Word: rauch
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They ran into each other again at auditions for a Loeb Experimental Theater production of a play called Kaspar, in which, as it happened, they both got parts. Rauch played a prompter, which meant he had to go up to the balcony and scream down Warner played one of five alter-egos of the main character. Kaspar, and spend a lot of time hopping around the stage on crutches Rehearsals were "endless" and neither of them could quite figure out what the play meant...
...that--one a little before the other--they found they were better directors than actors. By then they were rooming together in Adams House and spending incessant hours talking about theater. And they had laid the groundwork for three phenomena almost equally legendary in Harvard theater circles today: the Rauch directing career, the Warner directing career, and the Rauch-Warner friendship, which has oscillated ever since between intense mutual support and equally intense rivalry over actors, stage space, and even scripts...
Three years and several epic battles later, most people involved agree that the two have had considerable influence on each other's work and on Harvard drama in general--though, to be sure, neither Rauch nor Warner nor anyone else can pin-point just what that influence has been...
...average Harvard theater-goer who hears the names Warner and Rauch constantly lumped together, that difference--a very definite one in style and approach--may not be apparent. Superficial similarities do abound. Both Rauch and Warner wince at words like "experimental" and "avant-garde," but one thing is undeniable: Nobody who goes to a production by either of them expects familiar renditions of old favorites, even when the posters promise Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night or even Cinderella. There are sure to be challenges--women playing men, men playing women, audience members sitting on stage, actors operating curtains...
...shocks are physical. When Rauch directed Romeo and Juliet on the mainstage, he startled everyone by turning the famous balcony scene upside-down. Juliet wasn't raised above the stage; instead, she curled up under a quilt on a large mattress, while Romeo stood over her pleadingly. Later, in the Capulet fault, the audience was treated to a ghostly mirror-image of itself--a huge bank of the auditorium seats with pale corpses propped in them, staring...