There's No Business . . .

For most theatergoers last week it was a choice between a good production of Shakespeare's bloodiest and an excellent evening of Menotti. Next week it will be Orpheus and Patience on one hand and selected O'Neill on the other. Many who would like to attend all the productions will only see two or three of them, and each show will cut into the other's ticket sales. But this is nothing: last spring theatrical activities vacillated between a choke of four and five shows one weekend and none the next, forcing an alternate glut and fast on theatergoers. As good a production as the freshman Twelfth Night never made it out of the red because of the overwhelming competition of Gilbert and Sullivan, Sartre and Chekov. Some kind of organization, or regulation of drama at Harvard is necessary to make the "drama renaissance" more a flowering and less a mushrooming.

If the HDC, being the most prominent of the drama groups, would set up a kind of master calendar on which the various companies could mark their production nights, there might be more cooperation and less coincidence. Of course it is impossible to assign each production a solo, unrivaled date since some dates (after hour exams, for instance) draw bigger audiences than others, and there are periods when performers can't afford time away from their studies. But certainly some means of smoothing out the peaks and lows of the theatrical cycle, such as a big calendar accessible to all groups, hanging in the HDC office, would be more efficient than the present gentlemen's agreements among directors, which often don't work out.

By establishing such an arrangement, the HDC would help itself as well as the smaller organizations, and would help curtail the cut-throat competition that is now developing out of this polarization of productions.