Word: chapman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the Loeb was first being planned, Chapman wanted it to house professional companies for at least a part of every season; this year, for the first time, two pro troupes will play there. And it will no doubt be a relief for him to hear polished sounds coming from the stage. For if he has given up the professional theatre as a vocation ("I don't have the theatrical temperament," he explains), he has retained the standards it once demanded...
...puppet shows with his neighbor and contemporary, George Hamlin. He worked hard on his acting at Taft, went on to act and direct at Princeton. Princeton's situation was very much like that of Harvard before the Loeb opened. "There was no theatre, no drama department, no staff," says Chapman. "Nobody cared a damn." His only encouragement came from two English professor who occasionally stopped in at rehearsals, then made their suggestions at Sunday afternoon teas. He wrote two Triangle shows, playing "Miss Gibbings, a saucy secretary" in one of them. He became president of the Triangle Club...
Billy Budd marked the beginning and in some ways the end of Chapman's career as a professional playwright. Chapman had written six plays before he showed one to anybody. "I don't think they exist anymore," he says, and he doesn't seem to regard their loss as any great tragedy. He wrote Billy Budd with a Princeton colleague, Louis Coxe. In 1949, it was produced at an uptown off-Broadway theatre. Two years later a second version opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. The play promptly became a cause. John Mason Brown's notice in the Saturday Review...
...show only ran three months, but it came within two votes of winning the Drama Critics Circle Award. Chapman's favorite playwright, his paragon, is Shaw, and Billy Budd revealed in Chapman a Shavian concern for getting across a message of morals and ethics...
...recently said, "I wonder what happened to Chapman. Maybe Melville stopped writing." That is not what happened to Chapman. Between the time his play closed off-Broadway and opened on, Chapman had to do the cocktail party circuit, wooing backers. He and Coxe had to rewrite the play several times to suit other people's preferences. All this was distasteful to him and is one reason why he calls himself an "ex-playwright...