Word: seltzer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...senior year at Princeton in 1954, Daniel Seltzer, assistant professor of English, wrote a thesis that was nearly six hundred pages long (don't put that down as if I were proud of it"). Dealing with "royal themes--the characterization of moral ideas on the stage," the thesis was for Seltzer a "kind of catharsis," and he now looks back with Joycean delight at the comment of his roommate who suggested that "I put the thing on casters...
Continuity seems to mark Seltzer's career, and if anything unifies his varied roles as teacher, actor, director, and writer, it is his abiding dislike of professionalism. Characterizing his life in the theater as a "love-hate relationship," he emphasizes that "there are aspects of the professional theater which appall me." Most simply, he decries the "big business of Broadway" which emphasizes a criterion of achievement "only incidently related to merit." And he finds the theater in "pretty dismal shape when we have to tout Albee as our leading playwright...
Although the London theater and off-Broadway productions are both sources of creativity, Seltzer is adamant about drama's potential at Harvard. "Original drama and preservation of the classical tradition is at least as much the responsibility of the academic community as the professional," he said last week in his Loeb office, surrounded by glossy prints of main stage productions...
...important test of the plan's feasibility may be this spring's experiment at the Loeb, which will combine lectures with regular rehearsals in staging fall-scale productions of Shakespeare's King Lear and Julius Caesar, as well as concert readings of four plays by Christopher Marlowe. Daniel Seltzer, assistant professor of English and acting director of the Loeb, said he would want to see how the experiment worked out before making any formal proposal to give academic credit for a drama ocurse...
...students will constitute "sort of a reportory company," Seltzer said, in which one actor may have a major role in Lear but only a minor one in Julius Caesar. He said that plans for casting were not definite yet, but that all actors would probably have to audition to be admitted to the project. Casting for parts would take place after the program had begun...