With Harold Scott

Hal Scott sat next to me at lunch last Friday and talked about theatre. There was no need for an "interview": he talked, and other people asked him questions and almost everything he said is worth reprinting. A week before the opening of Indians he was anxious about it, with a kind of anxiety mixed with confidence which marks the professional.

Scott is at home at Harvard. He graduated in 1957, in one of the pre-Loeb classes. As an undergraduate he put on plays "in church basements, common rooms, dining halls, Agassiz, anyplace we could put up a stage." His generation of students agitated, pressured and cajoled Harvard for a theatre center, but never enjoyed the fruits of their persistence. Now Scott has come back to the theatre he helped begin.

Fifteen years out of Harvard, Scott looks back on a career of acting and directing. Of the two, he prefers "whichever I haven't done last." He has directed frequently in university theatres -- Brandeis, Hofstra, Atlanta, Adelphi, U. Conn., as well as with professional companies, and acted in and out of New York.

Scott is an animated conversationalist. He uses his hands his arms, his voice, his inflection to make points, as a good actor will: "The best directors either should be good actors or should understand actors--very few directors do."

Someone asks his opinion of theatre in colleges. "People keep being bored by so much University theatre because they go and see somebody's thesis on the stage." Academics make bad directors, by and large, he thinks, because they approach a script as a printed page, not a work for the stage. They don't understand what to do with actors, with movements, with voices.

Scott the actor and Scott the director are one. As he talks about movement, you remember him stealing the show as the prosecutor in Catonsville Nine, a mediocre script which succeeded more on the audience's sympathy with its political stance than on its artistic merits. Scott's sense of irony, well integrated with his actions, and his fine voice set him apart from the rest of the cast, and provided the only possible reason for paying eight dollars to see the show. When he criticizes the cardboard character of college acting, he speaks as an acknowledged master of the art.

Finally, someone brings up Indians, the play Scott opens with tonight. The woman sitting next to him, who is directing at the Loeb Ex, asks why the play folded on Broadway. Her tone seems to repeat Walter Kerr's dictum that good plays never fold, or even get bad reviews.

Scott jumps to the play's defense. "It was overproduced, in my opinion. We're using some of the original costumes and some of the original props in the play. They were gargantuan. But even if it was overproduced, it was too easily dismissed, despite the social relevance of the play."

Scott waxes intense in defense of Indians, both as a play and as an expression of a monstrous injustice. The treatment of the native American is one of the darkest -- and most often ignored--chapters in this country's history, he says. Tonto and Land o'Lakes butter and every television Western you've ever seen only add ridicule to atrocity. "The play is today's headlines," Scott says. In the Times that day -- the story of an aged Indian kicked, beaten and mutilated to death by a group of drunken whites at a dance.

Scott hopes Indians will not add to the offense Indians have already received in this country. He is nervous about using props like peace pipes and wampum, which are sacred objects. He wants the play to be as realistic, and thus as shocking, as possible. "If you're not shaken up by the end of it then I really have failed."

Indians opened -- and closed -- on Broadway three years ago, to the universal disapproval of the New York critics. Scott calls it "the most important play of the last ten years... You couldn't see the play for all the coming and going." Scott has known the author, Arthur Kopit '59, since their graduate days, although he has not talked to Kopit recently about this production. The play shows touches of the kind of manic wit Kopit displayed in his undergraduate play, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, etc., and also provides the director with some chance for pyrotechnics. Scott's touch should be evident all over this production.

After Harvard, Scott will return to his home in Chelsea, the increasingly fashionable section of Manhattan north of the Village, and to his double career. This summer he directs for the Eugene O'Neill Foundation in Waterford, Conn., which accepts a series of new scripts every year for professional production.