Two Worlds

MORE THAN most students involved in Loeb or House drama productions, Martha Hackett '83 straddles the two very opposite and sometimes conflicting worlds of professional actress and full-time student. An American Literature and Languages major, she spends the day at classes and her job at the Adams House Library. But at night she joins the world of the professional actors in Harvard's American Repertory Theater (ART), where The Boys From Syracuse is running until March 26.

The ART produces five shows a year, drawing its cast from the Boston area and, once in a while, from the Harvard community. The occasional students who get roles don't exactly star; like Hackett and Alison Taylor '84, also in Syracuse, they take minor roles. Hackett plays a prostitute with a few lines.

Because ART is not primarily geared toward Harvard students and their schedules, rehearsals can be long an grueling, lasting up to 12 hours a day. More disturbing, they ignore the time-honored traditions of Reading Period and exams. Hackett stayed in Cambridge over Christmas vacation this year to write the papers she would have no time for in January.

"Acting is emotionally draining. You're exhausted after spending all day rehearsing, and the thought of studying afterwards is difficult to contemplate. For the people on ART, acting is their job," Hackett says, adding." When you come back after 12 hours at the theater, it's sometimes frustrating to remind myself that studying, not acting, is my real job."

Still, Hackett feels that drama at Harvard should stay within the extracurricular and not the academic realm. The last thing Hackett wants to see, she says is a drama department that could dominate the theater scene and restrict opportunities to theater majors. "Having no formal drama department makes people do theater on the extracurricular level, and therefore promotes the diversity of House, Loeb and Loeb Ex productions," she says. "Putting theater on the academic level might make it too limiting."

Hackett took an acting course from Joann Green, an ART member who doubles as an acting instructor, and feels that the course helped make her think about career choices. On Green's advice, Hackett was able to get recommendations and apply to graduate schools of drama, including the programs at Yale and New York University.

"Joann was really helpful in giving men the encouragement to apply to graduate schools. You can only go so long on what peers say," she notes.

If it weren't for Harvard's decentralized, multi leveled theater setup, Hackett might not have pursued acting at all. In high school, she sang and acted in musicals. Freshman and sophomore years she sang with two Harvard bands. Hand to Mouth and The Girl Next Door, Her first, dampening encounter with acting at Harvard came freshman week when she tried out for a freshman seminar in acting given by Robert Chapman, professor of English. She was rejected.

Music and voice lessons stayed dominant until the spring of her sophomore year, when she began acting in plays with music-starting with Aladdin, in which she sang the play's only song, and going on to Adams House (Tango), the Ex (Blood Wedding), and the Loeb mainstage (Three Penny Opera and Working). When it came time to cast The Boys from Syracuse this December, the ART called her and asked her to try out.

Rehearsals at the ART were very different from Harvard's, and cast some light for Hackett on questions of Loeb/ART overlap. While it is easier to take direction from professional directors, she says, a student director is more "doting" and is more concerned with individual. But there are definite payoffs. An undergraduate can learn much more watching how a professional director corrects other actors. Landing an ART part offers undeniable long-range opportunities as well. Connections with professional, actors in the area could lead to future parts in Boston productions after graduation-an alternative Hackett said she could pursue instead of graduate school.

Hackett came to Harvard when the ART did. The greatest thing it has given her, she says how, is the same as what the rest of Harvard gave-the opportunity to act. "Before I came to Harvard," she says. "I though singing was all I wanted to do."