Robert H. Chapman

Ever since Robert H. Chapman became director of the Loeb Drama Center in 1960, his main policy has been not to impose one. "The Loeb capitalizes on student interest," he says. "The idea is to trust in what the students can do, and we keep as light a hand on the production as possible. Our program has evolved; it hasn't been dictated or invented."

Chapman is the senior member of the three-man Loeb staff, the only person who has been with the Drama Center since its planning stages. In 1958, he attended the first meetings of the committee which determined the structure of the Loeb-to-be. When President Pusey appointed Hugh Stubbins to design the Loeb, Chapman helped the architect implement the committe's plans and advised him on the special needs of Harvard theatre.

Now his duties, which he shares with associate directors Daniel Seltzer and George Hamlin, are largely advisory. With the two associates, he sits in on meetings of the five-man Executive Board of the Harvard Dramatic Club, the student organization which produces nearly all of the plays at the Loeb. He helps Hamlin oversee divvying up the Loeb's $20,000-a-year budget.

When questions come up about which plays to select, or about incipient production problems, or about work on a current production, Champan and his two colleagues are there to help answer them. The three have no veto power. They belong to the Faculty Committee on Dramatics, which can, but rarely does, veto choices of plays; it is mainly Chapman who keeps the Committee informed on Loeb activities.

Chapman feels responsible for making sure that the Loeb runs, as he puts it, on a "two-party system" -- that is, for both participants and spectators. In advising the HDC, he tries to see that a balance is struck between educating the students and edifying audiences. When he directs Etherege's Man of Mode next month, it will be both "because it's not the sort of play students would ordinarily do," and because it will permit some of the six or seven hundred people in Harvard's English Department to see what a Restoration comedy looks like.

But since Harvard has no drama department, the most important thing that Chapman can do is to guide the students as they put a show together. And there is some disagreement around the Loeb as to how successful he is. Certainly his is not the style of the ubiquitous Dan Seltzer, distributing encouragement at rehearsals, helping actors make up on opening night, stopping in the Yard or the halls of the Loeb for a quick chat and to give a pat on the back. Nor is he like the warm, rather paternal Hamlin. Both the associates seem to be around more than Chapman, who sticks to his office. "Dan Seltzer and I don't agree," he says. "I tend not to go to a rehearsal unless I'm invited."

Because of this, people at the Loeb, especially new people, tend to think of Chapman as cold and inaccessible. "From what I'd heard, I'd envisioned him as an ogre, or Michelangelo's God," recalls one Cliffie. "But when I met him, the first thing he did was to kiss my hand. He's dashing, witty, and very charming."

There are really two sides to the Chapman coin. Heads, he looks down his nose at the Loeb; tails, he's a slightly discriminating perfectionist. "People don't ask him to rehearsals because they are afraid he would sneer," says one HDC member. "If he can't do a show exactly right, he can't bear to do it," says another. "He's kind of a snob. He won't do a show that would be compromised from the beginning."

When he directs, he spends a great deal of time researching the play's record. His production of Love for Love, a brilliant success, was correct down to the Restoration detail of having the gentlemen wear their hats to dinner. He was reluctant to go see the HDC's summer production of The Bacchae, because it was a modern interpretation done in modern dress; it didn't seem to him the real thing.

From the biggest director to the littlest props girl, Loebies respect him. His presence at a rehearsal or a performances galvanizes the cast. Whispers of "Chapman's here!" "What's he think of it?" float through the ranks and around the Green Room. They know he knows a lot, and they have faith in his appraisals.

But if they trust his judgement, they are often afraid to hear it handed down. When he dissects a Loeb effort, his charm can give way to an icy directness. Most leads and directors do end up wandering into his office for a post-mortem. Says one HDC executive, "If you ask him, he gives it to you straight -- right between the eyes. He judges everything from a professional standpoint. That's a good influence."

To many HDC members, however, he gives the impression that, as one put it, "he's extremely dissatisfied with everything that's done at the Loeb." Says the same person, "Chapman is caught between being too professional for the amateur Loeb and being fed up with what the professional theatre has to offer."

When the Loeb was first being planned, Chapman wanted it to house professional companies for at least a part of every season; this year, for the first time, two pro troupes will play there. And it will no doubt be a relief for him to hear polished sounds coming from the stage. For if he has given up the professional theatre as a vocation ("I don't have the theatrical temperament," he explains), he has retained the standards it once demanded of him.

Now 47, he was, by the time he was four, putting on puppet shows with his neighbor and contemporary, George Hamlin. He worked hard on his acting at Taft, went on to act and direct at Princeton. Princeton's situation was very much like that of Harvard before the Loeb opened. "There was no theatre, no drama department, no staff," says Chapman. "Nobody cared a damn." His only encouragement came from two English professor who occasionally stopped in at rehearsals, then made their suggestions at Sunday afternoon teas. He wrote two Triangle shows, playing "Miss Gibbings, a saucy secretary" in one of them. He became president of the Triangle Club in his senior year.

When he graduated from Princeton in 1941, he was thinking of "making a desperate attempt to get into the theatre as an actor." Instead, the Navy cast him as an intelligence man, and he ended up in Casablanca in a 12-man bureau devoted to investigating the likes of a bank teller who hung a photograph of Marshal Petain in his cage. He took advantage of the lack of crises to travel around North Africa, particularly Morocco, for which he developed an enduring love. (Today his office, which is his castle, is known behind his back as "little Morocco," because it is lined with books on Morocco, and its desk and walls are covered with Moroccan memorabilia.)

Back from the war in 1946, he taught for a while at Princeton and Berkeley. In the late forties he was called to New York to work on his dramatization of Melville's novella, Billy Budd.

Billy Budd marked the beginning and in some ways the end of Chapman's career as a professional playwright. Chapman had written six plays before he showed one to anybody. "I don't think they exist anymore," he says, and he doesn't seem to regard their loss as any great tragedy. He wrote Billy Budd with a Princeton colleague, Louis Coxe. In 1949, it was produced at an uptown off-Broadway theatre. Two years later a second version opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. The play promptly became a cause. John Mason Brown's notice in the Saturday Review reflected the tone of its admirers: "Those who did not see Billy Budd did their bit to discourage the theatre from doing its best. They turned their backs on courage and distinction."

The show only ran three months, but it came within two votes of winning the Drama Critics Circle Award. Chapman's favorite playwright, his paragon, is Shaw, and Billy Budd revealed in Chapman a Shavian concern for getting across a message of morals and ethics.

A wag recently said, "I wonder what happened to Chapman. Maybe Melville stopped writing." That is not what happened to Chapman. Between the time his play closed off-Broadway and opened on, Chapman had to do the cocktail party circuit, wooing backers. He and Coxe had to rewrite the play several times to suit other people's preferences. All this was distasteful to him and is one reason why he calls himself an "ex-playwright."

Another reason is his Shavian notion that a playwright must work from personal conviction and direct experience. "Unless you live out in the world, you're writing imaginary plays, from other people's plays. I can't get worked up about that. When you write a play, you have to want to write it so bad that not writing it gets to be annoying, intolerable."

Shortly after Billy Budd, Chapman wrote The General, a play critical of McCarthy which was given a fine amateur production in Cambridge. In the 14 years since then he has finished only one other play, about Orestes and Electra. The first act-and-a-half of another sits in his desk. He no longer works on it.

Although Chapman has maintained his professional standards, he has turned away from the professional theatre since he came to teach at Harvard in 1951. He teaches not because he can't do, but because he has abdicated from doing. He still acts and directs at the Loeb, but that is not the real thing, and he knows it.