The College and the Loeb

One does not scold infants for fear of inducing a trauma, but the Loeb Drama Center, the wayward son of Harvard drama, is old enough now to have its faults pointed out. After a full term with the new theatre, disturbing and pernicious tendencies can be discerned in both its administration and its general effect on College drama.

Always in the background lurks the question of whether the Faculty Committee on Drama is seeking professional quality production or competent and sometimes inspired student amateurism. But there are more specific problems. First, the Student-Faculty Advisory Committee has violated its own announced rules in the selection of spring productions. Official releases have stated that the selection committee would consider only programs which have received the nomination and thus the backing of a recognized undergraduate organization. Yet they not only allowed but encouraged the two directors whose plays were nominated by the Harvard Dramatic Club to change their plays during the process of presentation to the committee. Thus the plays which the committee considered had no club backing.

While it is not reasonable to expect the College to give undergraduate organizations carte blanche over productions in the Loeb, it is not only reasonable but necessary for healthy theatre that the initiative for productions begin with a group of undergraduates and not arise from some closed-session bargaining between the Faculty committee and certain favored undergraduates.

A production requires the dedicated support of a large number of people who receive no compensation except satisfaction in having been part of a creative venture; the selection of the play should be a part of this process. A roster of the plays presented before the advent of the Loeb and solely on student initiative shows a variety and quality that leave no cause for now depriving interested students of the right of choice; for the committee to usurp this right under a cloak of doing otherwise is both unwise and dishonest.

Now what exactly is the Loeb committee striving for? Must productions on the main stage of the Loeb be of professional quality in order, as the phrase goes, to meet the challenge of the facilities now available? Or will the Loeb continue the tradition of highly talented amateur production with the new theatre's facilities merely an aid? In effect, the Faculty committee appears to have chosen an unhappy compromise. Through virtually hand-picked plays, close supervision of design and execution, and the allowing of sometimes wholesale importation of actors who are not undergraduates and who often have no association with Harvard, the committee is arriving at a situation neither amateur nor professional. They are not, however, arriving at a College theatre. They are not only disregarding many of their own pronouncements about the new theatre, they are also denying the very tradition which led to the construction of the Loeb.

Some Yale students up for The Game pronounced the name of the new theatre "Low-Ebb," but Yalies have no room to talk. At Yale there is only one undergraduate are producing organization, the Dreamt. There are no "outside" shows. The result is often productions technically superb and dramatically bland. Harvard drama in the past has successfully avoided this monolithic structure with its resulting inflexibility. Worthwhile productions have been staged in unlikely places through the intense efforts of a handful of interested students.

But with the coming of the Loeb, this vitality could be lost. Already there is in the HDC a group that favors loosening of organizational ties through the club's co-operation and perhaps co-sponsorship with other groups. Their ultimate aim is apparently a single large body of actors and technicians orbiting about the Loeb under the general heading of Harvard Dramatic Club. Their aim is honorable: they feel such a single group would give undergraduates a stronger hand in bargaining with the theatre's administration. But certainly there are objections and alternatives to their proposal. The multiplicity of producing organizations has been one of the primary reasons for the vitality of Harvard theatre. A play requires a large number of students for production, but not a majority of the theatre community. In the past a director and producer, when unable to obtain the backing of one group, has been able to turn to another. A production could never be forever damned by a single organization.

Sometime last year a member of the Faculty theatre committee said that the Loeb should be regarded merely as an additional facility for drama, not as the sole facility. Subsequent events and the overwhelming technical superiority of the Loeb make the realization of this sentiment difficult but not impossible. It is true that the choice of other theatres is small; the Pi Eta theatre is no longer available and there are difficulties in using Agassiz. But if undergraduate groups are to escape the collective Faculty thumb and maintain more than an appearance of independent control they must assert their ability to produce elsewhere.

The HDC faces exactly this choice now; only one of its proposed spring shows was accepted by the Loeb Student-Faculty Advisory Committee. Unless the club's members are resigned either to accept the dictates of the committee or to strive for a Harvard dramatic octopus, they should present their second play outside the Loeb. After all, plays have been given in the Fogg Museum courtyard.