A Political History of the Loeb

Making the Harvard Square bookstore rounds in May of 1964, you would have come across a cheap-looking mimeographed publication called The Pageant of the Beasts, by Anonymous. Selling (in fact best-selling) for a dime, it told of a forest full of animals who put together a pageant in honor of White Swan, a local poet laureate whose 40th birthday it was.

The Pageant of the Beasts was an in-joke, written for the benefit of a tightly knit little in-group, and virtually meaningless to anyone else. The beasts of the tale were the actors, administrators, and friends of the Loeb Drama Center. The pageant was the Loeb's great Shakespeare Festival, a project which had already alienated or attracted enough people to buy up Beasts' full press run.

Whether the characterizations in this little fable were correct or not is debatable. But the idea of portraying Loeb people as animals was unquestionably a stroke of genius. Like animals, they (a) growl, (b) bite, and (c) growl and bite each other more than the common enemy. Maybe this is characteristic of theatre people everywhere, but it was certainly true of the Loeb community in the Spring of '64.

Under the leadership of Daniel Seltzer, then acting director of the Loeb, the Shakespeare Festival had brought in a whole new group of undergraduates, relegating the old club of entrenched semi-professionals to minor roles and inbred cocktail parties. Seltzer had passed the torch from one generation to another, and the older crowd wasn't having any of it. They talked behind his back, mailed hastily drafted protest letters to the Crimson, thought about or actually wrote works of vengeance like The Pageant of the Beasts.

The Pre-Loeb Era

The politics of Harvard drama did not begin with the Loeb. Even the current line of development must be traced back to 1945, when the foundation of today's webwork of theatre bureaucracy started taking shape.

In the years following the Second World War, theatre at Harvard was monopolized by a batch of initials-- HDC, VTW, HTW, and HTG. The Veterans' Theatre Workshop, formed in '46, quickly established its pre-eminence over the 30-year-old Harvard Dramatic Club as the University's major producing agency-- but the VTW, unlike the HDC, lacked permanency. It thrived on the strength of its founding members, who graduated without establishing any lasting undergraduate organization.

The VTW (later the Harvard Theatre Workshop, or HTW) passed out of existence in the Spring of '49. It was subsequently revived as the Harvard Theatre Group (HTG) but again it became defunct when its founders graduated. Consequently the Fall of '53 saw Harvard theatre on what looked to be its last leg: the HDC.

Long burdened with second-string talent, just getting over two financially disastrous productions (including a $9,000 Man Who Came to Dinner with Monty Wooley as guest star), the HDC was hardly in a position to assume dominance over Harvard theatre. Only an uncommonly talented new generation of people enabled the HDC to meet the high standards which had previously characterized its competition. Director Stephen Aaron, actors Colgate Salsbury, Harold Scott and D.J. Sullivan -- all were from the class of '57, and they became the nucleus of a rejuvenated HDC.

House drama societies also sprang up through the '50's, most of them specializing in one area or period of drama. Winthrop did musical comedies; Eliot did Shakespeare; Lowell became known for the Lowell House Opera; Leverett produced mainly one act plays; Dunster and Adams spread out in all directions.

Alongside the HDC and the House Drama Societies were two collegewide groups devoted to musical works: the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players, established in '55, and Drumbeats and Song, production outlet of the Radcliffe Grant-in-Aid Society, which like Old Faithful has uttered forth with one musical comedy per year since '49.

The Golden Age of Harvard theatre may be just a myth. But the '50's were clearly a time when undergraduate drama thrived on its limitations -- cramped facilities, lack of funds, faulty technical equipment -- and above all on the absence of a drama center.

The Coming of The Loeb

While President Conant was less than gung-ho about the idea of a university theatre, his predecessor, A. Lawrence Lowell, had actively opposed one, going so far as to refuse unsolicited offers of money for the purpose of establishing a drama school. Conant's successor, Nathan Pusey, felt differently. Early in '54 he announced his support for a drive to finance construction of a theatre, and when John L. Loeb '24 donated a flat million to the cause, its realization became a certainty.

Chosen to head the new theatre was Robert H. Chapman, then associate professor of English. Chapman had come to Harvard on a crest of popularity -- the adaptation he co-authored of Billy Budd was an immense critical success off-Broadway. While the merits of his anti-McCarthy play The General were hotly debated, it was anti-McCarthy, and its production at Harvard generated an aura of romantivism about its author.

