DRAMATIC CLUB PLANS TO DO MIRACLE PLAY

The Dramatic Club, though busily engaged at present in preparing for the production of "Mr. Paraclete", is also making plans and enlisting actors for its annual miracle play. In the mean-while two letters of unusual interest have been received by the Dramatic Club, both endorsing the Club's policy of experimentation which has been subjected to considerable criticism.

The miracle play, which this year will be performed on December 16 and 17 at 9 o'clock in the evening, will have as its setting the Gothic entrance in the Germanic Museum. The play itself is an adaptation of "Benediktbeurer Weihuachtsspiel", a medieval German play.

D. F. Robinson '26 is in charge of the production, and announces that several positions are still open in the miracle play. He will see all members of the University who are interested at Holworthy 12 today from 1 to 1.30 o'clock and from 5 to 5.30 o'clock.

Kenneth Macgowan '11, co-director with Robert Edmund Jones '10 and Eugene O'Neil '16 of the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York and Philip Bale, Boston theatrical critic, are the two men who have recently risen to deny that Harvard has allowed "its theatrical interests to go into blue obscurity." Both these men find in the Dramatic Club a worthy successor to the 47 Workshop.

Sees Improvement in Work

"The Harvard Dramatic Club," Mr. MacGowan writes in part, "seems to me to be doing much more intelligent and important work in producing such exceptional plays as 'The Makropoulos Secret', 'The Moon Is a Gong', and 'Mr. Paraclete' than we ever did with our Harvard-made plays."

Of a similar mind is Philip Bale, who under the title of "The Dramatic Renaissance at Harvard," writes in an optimistic vein on the Harvard dramatic situation. Referring to the Dos Passos '16 play, "The Moon Is a Gong", which, according to Hale, marked a new area in Harvard dramatics, the Boston reviewer writes in part:

"But the circumstance that the first play of the new policy happened to be in itself a failure has nothing to do with the case. That policy was boldness; and whatever the charges to be laid against the artistry of "The Moon Is a Gong", upon other scores, upon the important one it mocked obloquy. The play unquestionably possessed the virtue for which the Dramatic Club picked it: that it could not be charged with same-ness. It was anything else you will; but not 'just another one'. The strike for originality which its choice represented was eminently successful.

"This year the ambitions of the club are even higher. They have now in rehearsal 'Mr. Paraclete', translated from the Russian of Nikolai Evreinov specifically for their purpose. What they will make out of it remains to be seen. But the conditions that will permit a play to be chosen purely apart from commercial considerations, and the conviction that it is the superior order of creative art which should command the attention of the Dramatic Club, surely do not show that the drama in Harvard is in quite so lamentable a state of disrepute as it might conceivably be."