Word: localize
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Harvard Square is in real danger of turning into a Little Broadway. As on Manhattan's Broadway, an increasing emphasis on commercial success has become detectable among the local drama groups, and the cult of success is made necessary by the fact that the productions are growing ever more grand and elaborate. The recent Harvard Dramatic Club staging of Hamlet had a budget of well over four thousand dollars, a figure which is by no means exceptionally large. Unfortunately even when these expensive productions get their outlay back at the box office, the result from an artistic point of view...
...additional sign of the growing Broadway mentality among the local drama groups can be found in the type of play which they choose as their vehicles. The current Dudley House production of Streetcar presents a particularly unfortunate example, but scarcely an isolated one. The last couple of years have witnessed the college staging of other plays by Williams, as well as works of Miller, Fry, and Chekhov, all of whom then had plays running in New York. While these men are among the best of modern playwrights, their works do receive quite frequent productions by the commercial theater. Obviously college...
...Harvard theater, however, has shown only a sporadic tendency toward original or experimental work. One cause of this lack is the scarcity of produceable plays by local writers and the questionable quality of experimental plays by established authors, but these points make a poor excuse. The works, for example, of Ibsen, Lorca, and Yeats include many of which are eminently suitable for staging at the University. Some of them have the additional advantage of not requiring grand production. Instead of these, we get imitations of Broadway--and Shakespeare. Even worse than the popular modern playwrights, Shakespeare provides the staple...
However, while the Society's energy and enthusiasm deserves nothing but applause, their choice of a vehicle for their entry into the local scene is open to some question. Certainly Streetcar, Williams' most successful exploration of Southern degenaracy to date, is a popular play, but this very fact brings in its wake a number of problems. For one thing, though the play has not been staged right here before, it has received a good many recent productions, and comparison thus becomes inevitable. For another, it has become pretty thoroughly identified with the ultra-naturalistic school of acting developed by Elia...
...Term was long and tedious, and a review is even more so. The whole thing was summed up back in November by the Chief Storekeeper of the local ROTC unit. The Storekeeper, who practices the mystic art of Persian rugmaking, claimed that his insights into the future were "too frightening to reveal...