Professionals to Aid HRDC

In a move that student actors say may solve the perennial shortage of professional mentorship for their productions, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) announced Friday its selection of a visiting director for the fall.

The initiative is comes on the heels of a similar project that fell through last semester. The group now hopes it will become an annual tradition, HRDC board members said.

For the first time this year, the project will be funded and partially organized by the Office for the Arts (OFA).

“Our hope is that this will become truly an institution,” said OFA director Jack C. Megan.

The Visiting Director Project (VDP) aims to invite a professional director to Harvard every two years to give the campus theater community a chance to work with and learn from professionals, organizers said.

This fall, director Jay Scheib, who has worked extensively in Germany and New York, will come to Harvard to direct Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, a satiric play dealing with a failed republican revolution during the Renaissance.

A VDP show has gone up bi-annually spring since 1995 and was due to happen this semester.

But because of what former HRDC president Daniel A. Cozzens ’03 called poor planning, the program didn’t materialize. At an HRDC-sponsored open forum last November, members expressed disappointment at the failure.

But this fall will see not only the return of the VDP to the Loeb Mainstage, but substantial changes to the program itself, Megan said. The most important of these changes is a pledge from the American Repertory Theater (ART)—the professional acting company, housed in the Loeb Drama Center—to help the HRDC secure a professional during the years that the OFA is not involved, resulting in expert mentorship every year.

“The ART has made a commitment to provide a professional director from its ranks of resident directors every other year and will work closely with the HRDC and the Office for the Arts in helping to identify an outside director in alternating years,” ART director Robert Orchard said in a statement.

The OFA has also promised to support the HRDC in further institutionalizing the program. Megan said the OFA will do most of the logistical work involved in bringing in a professional—resolving issues like pay, housing and food—so that the HRDC “could focus more on the work and less on crisis management.”

HRDC President Benjamin D. Margo ’04-’05, who is also a Crimson editor, said that past professional collaboration has resulted in better shows. He referred to the most recent VDP show, in which Marcus Stern, and ART director, directed Great God Brown.

“It blew me away,” Margo said. “You could really see the improvement the [professional] director brought about.”

Margo also said the closer relationships with the ART and OFA would solve problems that have plagued the VDP in the past. A lack of institutional memory has left the group scrabbling to re-establish the program every other year, he said.

“It’s a huge deal that the ART has taken this very big and specific role in helping with the VDP,” Margo said. “The project had to be reinvented every two years. It was an arduous process and a chaotic one.”

Megan added that he was eager to see the visiting director take part in campus life outside the mainstage.

“We’d like to see this really take root, to see [Scheib] living in the houses, eating in the dining halls, visiting the classrooms,” Megan said.

If VDP shows go well, Megan said, Harvard will have an easier time attracting artistic professionals in the future.

“People talk in the theater world,” said Megan.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.