Veritas on Stage

In 2002, The Crimson broke a story that uncovered one of the darkest chapters in Harvard’s history—the “secret court” that actively persecuted homosexual undergraduates in the 1920s.

Almost 90 years later, this story has been transformed into a play that debuted Aug. 20 at the New York International Fringe Festival, taking its overall excellence award for best ensemble. “Veritas,” written by Stan Richardson, dramatizes the 1920s episode at Harvard with a slew of stunning cast.

In an interview with FlyBy, Richardson said that he first got the idea to write “Veritas” from a friend, who had read an article on the subject in Out Magazine in 2003. He then spent weeks poring over 500 pages of cryptic documents involving the incident that eventually turned into an award-winning play originally completed in 2007.

Although the play draws upon the event in which the secret court prosecuted the homosexual Harvard men, Richardson said he made a conscious decision not to depict the court itself in order to avoid drawing any basic, easy conclusions. He added that he was more interested in “imagining the moments of fracture.”

Richardson explained further: “One thing that got me hooked was a letter Keith Smerage ’21 wrote to his mother before the court convened. He was so eloquent in his hopes for himself, what he thought Harvard could do for him and what he could do for the world. He just couldn’t pull it together after this and committed suicide ten years later.”

“People like to see plays and be morally tucked into bed at night,” Richardson said. “But that’s useless to people. My play is a warning, trying to break through the idea that just because it happened in the past, it’s nothing [that] couldn’t happen again.”

Photo courtesy of Carlos Arias.