Faculty Write Plays

(The CRIMSON'S Literary Supplement of Dec. 5, 1959 included an historico-critical survey, "Playwriting at Harvard: 1690-1960." The brief concluding section on faculty playwriting, set up in type, was not printed, owing to space restrictions, and was then inadvertently shelved. Belatedly, we herewith print the remaining paragraphs.--Ed.)

This survey would not be complete without a few remarks about the small roster of plays written by Harvard faculty members. As I stated earlier, Barrett Wendell had amused himself by trying to write a few plays during the 1880's. And Baker himself was the author or co-author of eight plays written in the last decade of the century.

John H. Finley '24, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, while on the way to his Harvard doctorate managed to find time to write the masque Thalia; or, A Country Day (1929). A charming if overwritten work, Thalia was most recently performed by the HDC Actors' Laboratory in May, 1954.

Most of the faculty playwriting, however, has been done during the last 10 years. Robert H. Chapman, associate professor of English, came to Harvard as an instructor in 1950 when he was putting the final touches on his dramatization (written in collaboration with Louis O. Coxe) of Melville's Billy Budd. A deeply moving allegory, the play has justly become something of an American classic already. In 1951, it was nosed out by Darkness at Noon by only two votes for the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the finest play of the season. In 1953, the old Harvard Theatre Group chose for its farewell production the premiere of Chapman's much weaker play, The General. Since then, Chapman has been working on a number of other new plays.

Thornton Wilder, during his year here (1950-51) as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, gave assistance to the HDC in its production of his Skin of Our Teeth. While living in Dunster House, Wilder did quite a bit of work on a play called The Emporium, which contained much intriguing material. Wilder is an exceedingly slow and self-critical worker; and he still has not completed this play to his satisfaction.

William Alfred, associate professor of English, has written three plays while at Harvard. The first, an impressive retelling in verse of an old story, was composed in 1953 while Alfred was still a teaching fellow; simply titled Agamemnon, it was produced in Sanders by the Poets' Theater. The Poets' Theatre in 1958 also staged Hogan's Goat, which Alfred had finished the previous year; this at times highly moving tragedy slipped too far into melodrama for complete success. A third play, The Runaways, begun in 1954, has gone through nine revisions so far.

Though Archibald MacLeish, currently Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, considers himself primarily a poet, he has on several occasions turned to the dramatic medium. In the years just before MacLeish came to Cambridge for a year's stint (1938-39) as Curator of the Nieman Collection, he wrote three verse plays especially for radio: Panic (1935), Fall of the City (1936), and Air Raid (1938).

During his decade as Boylston Professor, MacLeish has written four more plays. In The Trojan Horse (1952) he turned Homer's tale into a tragic and powerful parable about McCarthyism and the destructive force of fear and unreason. He specifically authorized its production without scenery, or over the radio. This Music Crept By Me Upon the Waters (1953), a comedy about five couples who have withdrawn from the banalities of the business world to a "paradise" in the Antilles, does not succeed; its obscurities prevent it from working on the stage.

Of the Pulitzer Prize-winning J.B. (1958), five years in the writing, nothing more need be said: these pages have already carried four articles about it by three different people, including myself, and enough's enough. Few persons know, though, that J.B. was not the first time MacLeish dramatized part of the Old Testament: he wrote a play, Nobodaddy (1925), about the Garden of Eden, which was published the following year by, of all things, Dunster House.

This year MacLeish wrote another play, The Secret of Freedom, which was printed in the October issue of Esquire. Penned expressly for television, it will be broadcast later this season. This is his first prose play, and it is an avowedly propagandistic piece. It deals with folks-next-door-and-around-the-corner, like Wilder's Our Town but less artfully. Structurally, it flows well. One arresting feature: from time to time as a character speaks he will vanish from the screen and become merely an auditory commentator, while the screen shows film-clips from newsreels and documentaries.

The play presents a good many hackneyed ideas about foreign and domestic policy, but they are ideas that MacLeish obviously feels need to be restated. He hammers his main point too many times; but perhaps it is unfair to condemn him for this since the play is aimed at the mass TV audience with its celebrated mental age of 14. At any rate, the whole thing is handled with good taste, and hopefully it will achieve its proletarian purpose.

In every one of his plays, MacLeish is not wasting his time. He is always the statesman-teacher, dramatizing with serious intent the things he feels strongly about, which are the things he feels we should feel strongly about. He reminds us that the highest role of playwriting is to show and explain Man to himself.