Staging an Idea

PUTTING ON a student show at Harvard is a rigorously meritocratic proposition. An aspiring director must submit-frequently to a jury of his peers-evidence of artistic vision, past experience, current enthusiasm, and the presence of willing assistance. Some committees also ask a director to explain why their particular turf appealed to him.

But these criteria-the only ones by which House drama societies, the Harvard-Radcliffe Drama Club (HRDC), and select faculty assess each proposal-point glaringly to a frequent blind spot of the Harvard theater community.

Scarce is the stage whose application procedure requires a student director to have done any research into either the literary or theatrical tradition behind his own play. Drama committees do an injustice to the director, his future cast, themselves, and ultimately to the audience, by leaving to hope and chance the director's conceptual grasp of a playwright's text, so essential to a solid, focused production. Not that a director hopeful should submit a 10-page tome along with his or her application. Neither should any director be confined to mechanically figuring out the playwright's intentions and them staging them.

However, the task of directing becomes impracticable unless thematic priorities and emphases, drawn from the script itself, are used to nurture and shape the artistic vision. And it becomes impossible to distinguish theme from device, message from embellishment, or innovation from convention without some awareness of the period, the playwright, or the genre.

Theater is a doubt-edged sword-the success of a production hinges as much on preparation as on creative intuition. Harvard theater tends to be long on creativity, but, all too often, short on background. In fact, the two should be intimately correlated, and informed creativity usually brings the beat results. Simply liking a script does not necessarily justify directing it.

"Preparation" can mean anything from research into the literary tradition of the work to investigation of the historical setting-both the one in which the drama was written and the one in which it takes place. Updating a play, even if it means only minor rewriting of the script, requires the most caution and understanding of all. To take an obvious example, recklessly pushing Shakespeare into the '20s can erase important themes along with the "wherefore art thou's."

THE LEGACY of Peter Sellers '80 has bequeathed to Harvard a finer appreciation than before of theatrical innovation. During Sellars' four years here, the community witnessed productions that reached to the outer limits of interpretation and experimentation. Now a talent the greater theater world need reckon with, Sellars clearly knew what he was doing, and he rarely came up without pearls. Unfortunately, his example also marked student theater with a mad and often careless pursuit of creative spontaneity, an excessive emphasis on the experimental side of drama, that now plagues and even stems its creativity.

If students took a closer look at Sellars' work, however, they would find a depth and background not always evident in his mod, appealing exteriors. Student theater can only benefit from the guiding influence of such a solid grounding. The significance of this intellectual connection to the creative art has been somewhat displaced in the heady pursuit of greater experimental heights.

Many a director has shied away from specific information about previous productions of his chosen play, fearful of its "contaminating" effect on his germinating seed of originality. This avoidance of the prevailing force of other, perhaps professional production, may be more than merely an excuse for ignorance-it is in fact more understandable than complete indifference. But studying past productions is not he only way to gain insight into a script. Besides members of the Committee on Dramatic Arts, some of whom are quite happy to advise, and Widener's own dramatic arts section (Pusey 3). Harvard boasts an extensive resource on contemporary and historical theater. For the majority of student directors, the Harvard Theater Collection remains an untapped resource, which is particularly unfortunate since its holdings extend far beyond the notes and photographs of dramatic productions.

The actual connection between research into theater and actual directing of it can be forged in many different ways. Perhaps students should be required to demonstrate some detailed research into their proposed scripts when they apply for a theater slot. Such a demonstration would require some extra time, but certainly not enough to intimidate the student already committed to half a semester of production headaches.

No one can or should be forced to incorporate this information into the final production, and simply compiling it is unlikely to stifle a director's creative juices. Moreover, to those who have not considered theater's literary connections, the experience could be invaluable.

In an environment so thoroughly committed to the experience of learning, the nurturing of an intellectual climate amidst to much vibrant, artistic talent would seem the most natural objectives dramatic arts committee should strive for.