So long as the Loeb Drama Center remained a vague vision for the future, everyone could see it in his own image. Students could think of the Loeb simply as a stage to be used as freely as any other. Some faculty members could envision a gradual evolution toward a formal drama school. Others, to whom this idea was repugnant, only hoped the Loeb would be professional, respectable, and faculty-run.

Chapman himself spoke of a compromise between a drama school and "laissez-faire amateurism." Many undergraduates saw in the statements of Chapman and others the possibility that Harvard's new drama center would be used as a device to implement tight faculty control over undergraduate theatre. Such fears were hardly quieted as administrative plans for the Loeb gradually developed in the Spring of '60.

Chapman announced the creation of an elaborate two-committee play selection process, under which established Harvard drama groups could offer production plans to a student-faculty advisory committee. Final authority, however, was vested in the Faculty Committee on Drama.

Dean Bundy assured undergraduates that the Faculty Committee would rarely exercise its authority, but students responded by asking why the committee had to exist in the first place.

Several other announcements in the same period did little to mollify the growing student contingent of anti-Loebites. The HDC, which had already started discussing possible inaugural productions, was jarred to hear that Chapman's assistant, Stephen Aaron, would direct the first play at the Loeb. Several years earlier, Aaron had been Harvard's foremost student director. Now, despite all his efforts to represent the interests of undergraduates, he became a symbol of faculty control.

Another cause of undergraduate opposition was a preposterous faculty report stating that the Loeb should produce only "recognized classics of the stage." Vague, and only briefly adhered to, this prospectus for play selection was mainly directed against musicals and Broadway fare. But it was interpreted by some to exclude lesser known serious plays as well. Quite reasonably, students active in Harvard theatre began to fear the Loeb would become a showcase for faculty-dominated professionalism.

The Inauguration

Troilus and Cressida, the grand opening production of the Loeb Drama Center, was universally acknowledged to be a bomb. Brooks Atkinson, who came up to review the play for the Crimson, said so unreservedly. Undergraduates said so in tones ranging from surface disappointment to unconcealed pleasure. Troilus's importance was more than ceremonial, however. It weakened the case for Loeb professionalism, since it was hardly a success. It also weakened the status of its director, Stephen Aaron, whose tenure as assistant director of the Loeb was to be extraordinarily brief.

Aaron, like Daniel Seltzer today, was the partisan of the undergraduates. But his youth and consequent lack of influence made it impossible for him to function effectively with the faculty; his connection to Loeb officialdom put him out of favor with undergraduates as well. Aaron frequently offered unsolicited advice and was forcibly ejected from at least one Loeb rehearsal to which he came uninvited.

Right from the beginning of his career as director of the Loeb, Chapman established a policy of putting himself above politics. He was an administrator, a professional -- something of a George Washington in that his success in the pre-Loeb era brought him to a position of authority where he could leave the bickering to his juniors. In some ways this proved a good thing. Chapman was able to maintain the respect of both his fellow faculty members and the undergraduate community. But the price of this respect was considerable: answerable to both the students and the Faculty Committee, Chapman was forced to adopt conciliatory rather than positive positions.

On a few questions he remained unconciliatory. Chapman to this day objects to musicals -- particularly to their high production costs. He is mistrustful of student productions, pre-

"Chapman was an administrator, a professional - something of a George Washington in that his success in the pre-Loeb era brought him to a position of authority where he could leave the bickering to his juniors." ferring ones in which the undergraduates play minor roles and learn from their elders. This has consistently been the pattern of Chapman's own shows: graduate students, faculty members and local professionals take the lead roles, Chapman directs, and undergraduates -- expect for a small number of established stars -- are relegated to bit parts, or to hammering nails.

Since the productions Chapman has directed at the Loeb have generally been excellent, his undergraduate exclusion policy has been an unpopular one -- at least among undergraduates.

During the first few years of the Loeb's existence, Chapman's emphasis on professionalism created a tightly knit clique of older actors (including, it is true, a few precocious undergraduates, who worked often in Loeb productions and quickly became the in group. Other students were just visitors to the Loeb; these people saw themselves as permanent residents.

Play Selection

Political change at the new drama center was slow in coming. Aaron's departure climaxed the major debate (a personal one) of the Loeb's first year. He was replaced in the Fall of '61 by George Hamlin, an old friend and co-worker of Chapman's.5DANIEL SELTZER