The 3-Way Battle of the Drama Reviews

The Harvard community is full of theatre nuts. When a quirk of scheduling put four shows in competition last Saturday, three of them sold out and the fourth came within a few seats of doing so. Four shows, instead of the usual three, squeeze into the Loeb this fall and there is talk of doing five in the spring. Only one or two Houses are so moribund dramatically that they won't stage at least one show this year, and Adams House may put on as many as four.

But nothing is going to convince me that there is a group of people anywhere in the world who want to get up in the morning and read through 24 reviews of plays and movies.

Harvard's drama-review magazines have had as noble intentions and as few accomplishments as any of the community's enormous pile of publications. Their original purpose was to free Harvard drama from the tyranny of newspaper reviewers unversed in theatrical traditions or techniques. Writers with dramatic experience, the reviews' founders felt, would be appreciated by the theatre-loving public and would be able to offer sound criticism to performers.

But the people who put on plays at Harvard are a fairly homogeneous lot, and try as they might to avoid it, the editors found themselves the victims of in-groupitis. Reviews ranged from the spectacularly pedantic to the embarrassingly personal. Old friends and violent enemies reviewed each other. Junior members of the English department kowtowed before professors doubling as performers or directors.

Worse, the magazines were unable to free thmselves from the most aggravating difficulty of newspaper reviews -- the hasty thought and hasty writing that are necessary when a reviewer rushes back from a performance and bangs out his article against the pressure of a deadline. The magazines all decided to go in for the same-night reviews of Loeb since only on first nights could a large enough crew be assembled to type, mimeograph, and staple together the rough-paper journals.

This fall, however, the Harvard Drama Review has made its escape from the domination of the stapler into a slick-paper format, written and assembled at greater leisure. Joel Silverstein, the editor, has put together the most intelligent collection of critics any of these magazines has ever had, and the reviews, though still erratic, have been far better on the average.

But the best thing about the magazine has been its departure from the traditional review-on-review format. In his first two issues, Silverstein has assembled an original play, and two long analyses of Jean-Lue Godard's recent films. Silverstein says that the future issues will contain more scripts and more reflective articles.

If he can maintain the quality of these first pieces, the magazine will be something to look forward to. The play, David Cole's The Icefield of the Absolute Encounter, is a far-above-average student script, the kind of play there has never been a satisfactory way of presenting to the college. Single performances in the Experimental Theatre, usually by inexperienced casts, rarely do justice to original plays. If Harvard's dramatists have a collective fault, it is trying to cram too much intellectualizing into their scripts -- the dialogue washes over audiences, leaving them confused. If the Drama Review continues to print plays, it will offer Harvard's playwrights infinitely more convenient access to the very critical denizens of the theatre community.

The most hopeful sign in the magazine to date is John A. William's article on Godard in the second issue. Williams writes so lucidly that he's sure to be bounced from the movie-crtics' union. He has synthesized aspects of four of Godard's movies well enough that his points are clear to a reader who has seen none of them, and interesting to one who has analyzed them all.

Since they're printing better-quality material, the editors of the Drama Review should tighten up their own publishing standards. None of the pieces so far has been carefully edited, and the printing, although in an attractive new type-face, is occasionally a shambles.

But the Harvard Drama Review now lords it far above its competition, which still concentrates on the shows around Harvard. The five-year-old Dunster Drama Review's articles are getting shorter and shorter, and its writing worse and worse. Theatrically experienced people no longer write its reviews, nor is its academic criticism interesting enough to give the magazine any reason for a continued existence.

The Quincy Drama Review, born last week, apparently depends largely on the energy of its editor, Randall McLeod, who wrote slightly more than a third of the first issue. McLeod, however, is not a good enough writer to carry the magazine by himself. His interview with Robert Chapman is a good idea, well carried out (and certainly the drama reviews ought to offer some comment on the operations of the Loeb). But McLeod's other piece, a discussion of the set for The Tempest, is rendered incomprehensible by the lack of a diagram, and the reviews are undistinguished.

It may be that the magazine simply suffered from first-issue problems. We now know, at any rate, that there's no reason it can't get better. Joel Silverstein and his fellow editors have proved this fall that 12 pieces of paper can be a student drama review and a valuable magazine at the same time.