"THE BARD ESSENTIALLY A SHOWMAN" SAYS LEIBER

"Shakespeare, as it has often been said, was essentially a showman," remarked Fritz Leiber to a CRIMSON interviewer the other day. "I believe that any play of Shakespeare's, even with the small amount of merely suggestive scenery used in his day, could be acted behind a soundproof glass curtain, and the audience would understand it as well or even better than the wordy actionless plays of today, which rely upon witty dialogue for their raison d'etre.

"Inasmuch as the Bard wrote without the use of a curtain, many of his scenes are bound so closely together that any appreciable wall destroys the continuity of action. For this reason I have arranged to make the intermissions between acts and scenes of a minimum duration; this can easily be accomplished with our type of semi-permanent scenery. When the wait does not exceed half a minute the theatre is kept dark in order to maintain the flow of action and proven occasion for untimely criticism and comparison. For instance, in the ghost scene of "Hamlet," when the prince goes offstage following the Apparition. I try to preserve the immediate thought and keep the old ladies from gossiping about better and worse Hamlets that they have known, by continuing after the slightest possible break."