Summit Airs Theater Concerns, Proposals

The play was the thing Monday night at a semi-annual theater summit sponsored by the Harvard Theater Advisory Group with the help of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC).

Participants in the summit, a forum for discussing the state of theater at Harvard, discussed issues ranging from creating a central fund to help pay for the rights to stage plays, to creating a single Web page for all theater at Harvard.

"[The summit] is really good because we find out what common problems are and what common solutions could be," said Jessica K. Jackson '99, HRDC president.

About 25 people from various theater groups, including 11 first-years, attended the meeting.

Jackson noted that more actors and first-year students attended than usual, a trend she said she was happy about.

Alan P. Symonds '69, technical director and advisor of theater in the Office of the Arts for Harvard and Radcliffe, said he found the first-year attendance "pretty remarkable and pretty neat."

"I hope [the first-years] saw theater at work at Harvard and that [they] will be leaders of a new generation of theater at Harvard," he said.

Though "optimistic" about the possibility for change, Jerald M. Korn '99, producer of the annual Hasty Pudding show, stressed the need for action.

"If [the ideas] don't happen, it will have been a meeting of a lot of good ideas that don't come to fruition," Korn said.