Word: loeb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...long as the Loeb Drama Center remained a vague vision for the future, everyone could see it in his own image. Students could think of the Loeb simply as a stage to be used as freely as any other. Some faculty members could envision a gradual evolution toward a formal drama school. Others, to whom this idea was repugnant, only hoped the Loeb would be professional, respectable, and faculty...
...drama school and "laissez-faire amateurism." Many undergraduates saw in the statements of Chapman and others the possibility that Harvard's new drama center would be used as a device to implement tight faculty control over undergraduate theatre. Such fears were hardly quieted as administrative plans for the Loeb gradually developed in the Spring...
Several other announcements in the same period did little to mollify the growing student contingent of anti-Loebites. The HDC, which had already started discussing possible inaugural productions, was jarred to hear that Chapman's assistant, Stephen Aaron, would direct the first play at the Loeb. Several years earlier, Aaron had been Harvard's foremost student director. Now, despite all his efforts to represent the interests of undergraduates, he became a symbol of faculty control...
Another cause of undergraduate opposition was a preposterous faculty report stating that the Loeb should produce only "recognized classics of the stage." Vague, and only briefly adhered to, this prospectus for play selection was mainly directed against musicals and Broadway fare. But it was interpreted by some to exclude lesser known serious plays as well. Quite reasonably, students active in Harvard theatre began to fear the Loeb would become a showcase for faculty-dominated professionalism...
Troilus and Cressida, the grand opening production of the Loeb Drama Center, was universally acknowledged to be a bomb. Brooks Atkinson, who came up to review the play for the Crimson, said so unreservedly. Undergraduates said so in tones ranging from surface disappointment to unconcealed pleasure. Troilus's importance was more than ceremonial, however. It weakened the case for Loeb professionalism, since it was hardly a success. It also weakened the status of its director, Stephen Aaron, whose tenure as assistant director of the Loeb was to be extraordinarily brief...