Summer Theater Group to Give 'The Man Who Came to Dinner'

The Harvard Summer Theatre Group will give Cambridge its only live drama of the summer, when it opens its production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, on Thursday August 6.

The Kaufman and Hart comedy will be performed on a stage now being erected in the Lower Common Room of the Harvard Union. The modular stage owned by Dunster House, which was built this year with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, will be the basis of the temporary structure, while elements of the Adams House apron stage. also financed in part by the Ford Foundation, will be used to complete it. The new stage is designed for minimal interference with normal activity in the common room, piano room, and TV room.

Earle Edgerton, who played a leading role in the HSTG's production of No Exit last summer, will star in the new production as Sheridan Whiteside, the superbly nasty "wit, critic, lecture, radio orator, and intimate friend of the great and near-great" who is marooned by a broken hip in the home of what appears to be an aggressively ordinary Ohio family. Mikel Lambert, a student at the Summer School, will play his romantically involved secretary, and Marguerite Tarrant, a student at the Yale School of Drama, will appear as a nymphomaniacally inclined actress.

The play has been a ravorite with audiences since its premiere, and has been acclaimed by leading critics as the finest comedy of insult.