Word: dramas
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Dramatic Arts, or its McCarter Theatre, Yale and Princeton must look towards their Cambridge crony with pity. Harvard still inclines to a tradition of "pure" liberal arts, devoid of much practical application. But long ago colleges realized each subject can grow only in its own medium, that to write drama for an English composition course--and yet keep it divorced from the stage--is like reading chemistry without carrying on laboratory experiments. Playwrights like Sidney Howard, Eugene O'Neill and Philip Barry thrived under Professor Baker because the workshop tested their lines through informal productions and moulded them into shape...
...meantime, concrete steps can easily be taken. Through a composition course in playwriting, undergraduates could test their work in collaboration with the Dramatic Club and produce informally for their own practice and self-criticism. Another course, devoted to acting, might correlate all the odds and ends of drama now spread over the English Department. A third, given by the Fine Arts Department, would concentrate on design and technique for actual production. With such progress under its belt, Harvard could atone for the past, not by waiting for a financial "angel" but by announcing that the foundation for a complete School...
...addition to the American history programs, the Radio Workshop is preparing special experimental broadcasts, one of them a script of the poetic drama "Inquest" by Theodore Spencer, visiting lecturer in English. Several members of the Workshop are working on individual script projects. Last spring the group produced and recorded a version of Sophocles' "Antigone" in collaboration with the World Wide Broadcasting experts...
...main defect of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is that it is not tragic. Until the very end, Elizabeth's insistence that Essex can save his head merely by sending back her ring makes the drama seem as unreal as a schoolgirl's tiff, the decapitation just a bit of a royal whimsey. Partly this is due to Author Anderson's original conception, partly to the neurotic bounce with which Cinemactress Davis scratches, claws, snarls and romps her way through the repetitious love scenes, mopes and moons through her my-manic depressions...
...role there since December 1935. For this Broadway can rejoice, even though finding anything to rejoice at in the play itself is like looking for a needle in a Hayestack. After a two-month tryout, this thing of shreds & patches is still, like Gaul, divided into three parts-comedy, drama, romance -and, as in Gaul, the three parts are on very uncivil terms...