Word: hdc
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other policy which has generally been followed was the original decision to have professional direction of all HDC plays. This was first interpreted as hiring directors who had worked on Broadway, such as Wilfrid North, director of the first production. Later, recent graduates who had had either professional or amateur experience were hired, and in succeeding years, capable undergraduates directed the shows...
Baker hmself was highly pleased with The Promised Land and succeeding productions, two of which, The Scarecrow and Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater were performed on Broadway, the first by a professional company, the second by the HDC itself. The initial guiding light of the Club wrote in 1917 that the group's achievement was "remarkable." He asserted that the production of original plays had not hampered the organization, as some had first thought it would, but "from the beginning the Harvard Dramatic Club has shown clearly . . . that college undergraduates can give original plays to a mixed audience and with real...
Baker's disappointment must have been great when the HDC, reorganized after a year's recess following World War I, decided to abandon the production of undergraduate plays. They gave as their reason their opinion that these plays had proved too confining, and that the need for "filling the gap between the younger playwrights and Broadway" was being met by the 47 Workshop. The Club's new administration thus decided to produce works which had not previously been given in the United States. For seven years they concentrated on foreign works, but in 1924 it decided that "the trouble with...
After the original policy was rejected, Baker's influence began to wane. For years Baker had striven for the construction of a theater in which to house the productions of his Workshop and the HDC, but in vain. Plans had been drawn up in 1914 for a theater of advanced design, but this, despite the Harvard Alumni Bulletin's warning that "the need is pressing; the opportunity is unique," never amounted to anything. In 1924, Yale offered Baker the theater he wanted and the opportunity to teach nothing but playwriting--which he could not do at Harvard--and in that...
...departure of Baker did not reduce the stature of the HDC, and it continued to add to its laurels. The year after he left the group produced The Moon Is a Gong, by John Dos Passos '16, who had written nothing worthy of production during his years as an undergraduate. In 1934 it put on Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine, the same year it presented the American premiere of A Bride for the Unicorn, by Denis Johnston, a noisy and risque comedy putting the story of the Golden Fleece in modern setting...