Finish the Job

Four years ago, when Robert Brustein and his American Repertory Theatre (ART) came to Cambridge in a unique partnership between drama and academia, the controversy lasted from September until May. Most student dramatists opposed the experiment, fearing that sharing the Loeb building and stage with a professional troupe would inhibit experimentation and curtail student opportunities. And when the deal finally went through, vocal opponents may well have taken comfort in the thought that the contract mandated a full-scale review four years later a review which, according to Faculty rules, could result in anything from a rubber stamp on the arrangement to its complete repeal.

But now, with the ART firmly settled in its Brattle Street headquarters, most initial fears have dissipated, most of the vociferous opponents to the plan have graduated, and few students now involved in Harvard theater remember what life was like without the ART around. And in acting on the results of a full-scale report on student. ART interaction-including drama course, student attendance at ART productions, and numbers of students who work for the professional company-the Faculty should concentrate, not on killing the arrangement, but on fulfilling its considerable unrealized potential.

ART members were originally supposed to teach and guide students in using the Loeb's staggering resources, including a mainstage which demands near-professional expertise to handle. On the academic side, ART-ers were to teach a small core of drama courses offered by a Faculty Committee on Dramatic Arts, chaired by Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III. Finally, the close contact with Harvard was to benefit American theater as an institution, infusing it with a needed literary acuity and sense of the past.

The jury is still out on whether the ART-Harvard partnership can work financially. Indeed, strictly as a theater company, the group has barely weathered some fiscal storms. But regarding the troupe's contribution to undergraduate theater, signals are far clearer.

Students working in the Loeb now, both on the mainstage or in the smaller Ex. are calling for more, not less, assistance and inspiration from the professionals, and there is no reason Harvard should not pursue its initial goals and give it to them. Members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club (HRDC) say they want more structures within the Loeb itself for interaction with technical experts and other professionals.

Farther down the road, students would undoubtedly benefit if the current Faculty committee on drama could offer a concentration, one which focuses not narrowly on skills and production, but broadly on the literary, historical and sociological aspects of theatrical enterprise.

As long as the Faculty does not find a ground swell of support for sending the ART packing-a unlikely event-the current scrutiny provides a rare opportunity to make a hitherto experimental program fulfill its original aims-on the day-to-day side, by working with students more closely; on the intellectual side, by legitimizing through a concentration the wealth of theatrical knowledge there is to be conveyed.