Word: chapman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chosen to head the new theatre was Robert H. Chapman, then associate professor of English. Chapman had come to Harvard on a crest of popularity -- the adaptation he co-authored of Billy Budd was an immense critical success off-Broadway. While the merits of his anti-McCarthy play The General were hotly debated, it was anti-McCarthy, and its production at Harvard generated an aura of romantivism about its author...
...Chapman himself spoke of a compromise between a drama school and "laissez-faire amateurism." Many undergraduates saw in the statements of Chapman and others the possibility that Harvard's new drama center would be used as a device to implement tight faculty control over undergraduate theatre. Such fears were hardly quieted as administrative plans for the Loeb gradually developed in the Spring...
...Chapman announced the creation of an elaborate two-committee play selection process, under which established Harvard drama groups could offer production plans to a student-faculty advisory committee. Final authority, however, was vested in the Faculty Committee on Drama...
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...
...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...