HDC to Produce Unpublished Play Of Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe's unpublished play, "Mannerhouse," will be given its world premiere performance by the Dramatic Club early next spring. Casting for the production will start in the HDC's workshop, Big Tree, and is to continue through the end of the week, according to Paul S. Burggraf '48, Dramatic Club president.

Scripts for those interested in entering the competition for set designs are being distributed by the director, William A. West '49. Numerous other persons are being sought to handle lights, sets, and publicity. Professor James B. Munn, to whom Wolfe dedicated "Mannerhouse," will act as advisor to West.

After discovering the manuscript in the archives of Houghton Library, the theatre group learned that the play is slated for a New York production late in the spring. Nevertheless, Maxwell Perkins '06, literary executor of the Wolfe estate, gave the student thespians the rights for a pre-Broadway showing.

Wolfe wrote the play while he was doing graduate work here in Professor George Pierce Baker's "Forty-seven Workshop," and before he achieved fame as a novelist. The play presents the rise and decay of a Southern family during the Civil War period. It is an eloquent plea for the cause of the ex-soldier of that war.

The HDC has not as yet selected a theater for the production. Sanders Theater, where the group presented "Adam The Creator" this fall, presents great difficulties because of its lack of necessary stage equipment.