LIBERAL INTERPRETATION

It is not alone its undergraduate sponsoring that removes tonight's presentation of the play "Porgy" from the rank and file of a long series of "Harvard nights." There have been "Harvard nights" at everything from the Pops concerts to "Good Morning, Dearie", and over many, though not all, has hung the thin and unwholesome haze of the box office.

In this instance the haze has not been dissipated alone by the whispered name of the Theatre Guild. Such disinfecting quality as the name might once have possessed has been balanced by hard-headed business methods, which have made the Theatre Guild of New York succeed where other artistically minded organizations have failed. And the flutter of disapproval, though less pronounced than that which greeted "The Birth of a Nation" in Boston and "All God's Chillun Got Wings" in New York, piques attention in Cambridge even outside the Liberal Club.

The natural associations of the catch phrase thinker with the word "melodrama" are the mustachio and hound dogs, the Tennesseean Montagues and Capulets, and the revolving saw that yearns for the hero's throat. But along Catfish Row, in the negro tenement district of Charleston, murder, knife behind back, walks hand in hand with music. The very name of melodrama was derived of this union. Modern usage of the word had its birth in the musically accompanied plays of the mauve decade, when "Hearts and Flowers," various funeral marches, and "After the Ball" were softly breathed by violins below the stage during appropriate soliloquies. The blending of music and drama is something more than a device. In the chorus of the Greek tragedy came first recognition of the essential rhythm that underlies life, which is never absent, and which is written deep in human existence from the humming of the child at play to the measured rocking's of placid age, from the Antigone to "Broadway."

The problem of the negro of America home at Harlem has been periodically attended to. The floods brought attention to the levee negro. But Catfish Row is likewise Africa in America. The attention drawn by the Liberal Club to a worthy drama has involved a too-familiar identification of the name of Harvard with the lighted overhangs of Tremont and Boylston Street; yet the identification seems this time not unjustified.