theatrical organizations. Some like the Harvard Theatricals and Sophomore Theatricals produced one or two shows and folded. Others were more successful. Pi Eta produced an annual musical from 1870 through 1941 and Hasty Pudding Theatricals have run with uninterrupted success since 1844.

Upswing in the 80's

Serious drama in a significant degree began at Harvard in the 1880's. In 1881 the Cercle Francais initiated the annual French play, and shortly afterwards the German and Spanish clubs added their productions. 1844 saw the start of the first College club seriously devoted to productions of English drama: the Harvard chapter of Delta Upsilon which produced Elizabethan comedies through the 1930's. In 1889 the first of a number of Harvard Shakespeare Clubs gave Julius Caesar in Sanders Theater before "a large and representative audience."

The so-called "Golden Age" of Harvard theater began in the 1890's. With the exception of the later days of the Baker Workshop, the two decades straddling the turn of the century were the high-point of theatrical activity at the University. Up to this time the productions had been on a fairly small scale, but in the '90's they became much more ambitious. In 1889 the students of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, by invitation of the Greek Department and with the aid of Harvard actors, presented an elaborate production of Sophocles' Electra to a packed Sanders Theatre. This began a tradition of classical extravaganzas which stirred tremendous enthusiasm at Harvard and throughout the area. The next few years saw production of Phormio and Ocpedipus Rex, culminating in a gigantic Agamemnon in the Stadium in 1908. In 1895 Sanders was transformed into an Elizabethan playhouse for Ben Johnson's The Silent Women. The year before, Union Hall in Boston was jammed to see the Cercle Francais produce Molicre.

The most famous extravaganza of this period came in 1909, with Charles Frohman's presentation in the Stadium of Schiller's Joan of Arc, starring Maude Adams. The production was under the auspices of the German Department and for the benefit of the Germanic Museum. On a balmy June night 15,000 people filled the Classic Horseshoe to watch Miss Adams and a supporting cast of 1,500 calvarymen, soldiers and archers parade across the Battlefield of France, while a hidden orchestra played Beethovan's "Eroica' Symphony.

Other indications of the fascination with the drama during these years were the audience of 1500 persons that crammed Sanders in 1895 to hear a speech by the famous actor Joseph Jefferson, and the great interest in Boston productions which resulted in a series of Harvard nights at downtown theatres. In 1904 the Boston Transcripts could well say, "There is not a University in America in which a numerically appreciable and notably intelligent and finely strung body of students cultivates the arts of the theatre with the eager and usually discriminating zeal of the Harvard students."

In 1907, W. B. Blake went even further when he said in his column, "In perhaps no community of the same size in the whole world is there so close and so intelligent a following of the drama as in and near Harvard Square. There is never an hour of the day or night when plays are not being rehearsed, acted or written." Cataloguing the productions of that year here, Blake counted language plays by the French, German, Spanish and Chinese clubs; an Old English play by the English Club of Radcliffe; an Elizabethan drama by Upsilon, three uncredited productions of modern plays written by Harvard graduates, a group of readings and experimental productions at Radcliffe, in addition to the traditional Hasty Pudding and Pi Eta shows. With this background, Blake strongly denied the need for a Harvard Dramatic Society, the idea for which had been circulating for several years.

Three Major Departures

The next year, in 1908, the Harvard Dramatic Club was formed. The founders felt that among the various University organizations giving theatricals there should be one devoted to the presentation of modern plays by English and American authors. Apparently others agreed with them, since more than 80 men answered the call for an organization meeting. At this meeting three principles were set forth, all of which were significant departures for a theater organization at Harvard: the production of modern, original scripts, the employment of women as actresses (previously female parts had all been played by men), and the use of professional direction.

It is impossible to discuss the origins of the HDC without reference to the activities of George Pierce Baker '87, professor of Dramatic Literature here and unquestionably the most important figure in the history of Harvard theater. The persons who formed the HDC were all students of Baker's; most of them were members of the famed Baker's Dozen which met at his house to discuss the drama over an Edam cheese. It was the need for an organization to produce the plays written for Baker's courses which inspired Edward Sheldon '08 and Edward Eyre Hunt '08 to found the HDC.

