The Perils of a Unified Theater at Harvard

The Perils of a Unified Theater at Harvard

Among Harvard institutions, Common Casting, the week long series of auditions organized by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club for almost all of the shows in a given semester, is truly unique. The many newspapers and journals on campus have vastly different comp requirements. Never would you see The Advocate and The Gamut mingling staff members for a joint issue or a joint meeting. Even the plethora of a capella groups at Harvard don't choose their members in conjunction.

What allows Common Casting to be so unusual is the comparative unity of the Harvard theater community. An undergraduate could serve on one publication for four years and never once meet a staff member for a rival publication. But this situation is nearly unthinkable in regard to student theater, for at least once every semester practically every actor, director and producer on campus converges at the Loeb Drama Center and Agassiz Theater.

The benefits of a unified theater community are manifold and readily evident. Rather than a feeling of great competition between shows, there's a prevailing sense of sharing and fairness. Rather than operating in isolation, actors and directors who might never otherwise speak to one another can exchange ideas and discuss future plans. Whereas publications, singing groups or even chamber ensembles can develop rivalries that prohibit any kind of collective action, the theater community has no problem joining together for Common Casting, turning what could be a drawn-out and maddening process of endless auditions scattered throughout the year into a relatively fast and well-oiled one-week affair. More importantly, they can come together to give actors, especially those new to Harvard, a chance to audition for shows they might not have considered otherwise.

But there is a downside to the sense of camraderie that makes something like Common Casting possible. It's the same problem inherent to any unified artistic community--namely, that it tends to marginalize movements towards experimentation. Inevitably, any society, no matter how large or small, develops norms. While such norms can be essential for social and political bodies, they can become stifling for artistic groups. Think of nearly any closely-knit collection of artists--from the Pre-Raphelites to the Dadaists--and you'll probably be able to trace a trajectory of initial innovation followed by a slow descent into self-referentiality, imitation and, worst of all, dullness. Clearly, the relative unity of the Harvard theater world is nowhere near crisis level. Nor, for that matter, is it anywhere near the cohesiveness of the Pre-Raphelites or the Dadaists. But the move against experimentation that often marks closed artistic communities certainly isn't unknown in Harvard theater.

The most obvious manifestation of this "social group normalization" comes in the casting process itself. For the most part, Harvard theater revolves around a group of probably about 20 or so very talented actors who are courted for nearly every leading role. Now some would claim that this core group of performers represents the majority of legitimate acting talent available. But no matter how many arguments I hear, I find it nearly unthinkable that with 1,600 of the most talented students in the country entering this institution every year, such a small percentage of the student body is worthy of a leading role.

Instead, I see the phenomenon of limited casting as a product of the unity of Harvard theater. It's not a question of nepotism. It's simply a matter of a reluctance on the part of student directors to experiment in their casting. Sure, placing a well-known junior or senior--or even a sophomore who made a promising start last year--in a major role helps to assure a productive rehearsal process, a polished show and a full house. But the people being cast are not the only good actors on campus. They are the actors who, for whatever reason, have been lucky enough to make a name for themselves at Harvard. (And this is not an attack on their talent. No matter how gifted you are, success is always two parts ability and one part luck.) And though it's impossible to know for certain, it seems inevitable that most directors and producers mentally precast their plays with the actors they already know.

This is not a healthy state of affairs. There's an inherent value, in my opinion, in taking actors who are unknown and untested (at Harvard, that is) and letting them give, or directing them towards, outstanding performances. It gives a voice to talented but (as yet) unrecognized performers, it challenges directors, it gives something new to audiences and it brings a greater sense of diversity to our theater community in general. Of course, it's not unheard of that a newcomer to the HRDC lands a major role. Gifted first-years can surely change a director's mind with a particularly outstanding audition. But as any actor will tell you, outstanding auditions are rare even for the most talented performers. Thus, by virtue of little more than Harvard casting norms, most actors who haven't gotten roles in the past will not get roles in the future--and that includes a substantial number of the first-years and sophomores who take part in Common Casting. By junior year, most of them have lost faith.

But reluctance to experiment extends far beyond casting. For a school that lacks a full drama department, Harvard has a sizable number of legitimately talented theater practicioners. But rare is the actor or director who is willing to reach outside of the realist tradition into some of the other realms of dramatic presentation--true Brechtian "presentational" drama, Mamet's recitational method of acting or Artaud's theater of cruelty. Sure, most of the plays on campus aren't set in a suburban kitchen, but they are more often populated by characters than by what critics might call figures, personas or representations.

To a certain extent, this reluctance to attempt plays beyond the body of canonical Western realist drama can be related to a general lack of exposure to these works, or at least unfamiliarity with them, on the part of many undergraduates--a lack of exposure that reflects the appaling paucity of drama courses, especially literary drama courses, offered at our fair institution.

But at the same time, the normalizing effects of a tightly knit artistic community can't be overlooked. I know of at least two other universities of greatly different natures--namely Brown University and George Washington University--that also aren't known for an overwhelming academic commitment to drama. Still, they manage to put out a steady stream of experimental student productions. In fact, their dramatic communities seem to fall on the other extreme of social normalization--i.e., "traditional" stagings and "traditional" plays are looked down upon. Such attitudes are every bit as confining as our own theatrical prejudices at Harvard, but they at least show that undergraduates are certainly capable of breaking out of the Western realist mode of theater.

Fortunately, a flip through the most recent Common Casting booklet shows that the Harvard theater community is still far from becoming as stringent or complacent as this article may make it sound. From two productions of lesser-known Shakespeare plays--Timon of Athens and Cymbeline--to a four-person Taming of the Shrew to a multimedia Agamemnon, there's still a fair amount of unusual work going up this semester.

But those students concerned with the continued vitality of Harvard theater should be wary of the seemingly benign camraderie that makes the theater community so unique. For along with a sense of community comes a sense of social norms. And such norms can, over time, begin to prevade everything from ideas about casting to styles of acting to a director's choice of plays and even to decisions about which plays to attend, leaving those who want to try something different in virtual obscurity.

And while there's nothing wrong with obscurity in itself, particularly for theatrical works whose mass appeal is limited at best, the image of a student theater community tacitly confining innovators--actors and directors alike--to invisibility should at least raise a few eyebrows. Isn't that what professional theater communities are for?

Special thanks to Eric Fleisig-Greene for his comments and suggestions on this article.