Students of Today

TWO YEARS AGO Enrique Lopez gathered together the most galling anecdotes about Harvard students and their legendary conceit he could find. He saran-wrapped the stories in discussions about the privilege of the exceptional, and arranged the packages in neat rows labelled with the names of the famous. He offered the formless, appalling concoction as The Harvard Mystique, more like a warmed-over TV dinner than a book, and called it an investigation of the conditions of acceptance into, attendance, and graduation from the oldest of Ivy League institutions.

The urge to explain, explicate, examine, describe, capture, evoke, demythify, demystify, dismantle and put together again a university has obsessed others, with unspectacular results. Recognizing this vacuum, a handful of students has taken it upon itself to present the machinery inside the Harvard robot. Humorously. Entertainingly. Unfrivolously.

Despite the unwieldly nature of the topic, the writers, producers, and the cast of Leaders of Tomorrow have succeeded in bringing the school to the stage. They have wrestled the Harvard experience, thinly veiled, into episodes in the lives of five students at Ivy League University. They neatly sidestep the first pitfall of the project: defining its scope. Equally ingenious in defining its form, their answer to the theatrical question, "What is Harvard?" becomes a cohesive production of songs, dance numbers, skits and monologues.

Leaders of Tomorrow shows people shaped little by their classes, activities, and the ostensible influences a college bears on its students. These leaders present a veneer to the world and to each other, which slowly disappears as graduation approaches, replaced by an embryonic but certain grasp of their own attitudes, feelings and opinions. Julie Carol Woods, playing Lorraine Mylan Thomas, gives up the games and poses she adopted in her tendency to be a white Black, and comes to terms with her anger at early mistreatment by whites, which previously, perhaps, she would have liked to forget.

THE MUSICAL NUMBERS carry a great deal of the show. The songs, written by Melissa Mizel and Michael Schubert, capture different moods and stages of development of kids who have emerged from the cavity-prone years, but are not quite ready to compete with leaders of today. They move along quickly, rarely dragging, and, helped by ingenious choreography, the more lively numbers evoke all the electricity of a Singing in the Rain. John Stimpson's solos as Kip, the WASPish, lazy, grinning, beer-drinking jock and all-around good guy, are outstandingly funny, and Stimpson's equally expert singing and dancing, augmented by energy that must come from barrels of pure Saudi crude, provide some of the show's most entertaining moments. There are no holes in this cast; all of the actors/singers/dancers bring an abundance of talent to their roles.

In fact, the talent of the performers belies the weaknesses of the show. The somewhat shallow and ill-defined characters prevent the actors from utilizing their abilities with utmost success. How many students at Harvard sit for hours dreamily recording who they sat with at lunch, what everyone said and how they felt about it, as the character Lee, played by Linda Stafford, does? If they do, then they deserve more to be entered in the Adams House raft race and floated down the Charles River than to be enshrined on the stage. One reason for Lee's failure at times as a character lies probably in the purposefully disjointed nature of the production, which must sacrifice the possibility of bringing depth and sensitivity to a complex role in favor of creating a cumulative, pastiche effect.

Another difficulty with the roles springs, one suspects, from casting very closely to the grain of the real students behing the characters. At times, the people on stage seem to have stopped acting. They become participants in their characters' problems and activities; the production beams in and out sporadically, its atoms lost in the Enterprise's transporter room, somewhere between a production and the scenes most likely taking place simultaneously in the rooms in Kirkland directly above the Junior Common Room, those of actual students. Instead of aiding the success of the show by bringing an extra dimension of realism to it, this aspect detracts from the show for the same reason Cybil Shepherd flopped on the screen: she could never play anything but herself in her films, and so her characters did not benefit from the careful analysis and mental exercise actors must usually perform when preparing for a role--and she did not require any more than a smidgen of concentration, indispensable for a sensitive interpretation of any role, to play herself.

UNINTENTIONALLY, then, it seems, the students at Ivy League University fail to cover new ground in examining the psyches of college students, especially Harvard students. The scope of the roles is a bit too narrow and the students do not venture far into their peers' cerebelli, but simply present their own personalities and perspectives, guarding them jealously as real Harvard students must and do--resisting the inevitable infiltration of conflicting points of view, modifying their positions just enough to convince observers that they have indeed changed, and that they needn't attempt further to influence their thinking.

Leaders of Tomorrow stumbles a little over the complex network between reality and representation it brings to the stage, but it accurately portrays the mazes of self-discovery that students undergo on the walkways between classrooms. It is a portrait, rather than an analysis, and as such, it towers above the warmed-over synthetic fare of Lopez and others. By framing the Crimson quest for self-understanding, the show, in its introspection, rejects myths about Harvard cast upon it and stands, naked, under the tree of knowledge.