But if 1908 was a starting point for the HDC is was just the middle of a long struggle for G. P. Baker. Baker started teaching at Harvard in 1888 as an instructor in elocution, but gradually became interested in the theater. In the 90's he began teaching courses at both Radcliffe and Harvard in the history of English drama from its birth to the present. This in itself was a considerable innovation, since at the turn of the century academic circles did not think of an author still alive as one who could write "literature." English courses of the day ended abruptly with Tennyson. But Baker was concerned with the living theater, not past history; as John Mason Brown says of him, "he kept dramatic literature smudged with greasepaint." Gradually Baker became dissatisfied even with teaching a course about modern dramatists. He was concerned with what could be written and done in the theater, not what had already been done. So in 1902 he asked Harvard to let him teach a course in play-writing. His request was categorically denied.

Radcliffe Says Yes

In desperation Baker then turned to Radcliffe and the Annex said yes. This is not so surprising as it seems, because for a long time Radcliffe had been even more active in the theater than the school across the Common. Formed in 1907, "The Idlers" were by far the most important and active group at Radcliffe, producing a number of highly competent plays each year. In addition there were girls at the 'Cliffe who had considerable dramatic talent and were already doing advanced work in Baker's history courses.

So in 1903 Baker started teaching "English 47" to a selected group of 12 Radcliffe girls. After two years it was obviously a success: and in 1905 Harvard agreed to accept the course, at the same time awarding Baker a professorship in Dramatic Literature. For a number of years both Baker and his students were intrigued by this new experiment, but soon the Radcliffe girls became dissatisfied and petitioned the college for the establishment of an advanced course 47a. Shortly after this was begun, they also formed a 47 Club in which they discussed and read plays on an extracurricular basis. The club in time led to the formation of the famed 47 Workshop whose pin pose was to produce the plays written in 47 and 47a and discussed in the 47 Club. While the 47 Club had been strictly female, the girls invited Harvard men to participate in the new project, and soon the Workshop was the focus of all Harvard theater.

As Baker put it, the Workshop was "not in the usual sense a theater, but rather a working place for the young dramatist, a place in which he has the opportunity to see the play adequately acted before a sympathetic and critical audience." This audience was not the usual crowd which drifts in from the streets. Admission was by in vitiation only and was restricted to "people believed to be deeply interested in such experimentation as the Workshop offers." But more than interest was required of the audience. Within three days after the production the spectator was expected to turn amateur critic and mail in an individual evaluation of the play along with suggestions for its improvement. Lacking University support, except for the provision of space in Massachusetts Hall, the Workshop also depended on the audience for most of its finances. The first season was financed by $500 raised among the members themselves, but from then on all money was raised either through a subscription appeal to the audience or alumni.

While Massachusetts Hall throbbed with activity--like "Berhhardt's heart beating in Priscilla's body" as John Mason Brown described it--people on the outside began to take notice of the productions. Even before the Workshop began Edward Sheldon's play, Salvation Neil, written while Sheldon was still an undergraduate in Baker's course, was discovered by the great American actress Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske and with her interpretation enjoyed a considerable run on Broadway. Soon after, with the founding of the HDC and its presentation of several plays written for Baker's courses, a number of Boston producers became seriously interested in the plays being created at Harvard. With the founding of the Workshop, John Craig, producer at the Castle Square Theater in Boston, initiated the Harvard Prize Play Award, open to Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates, graduates students and alumni of not more than one year. The winner of this annual prize was awarded $250 (with another $250 going to the drama section of the Harvard library) and the promise of production of the prize play for at least a week at the Castle Square. Craig gave the award for six years prior to the war and all six plays proved financially successful. The first, Florence Lincoln's End of the Bridge ran nine weeks, then two weeks in Chicago, and was revived for two weeks in Boston the next year. The third, Frederick Ballard's Believe Me, Xantippo, ran 11 weeks, breaking all previous records for runs at the Castle Square and then moved to New York for 20 weeks in a production starring John Barrymore. After the war Oliver Morosco gave a similar award for two years, following which Richard Herndon established the Belmont Theater Prize on the same terms, from which came Philip Barry's highly successful You and I.

