Word: winthrope
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...spring. Tis the season for Harvard students to emerge from a foreboding stack of papers and re-enter the world of sunshine and warmth. Tis the season for a healthy host of Harvard "fests." Coming up this weekend is the much-heralded Thropstock at Winthrop House (and you're all invited--even if you don't live there!) Thropstock promises to be a veritable confluence of fabulous music, with several student bands on the day's bill. In addition to the bands, there will be several arts and crafts areas--and the folks over at Winthrop House don't mean...
...Winthrop...
Crammed into the elegant and (conveniently) parlor-like Winthrop Junior Common Room, HRDC's The Cocktail Party should be seen first and considered later. Party because actually seeing the floor-level set past twelve rows of upper-class attendees requires great skill and cunning and partly because the play is riddled with T.S. Eliot's innocuously cryptic language, no distinct message leaps forth from the play. Rather, various lines worm their way into the audience, reappearing days later as pertinent homilies for the daily personal lives of audience members...
What do we do with this sort of theater? Even when it was hardly visible from the back row, The Cocktail Party filled the Winthrop JCR with an obscure imperative, neither calling for a systematic analysis of Eliot's intention nor a sympathetic internalization of Edward Chamberlayne's plight. Eliot's play glistens in space between gushing romanticism and total ironic self-deprecation. As still young and mostly un-betrothed audience members, we can only be glad that Eliot has asked his questions, and it is cathartic to see that the answers (to live in darkness, to honestly accept...
...Winthrop and see our fellow students act out a play by a poet who once seemed untouchably historical but who now seems like only another Harvard alum, and we realize that the play we have (barely) seen might actually be a reflection. The insolubility of Eliot's thought is not a result of Tadjedin's failure to properly direct The Cocktail Party. Rather, it is its greatest strength. It is comforting at least that the characters Eliot has created for us are just as bewildered as we are--yet, it offers no relief...