Apples

Chipped beef is moving in to replace golden apples in the Lowell House dining hall, sneaker-clad feet are beginning to wend their way toward libraries instead of rehearsals, and the College's Herculean theatre season at last draws to a thumping close. At this point the stage-struck undergraduate, like the Wall Street speculator in 1929 or the Davy Crockett fan in 1955, naturally wonders just how long the boom is going to last. Is theatre activity at Harvard just beginning a long and significant golden age, or have students merely spouted Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams this year out of the same faddish enthusiasm that once led them to swallow goldfish?

It's too early to tell, of course, but already there are indications that things will pick up next fall right where they now leave off. The Eliot House Drama Group, for example, last week announced a full slate of lower-case titles for its 1956-57 productions and completed casting for two of them. In time such farsighted acts may revolutionize the nature of over-the-summer planning at the College. Presumably, a late-April commitment to play Oedipus in October is more binding than an intention to take Humanities 2, as indicated on a preliminary study card.

In regard to the plans for an actual Harvard theatre, where the only obstacle is that of money, this year's backstage boom can also be instructive. While the University treasury and the people who usually help to fill it would readily finance something that "students really need," they seem hesitant about a theatre. To solve this problem, however, the Administration need only borrow a little of the ingenuity that theatrical undergraduates have been exhibiting all year. The solution is obvious to anyone who has observed the occupants of the Lowell Dining Hall recently; the actors and playgoers do fine in the evening, but the diners are rather discomfited during the daytime. The obvious answer, then, is for the University to build a new dining hall immediately and leave the Lowell House Theatre standing just as it is.