But if the Workshop and its products were acclaimed in Boston and New York, in Cambridge they met with a cold reaction from the University administration. Originally, Baker had hoped that his playwriting courses would prove an opening wedge for allied courses in the dramatic arts. He soon discovered there was no chance of this and concentrated his efforts on persuading the University to build him a theater. Since its inception, the Workshop had used Radcliffe's Agassiz, which was almost totally inadequate for its work. As early as 1914 Baker presented a complete plan for a new theater, urging that the "baffling conditions" under which the Workshop was forced to work be alleviated as quickly as possible. They were not. The University ignored Baker's plea completely. He offered to raise sufficient funds himself, but even this permission was refused. The Corporation was worried that he might approach potential donors it had in mind for other projects.

One of these other projects was the building of the Business School across the Charles. In 1923, when a fire in Massachusetts Hall forced the Workshop out of business temporarily, it at last looked as though the theater might be included in the Business School drive. On sabbatical during that year, Baker waited anxiously for word on this possibility and was finally notified that it had been vetoed. It was reported that one member of the Corporation had said that the inclusion of the theater would "kill the whole project."

Meanwhile, rumors circulated that Baker did not intend to return to Harvard after his sabbatical. Although he denied this, alumni and the CRIMSON began berating the administration for its attitude and warned that if it wanted Baker to remain it would have to do something quickly. "Just why this silent opposition persists is difficult to understand," a CRIMSON editorial said in the fall of 1928. "It may be a native distrust of the strange and the new or it may be an unconscious relic of the conventional point of view toward anything and everything in the slightest way connected with the stage. Both very nearly approach the ridiculous. When the drama has reached a point in its development where its legitimacy as a means of artistic expression has been universally recognized for some hundreds of years, he can be no better than a fool who denies the legitimacy of study of the mechanical details by which expression is achieved." Hermann Hagerdorn '07, New York playwright and former student of Baker's wrote a letter to the CRIMSON calling Baker "a prophet who is without honor in his own country."

Baker Goes to Yale

All this warning went to no avail and on November 26 it was announced that Baker had resigned to accept a position as director of a Yale Drama School to be set up with the gift of a million dollars from E. S. Harkness, a gift which probably had also been offered to Harvard and turned down. The reaction was immediate and indignant. The CRIMSON wrote a vituperative editorial which laid the blame for Baker's resignation squarely at the feet of the President and Overseers and their "shameful neglect" of Baker. "Their guilt must not go unnoticed," the editorial declared, "Not in years has there been such a justified need for an outburst of indignation from every Harvard man against the powers that be in the University."

Reaction outside the University was just as strong. Heywood Broun '10 wrote in the New York World "Harvard fumbles; Yale recovers." Elsewhere ran the headline: "Yale 47-Harvard 0."

Reaction from the alumni was the strongest of all. One representative alumnus wrote to the CRIMSON declaring that Harvard's decision to go ahead with the Business School and ignore the theater means that "money and moneymakers are controlling Harvard policy, that the University is being run by merchants for the benefit of those who aspire to be merchants" and that it is these who are behind "this crass and painful blow at the Arts and the Drama."

Much of this bitterness was beamed at President A. Lawrence Lowell. Lowell was accused of a personal animus towards Baker, but he hastily denied it. "This was not a matter of personal feeling at all; we just felt that the enthusiasm for the drama here at Harvard might very well be enthusiasm for Baker, and that if we spent $700,000 on a theater we might be left with another white elephant like Memorial Hall when Baker was no longer here. We didn't want him to go, but we did hope he would stay on our terms. We hoped he would go on using the facilities at hand until he was ready to retire."

