Word: hdc
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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...
...production of A Bride for the Unicorn was one of the few instances where the HDC was troubled by censorship. Theoretically, all the plays which it produced, until a few years ago, had to be approved by the group's faculty advisory committee. Normally this committee would decide which of a number of plays to produce. But in 1934, President Conant requested to read A Bride for the Unicorn and decide whether or not it was too risque to produce. The play squeaked through the committee, 3 to 2, but President Ada of to appear in it. Undaunted, the Dramatic...
...started the early '40's, and with the founding of a rival veterans' theater group--which later became the Harvard Theater Group--after the war, the Dramatic Club found itself unable to recover until the rival organization closed down in 1953 and turned its resources over to the HDC. Neil Smith, a former member of the Theater Group, became the president of the HDC, and gave the Club, which the previous year had produced only one play--Othello--a new vitality. In 1953-54 it produced four major shows, of which the biggest was T. S. Eliot's Murder...