Yale Drama Festival

The Yale Undergraduate Drama Festival held in New Haven at the beginning of spring vacation was slightly misnamed. Except for a couple of isolated moments, the gathering of some three hundred representatives from nineteen Eastern colleges lacked anything resembling a festive air. Instead, an atmosphere of rather grim determination surrounded the occasion. "If we don't stay on schedule," one handout solemnly announced, "our universe will be reduced once again to chaos and darkness." College drama, it was clear, is not a lighthearted endeavor.

Certainly the eleven productions which, together with two parties, constituted the agenda for the three-day meeting, fairly wallowed in high seriousness. Only one of the shows, the Barnard production of Ferenc Molnar's Olympia, was clearly identifiable as a comedy, and several others, including the three plays written by undergraduates, could scarcely be identified as anything at all. One thing, however, became clear as the weekend wore on--much of college drama seems quite firmly in the control of people who like experimental theater.

The term "experimental theater" could use some amplification, and the plays presented at the Yale festival will serve, if not as the basis for a definition, at least as indicators of how this school of drama looks and sounds. For one thing, experimental plays often are topheavy with abstract ideas. Harvard's contribution to the festival, Jean Genet's Death-watch, and the Wellesley production of a dismal little propaganda piece by Bertolt Brecht entitled Exception and the Rule, served to illustrate the experimental playwrights' reliance on ideology.

To be sure, all worthwhile plays from any period embody ideas, but writers like Brecht and Genet seem to start not with characters caught in a human predicament but with abstractions such as, in Brecht's case, the evils of capitalism. They then proceed to illustrate their philosophy with a plot and characters chosen on the basis of utility to the ideas under discussion.

Perhaps because of their approach to theater as primarily a vehicle for ideas, the characterizations drawn by many of the experimental playwrights are, at best, perfunctory. As in two of the undergraduate plays presented at Yale, the characters may be little more than convenient figures from mythology--Greek, in the case of Princeton's Reflections, (by Wayne Lawson), or Christian, in Swarthmore's Walk the Circle (by Werner Honig). Sometimes, as in Mary Manning's fine adaptation of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which was staged by Mount Holyoke, the characters are not recognizable people at all.

Finnegans Wake and a little sketch by the French writer Tardieu called Trio, which Sarah Lawrence presented, serve as examples of another, if minor, branch on the experimental tree--they depended for much of their effect on playing with words. The difficulties and advantages of Joyce's style are familiar enough; the Tardieu play exploited not the possibilities of puns, but of the musical ecects which can be extracted from the sound of words with scant regard paid to their meaning.

Although in quality these plays ranged from the verbal and visual excellence of Finnegans Wake to the dull pomposity of the Princeton effort, they all have one thing in common: none of them are easily comprehensible. Whether the difficulty involved in unraveling these plays is worth the effort must, in the end, be left to the taste, or perhaps the curiosity, of each individual member of the audience.

The one unfortunate effect which the more incomprehensible plays of the experimental schools may have on the art of the theater is to bring about confusion between the profound and the merely obscure. It would probably be unkind to suggest that either the audience at the Yale festival, which for the most part seemed to enjoy all the productions, or those people who selected the plays to be produced were suffering from such a form of confusion. But after three days the surfeit of obscurity did have a somewhat soporific ecect.

Not all of the groups in attendance came with plays calculated to confuse or confound. Vassar contributed an excellent production of Strindberg's Miss Julie, which constituted the most consistently satisfactory theatrical experience of the whole weekend. The Yale Dramatic Association, which acted as the sponsor for the festival, opened the proceedings with some scenes from their recent production of Arthur Miller's View from the Bridge. Considering the fact that Yale was working on its home ground, the technical side of the presentation left something to be desired. It was well acted, but suffered from stiff direction and poor lighting.

Syracuse's production of the short Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke rounds out the list of plays presented. Syracuse merits the distinction of bringing the festival's best actress, a young lady named Francesca Trantum.

As could be expected, the acting throughout the event as a whole ran the gamut from excellent down to awkward and amateurish efforts. Altogether, however, the standard of the acting was quite high. The best performances were contributed by the members of Harvard's Deathwatch company which featured Harold Scott, Colgate Salsbury, and D.J. Sullivan. They preserved the polish of their work in the Genet play for the Yale showing. Robert Brustein, as Jean, and Carlyn Cahill, as Julie, also turned in a pair of very distinguished performances in the Vassar production of Miss Julie.

The technical proficiency of most of the productions is impressive in view of the fact that everybody had to work with only such props as they could find in New Haven or bring along, and with no sets at all. It may be symptomatic of something or other that the most effective single prop used in any of the plays was a coffin which Mount Holyoke brought for its production of Finnegans Wake.

To be sure, the Yale University Theater is a well-equipped house featuring a complicated lighting device known as the Isenour Board. This board, which permitts the presetting of lighting combinations, seems to be a source of great pride to the members of the Yale Dramatic Association. Indeed, the very nickname for the group, "Dramat," bears a ring that might testify to an infatuation with mechanical efficiency. To some of the visiting directors, however, the Isenour Board was something of a Frankenstein's Monster--it exhibited an alarming tendency to make the lights flicker and dim at the wrong time.

Since the purpose of the festival was a fairly limited one--to bring together theater groups from schools throughout the East and let them see each other's work--it is safe to say that the festival accomplished its aim. Whether it also, as the Yale Dramatic Association hoped, stimulateed college dramatic activity must remain somewhat open to question. It is quite possible, though, that the three or four top-rate shows like Miss Julie, Finnigans Wake, and Deathwatch set standards of acting and production techniques which the other groups will try to emulate. The Dramat seems to have been happy with the results of the weekend; it has scheduled another festival for next year. Thus Finnegan's symbolic coffin appears not to have been the emblem of the great event after all.A members of the Vassar production staff acts as a solitary guinea pig for the light-testing crews.