Streaking Into the Past

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, There's a land that I've heard of once in a lullaby...

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops,

That's where you 'll find me...

And all you do is just sit tight, 'Cause it's all so, so, so downright right.

A sign soliciting actors for a musical production of The Wizard of Oz at Dunster House is the final straw: the Harvard theatrical community has gone preternaturally escapist this year. With the exception of a planned Adams House production of Medea--recently scrapped because of lack of interest--and a Winthrop House production of The Plain Dealer, the other House selections, Leverett's Applause and Kirkland's Hay Fever, are marked by unusual frivolity. Add to these plays the usual Hasty Pudding show (this year reincarnated as Keep Your Pantheon) and the semiannual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and we have what someone once called the triumph of sugar over diabetes. But what of the Loeb Mainstage? After an interesting start with Harlem in the Evening, a play with music based on the works of Langston Hughes, they have now planned The Rivals, Kiss Me Kate, and The Front Page.

It's no news that nostalgia is sweeping the country. But students can't be nostalgic for an era that they never knew. No, the preference is not for the past, but for the trivial, the best of the trivial drama, from any era or in any style that is not threatening socially, ethically or politically.

The plays of this Harvard season do not challenge an audience to think clearly, to feel deeply or to attempt to resolve any problems which could conceivably be of importance to it. Trivial plays and musicals, at which scores of students will be sweating away this semester, make truly trivial events, stereotyped characters, and mediocre music seem real and significant. These productions distract us rather than direct us to real life and real problems, personal and political.

Buy why pick on theatre? Is a community's taste in entertainment more significant than its taste in toothpastes or yogurt? Yes and yes. Drama has a special cultural significance. "Of all genres, the drama is by its nature most immediately sensitive to changes in response, since its offerings are constantly (and financially) tested by audiences: there must be uninterrupted mass appeal...plays register changes in the public temper more quickly, more openly...than do private forms," wrote Eric Rothstein in Restoration Tragedy. Drama is a symptom and a symbol of a community turned toward reality or away from it. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot, but neither, one might add, can it afford to have too little. And this spring, escapes with or without clothes to lands where "troubles melt like lemon drops" are taking on the trappings of a full-time occupation.

The last time that The Wizard of Oz made a hit at Harvard was in October of 1939 when the movie version played for the first time at the University Theatre (now the Harvard Square). The Crimson movie reviewer took it quite seriously and decided that in spite of "a strong aroma of Walt Disney," it was "a good show."

He quite rightly disliked the Munchkin production number and preferred Judy Garland in front of a simple backdrop singing "Over the Rainbow" and Bert Lahr chewing on his tail. The Crimson review in 1939 also went for Gone With the Wind (which has recently had a big revival) and for The Roaring Twenties (which still comes around now and again), "a saga of liquor and love that rolls through that fabulous decade into the gloom of the thirties." And the review highly recommends Bachelor Mother, in which Ginger Rogers, David Niven, and a jitterbug contest "all add up to delightful fare."

On the front pages of The Crimson in 1939, however, news of "The Real World" occupied more than one double column per issue. Almost every paper of that year reports a new crisis: January 15, 1939, Hitler marches into Prague; March 29, 1939, Franco claims victory over the Spanish Loyalists; September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. But on the inner pages of The Crimson, editorials urged strict neutrality and isolationism for the United States, and reviews and advertisements urged students to forget and to be frivolous. Ads for ballroom dancing lessons as well as special offers for "Tux or Tails" for a mere $35 reflect Harvard's version of the national passion for dancing. (Favorite songs for 1939 included "Deep in a Dream," "Wishing," and "I Didn't Know What Time It Was.") Meanwhile, Time magazine records the fact that a Harvard freshman, one Lothrop Witlington of Holworthy Hall, initiated the radically inane practice of goldfish swallowing, a fad which then spread to other universities.

But while movies, dances, songs, and fads seemed parts of a conspiracy against reality, what was the role of theatre at Harvard? In the first place, there was very little on-campus theatre in 1939. The gap seems to have been filled by the thriving pre-Broadway plays at the Colonial Shubert, and Wilbur theaters; reviews of these plays appear at least weekly in The Crimson. But Broadway and, unfortunately, the Crimson reviewer were part of the anti-reality conspiracy. As Burns Mantle, compiler of The Best Plays of Broadway, puts it, 1939 was a "comedy year." The Crimson reviewer raves over Too Many Girls at the Shubert (the title speaks for itself), and equally over the more durable comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner. The Crimson is severely critical, however, of S.H. Behrman's somewhat serious comedy, called No Time for Comedy, about the moral problem of writing comedy in a time of crisis. And of Maxwell Anderson's serious play, Key Largo, The Crimson is openly scornful. The reviewer is particularly distressed by the topical political "message" of the play, which has been removed, by the way, from the familiar movie version. The reviewer writes: "Of course, stretching the Anderson thesis a point further, one can see more than a slight tinge of whooping up the Allied cause in the present war and a plea for U.S. intervention. This facet of the play's message,' if taken seriously, would probably make almost anyone writhe." "If taken seriously." Surely there was no danger of that.

But what of the Harvard productions themselves? Only two plays were produced in the fall and winter of 1939, one of which was certainly ambitious, and the other meant to be taken seriously. The ambitious play was produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club at Sanders Theatre. It was an original play with music on the model of Coward's Cavalcade, called Too Late to Laugh. It was about rich and poor in New York City and it featured a cast of 150. But the season was most notably redeemed by the Harvard Student Union Drama Committee's production of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead, a serious play about the horror and waste of war. The Crimson reviewer, subdued and genuinely impressed, notes the topical subject of the play without scorn, and speaks of the "spirit of honest reality" which pervaded the production. That night The Adventures of Robin Hood was playing at the University Theatre.

Professor Chapman said recently in his course on Modern Drama that he would like to bring back the days (nostalgia again) of the riots at the Abbey Theatre during performances of The Playboy of the Western World and The Plough and the Stars, or even the riots after the first word ("merdre") of Jarry's Ubu Roi. Theater when it's working well, he was saying, is meant to be somewhat jarring and disturbing. But this spring's Harvard drama season is in total accord with the national attitude of escape and be merry. It is a whole feast for complacency. Musical comedy is by its very nature a tranquilizing force. No problem is allowed to arise that can't be soothed with another reprise. And an undiluted diet of period comedy, however refreshing and excellent each production is individually, seems guaranteed to assure us how much less silly we are now than people used to be. ("Can you imagine forcing your hair into all those little curls?")

Since the season is on now, there's no reason why we shouldn't enjoy it. But as we're emerging from one of our jaunts into the past, as we walk out into the invigorating after-theatre air, we might just ask ourselves what it is we're retreating from. Is it from the problems that surround us daily, problems surely not so grave as those that faced Harvard students in 1939? Or is it possibly that we are escaping something within ourselves--our own lack of commitment, perhaps, to the world and its problems, this side of the rainbow?

Candace Brook is a graduate student in English.