Word: workshopping
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...Baker put it, the Workshop was "not in the usual sense a theater, but rather a working place for the young dramatist, a place in which he has the opportunity to see the play adequately acted before a sympathetic and critical audience." This audience was not the usual crowd which drifts in from the streets. Admission was by in vitiation only and was restricted to "people believed to be deeply interested in such experimentation as the Workshop offers." But more than interest was required of the audience. Within three days after the production the spectator was expected to turn amateur...
...called "Golden Age" of Harvard theater began in the 1890's. With the exception of the later days of the Baker Workshop, the two decades straddling the turn of the century were the high-point of theatrical activity at the University. Up to this time the productions had been on a fairly small scale, but in the '90's they became much more ambitious. In 1889 the students of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, by invitation of the Greek Department and with the aid of Harvard actors, presented an elaborate production of Sophocles' Electra to a packed Sanders Theatre...
...girls became dissatisfied and petitioned the college for the establishment of an advanced course 47a. Shortly after this was begun, they also formed a 47 Club in which they discussed and read plays on an extracurricular basis. The club in time led to the formation of the famed 47 Workshop whose pin pose was to produce the plays written in 47 and 47a and discussed in the 47 Club. While the 47 Club had been strictly female, the girls invited Harvard men to participate in the new project, and soon the Workshop was the focus of all Harvard theater...
While Massachusetts Hall throbbed with activity--like "Berhhardt's heart beating in Priscilla's body" as John Mason Brown described it--people on the outside began to take notice of the productions. Even before the Workshop began Edward Sheldon's play, Salvation Neil, written while Sheldon was still an undergraduate in Baker's course, was discovered by the great American actress Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske and with her interpretation enjoyed a considerable run on Broadway. Soon after, with the founding of the HDC and its presentation of several plays written for Baker's courses, a number of Boston producers became...
...Workshop and its products were acclaimed in Boston and New York, in Cambridge they met with a cold reaction from the University administration. Originally, Baker had hoped that his playwriting courses would prove an opening wedge for allied courses in the dramatic arts. He soon discovered there was no chance of this and concentrated his efforts on persuading the University to build him a theater. Since its inception, the Workshop had used Radcliffe's Agassiz, which was almost totally inadequate for its work. As early as 1914 Baker presented a complete plan for a new theater, urging that the "baffling...