Greek Tragedy Returns to the Harvard Stage

Seventy-five years ago the University's Greek Department sponsored the first classical play given at Harvard, and the reviewers flocked to see it--even coming from Chicago and London. While the Classics Club's coming anniversary drama will not receive the same world-wide publicity, it will still have a tradition of successful plays to live up to.

The first production, Oedipus the King, began a club tradition of producing plays in their original languages. This year the group will follow suit by presenting Oedipus at Colonus in the Greek. And whether the Sophocles drama is a success or not, it will enter a colorful club's annals along with other productions which have made dramatic history at the University. The story behind these plays are now on exhibit at Widener and Lamont.

It all started in 1880, when a portrayal of Agamemnon in Greek at Balliol College of Oxford stimulated the Harvard Greek department into action.

The next year Oedipus took Harvard and Boston by storm. Tickets sold for $30 on the black market. Its cast has perhaps never been equalled at the University, and the reaction it received probably never will be.

George Riddle, an outsider who had acted with Edwin Booth, portrayed Oedipus. His success in this role was only the first of many he was to receive in the theatre. Curtis Guild, a future Massachusetts Governor, played Tiresias while Owen Wister, later to write The Virginan, was second messenger. J.K. Whittemore, George L. Kittredge, and John Knowles Paine also took part in the production. They were to become a professor of mathematics, a foremost Shakespeare critic, and the founder of the Harvard Music department, respectively.

But while the reviewers raved at the performance, some of the more sedate Boston elements thought morals had been thrown to the winds. One local paper carried the following letter:

'Foul and Revolting'

"The crime upon which the plot of Oedipus rests is so foul and revolting that the base suggestion of it is not to be found in even the worst modern literature.... She (Harvard) it is who planned to gather from hundreds of homes all that is pure and maidenly and guileless, shut it up within her walls and subject it to this hard ordeal."

The CRIMSON, however, had a different view. Its editorial page immediately replied, "The letter in Wednesday's Advertiser on the "morality' of Oedipus is one of the most childish productions we have ever read." Rev. Edward E. Hale also felt the same way and preached in the South Congregational Church that Oedipus was perfectly compatible with Christianity. Even the Lampoon thought the play worthy of attention, but could think of nothing better to do than lampoon it.

The cast itself was impressed with the audience which came to see the show. Riddle said afterwards that he had "faced the most distinguished audience ever assembled in America. In that audience were Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, President Eliot, Bishop Phillips Brooks, Dr. O. W. Holmes, Henry James, the President of Yale, the Governor, and Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles."

'Beauty of Mr. Doyle'

The Greek Department and the Classics Club, however, were to advance to still greater things. Using an all-male cast, as they had done with Oedipus, the group put on The Birds by Aristophanes in 1901 and drew the following comment from a Boston paper: "The ladies looking on could not help exclaiming at the beauty of Mr. Doyle as an attendant. The Queen (A. H. Rice) was nobly demure and enticing."

Five years later the Club moved out to Harvard Stadium to stage its most magnificient spectacle, Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Under a light drizzle, a large audience gathered at the far end of the horseshoe to watch the Greek tragedy produced as it originally was. The setting was complete with horses and chariots, nothing less than a "brillant pageant, typical of the heroic days of ancient Greece," as the Herald enthusiastically said.

Only a few Latin plays kept the organization alive for the next 27 years when the spell was finally broken in 1933 when Harry T. Levin, now Professor of English, took the lead as Odysseus in Philoctetes of Sophocles. Levin, it is said, learned Greek especially for the part.

Three years afterwards the University granted the club approximately a $3,000 subsidy to put on Mosellaria by Plautus for Harvard's Tercentenary anniversary. Only the best was good enough for the staging of this Latin comedy, so the group sent off to New York for costumes and sets.

Next in the club's famous-man tradition was Leonard Bernstein. By setting the music to jazz and using Indian costumes, Bernstein and the boys managed to get universally good reviews--even from the CRIMSON:

'Barnum & Bailey'

"A combination of the imagination of Jules Oline and Salvador Dali could not have concocted such a triumph of weird and other worldly wilderness as kicked up the dust in Sanders Theatre last night. Fantastic masks, brilliant costumes, lighting of all the colors of the rainbow,--it is impossible to describe, but the nearest thing to it is Barnum and Bailey at their best, minus the elephants,"--and so the writer went on.

World War II, however, slowed down Barnum and Bailey as well as the Classics Club, and the ancients went back to their graves until old soldiers, in their turn, began to fade away.

When the ancients returned, it almost seemed as if only the Romans had survived. For nearly a decade the club has put on a yearly Latin play, but no Greek.

Thus Oedipus at Colonus will be the groups first post-war Greek production, and typically the club has returned to Sophocles.

While the great tradition remains 75 years after the first performance, this year's show will have many changes from the original production. Coordinate instruction long ago brought female actresses into female parts. Tickets will also be available for considerably less than a blackmarket $30 price, and the audience which will venture over to Fogg Art Museum probably will be far less famous. Yet 75 years is a long time. Boston has become less sedate, and the performance will be less pretentious, but the idea is certainly as ambitious. Whether the critics rave again remains to be seen. But few will think that Greek drama has died at Harvard after the show has closed.For the 1906 production of Agamemnon, the Harvard Stadium was filled with a rather unusual brand of warrior.