State of Shock

For a few years after Baker's departure Harvard theater was in a state of shock and relatively inactive. Then in 1928, the HDC and the Liberal Union began sounding out student opinion and discovered considerable interest in reviving a study of playwrighting and producing. Reporting this to the administration, they received an altogether unsympathetic reply. It was then that the HDC conceived the idea of an appeal to the literally hundreds of Baker Workshop and other Harvard alumni already active in professional theater.

The American stage in the 1920's and '30's was if not dominated then certainly permeated by Harvard graduates. A partial list of the best known include playwrights Owen Davis '94, Percy McKaye '97, Hermann Hagerdorn '07, Edward Sheldon '03, Sidney Howard, Sp '14-'15, Eugene O'Neill, Sp '14-'15, S. N. Behrman '16, Robert E. Sherwood '18, Philip Barry Gr '19-'20; critics H. T. Parker '90, Van Wyck Brooks '08, Heywood Broun '10, Kenneth Macgowan '11, Robert Benchley '12, Brooks Atkinson '18 and John Mason Brown '23; designers Lee Simonson '09, Robert Edmund Junes '10 and Donald Oenslager '23; actors and actresses Walter Hampden '97, Osgood Perkins '14 and Dorothy Sands; and producers Winthrop Ames '95, Maurice Werthheim '06, George Abbot '12, Richard Aldrich '27 and Theresa Hilburn.

Leaders of the HDC went to New York in 1929, held six conferences with alumni there and returned with promises of full financial support and active participation. Thus it happened that in February 1930 the Cambridge School of the Drama opened with an enrollment of 65. The school had no official connection with the University, although three quarters of its students were also undergraduates at either Harvard or Radcliffe. The administration was entirely in the hands of an alumni board of governors, including Simonson, Abbott, Davis, Macgowan, Jones, Wertheim and Ames. These men formed a visiting faculty which supplemented the permanent staff by coming to Cambridge periodically, when their professional duties allowed, to give lecture series and work with students on productions. This system seemed to strike the perfect balance between the professional and the academic, and there was much optimism about the school's prospects. But it ran for only two years and then folded for lack of financial support. Rumors circulated that the University would have agreed to take over the school had it been a success.

'Golden Age' Ends

With the death of the Cambridge School in 1932 ended the "Golden Age" of theater at Harvard. Fortunately, though, the HDC and other dramatic groups were still enough alive to continue the College's dramatic heritage. The strongest, of course, was the HDC. In the club's early years, it stuck to the policy of producing only plays written by students or recent graduates; but after the first World War HDC decided that it could not compete with the Workshop in this field and went on a new tack. In the next two decades HDC devoted itself almost exclusively to giving American premieres to foreign playwrights, a policy which attracted considerable interest in its productions. Among the foreign writers to whom HDC gave first American productions were Maeterlinck, Guitry, Galsworthy, Cocteau, and A. A. Milne. The club also went out of its way to produce unusual native plays like John Dos Passos' The Moon is a Gong in 1925 and Auden and Isherwood's Dog Beneath the Skin in 1936. During this time the HDC had no theater to work with, moving its productions all over the area from Sanders and Brattle Hall to Worcester's Horticultural Hall and the Boston Academy of Music. But perhaps the most unique setting was the hall of the Germanic Museum where HDC gave 10 striking Christmas miracle plays during the 1930's.

World War II, of course, disrupted dramatic activity at the College, but the war indirectly gave birth to the finest theater group here in the last two decades--the Harvard Veterans Workshop. Back from the wars in 1947 came a group of talented, ambitious students who already had done considerable work in profession-5The above scene is from a dress rehearsal of the 1909 production of Schiller's "Joan of Arc." The star, Maude Adams, is shown at left center. Presented in the Stadium under the auspices of the German Department, this production had a supporting cast of 1,500 calvarymen, bowmen and soldiers and attracted a crowd of over 15,000.