Taking Stock: Theater at Harvard
By John Rockwell ‘62
I live in New York; first hand, except for a few American Repertory Theatre
(ART) performances over the years and Sweeney Todd and Macbeth at this
year's ARTS FIRST festival, my direct experience with professional and
student theater at Harvard is limited. But I do know something about it,
having talked with many of the major players as an arts-interested Overseer
for the last four years, and I know something more about the past, present
and future of the arts at Harvard in general, having served on a variety
of visiting and other arts-related committees at the University.
When I was an undergraduate, in 1646 – just kidding; it was 1958-62 – there was already a fair amount of theater activity among the undergraduates. During my time the Loeb Drama Center was built and opened (my roommate, Henry Munn, played the Fool in King Lear, the first undergraduate production there). I also recall that Frances FitzGerald, the author, and I were in the chorus of a student production of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio at the Agassiz, if we deign to count opera as theater.
But it was really in the 1980’s and 1990’s that undergraduate arts activity – including theater - exploded, fueled by the passion and interest of students, alumni and faculty, and nurtured by senior university administrators and the Office for the Arts. Which brings us to our present condition, with arts events year 'round, including more than sixty all-student theatrical productions annually, along with the ever expanding four-day ARTS FIRST festival in May.
ARTS FIRST is remarkable, and remarkably fun. Full-scale theatrical productions tend to flourish at the houses or the Loeb or in special venues, and less in the rapid-on, rapid-off ambiance of the Saturday Performance Fair. But the sheer pleasure in tearing around the Yard and beyond in search of performances on a beautifully sunny afternoon in early May – a statement that pretty much guarantees that it will rain, heavily and glumly and grimly, on May 3, 2003 – has been a genuine pleasure of my Overseer years and, I suspect, of many undergraduates' years, as well.
Which is all well and good as far as it goes. Harvard has traditionally chosen not to concern itself with professional training of actors (or, for that matter, in most other areas of artistic endeavor). It is not a conservatory; it is a liberal arts college with attendant professional graduate schools, none of them overtly arts-related. Undergraduate directors and actors who later become well-known artists (John Lithgow ‘67, Stockard Channing ‘65, Christopher Durang ‘71, Andre Gregory ‘56, Andre Bishop ’70) come here for a broadly humanistic education, and pursue their professional training on their own.
What has happened periodically, however, is that undergraduates have grown restive that they can't pursue the arts in a more formal way. Faculty members, too, responding to their own interests and those of their students, have piece-meal introduced covert forms of practical arts training for credit. The music department has a seminar in performance practice. One can study writing and poetry in the English department. Visual and Environmental Studies maintains arts studios, and also gives credit for filmmaking.
None of this has been formally studied, or made coherent, or sanctified collegewide by any higher authority. It first just sort of happened, and now seems to be becoming gradually more systematized -- as in the Faculty Committee on Dramatics, which offers twelve courses in drama.
The theater situation has been further enriched or complicated, depending on how you look at it, by the anomalous existence of a university-sponsored professional theater company, The American Repertory Theatre (ART). The issue of to what extent students may want or be able to obtain professional guidance from ART members, and to what extent ART members wish to or must devote their time to undergraduates, has been a sometimes difficult one. So has the competition for ever-scarce performing facilities, with ART and the Harvard-Racliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) uneasily sharing space at the Loeb and elsewhere. It will be most interesting to see if the new troika at ART, a new Office for the Arts director, along with a new president, provost and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the ever-shifting new leadership of the HRDC and the other undergraduate organizations, can work out a stronger relationship in a way that will assure all sides of the requisite mentoring and autonomy.
A final complicating factor for theater and all undergraduate arts is the development of Harvard’s new Allston property. The study of Allston and its many different possibilities has had the inadvertent result of freezing immediate plans, especially in the deployment of available space in Cambridge. Other than museums, will there or should there be some sort of performance component or studio or practice facilities in Allston? How would such far-distant locales, however desirable once you get there, coordinate with Yard-centered undergraduate life?
Ultimately, any long-ranging decision about whether to change the support of undergraduate theater activity or evolve the current ad-hoc relation of faculty professionals and student amateurs must rest with the administration and the faculty, especially the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the members of its extant arts committees and its new dean.
What might be nice would be the establishment of an FAS or even university-wide committee, made up of faculty and students and administrators and maybe Overseers and alumni, to consider whether a major change in Harvard's attitude toward the arts in general is desired or warranted. Should there be formal undergraduate or graduate instruction in the practice of music or theater? Should there be a graduate school of the arts, or program? At a minimum, should there be a model in undergraduate theater that mirrors undergraduate music making, in which students work in a direct, intensive and ongoing way with professional orchestral and choral conductors?
These are big questions, and the ethos of a large bureaucracy is inertia, especially in areas of secondary or tertiary priority and in which doing nothing can be ennobled by principle (the ideal of the broadly humanistic undergraduate, unburdened by professional craft). There are those who believe that excessive influence, not to say control, by faculty members would dampen undergraduate creativity in the arts (including theater), and would snuff out the very spirit that ARTS FIRST celebrates. Students have their post-60's "rights," and one of those rights is to ignore or defy what they regard as fustian faculty interference, even if they deny themselves faculty experience by so doing.
Personally, I believe that there is ample room for both amateur and professional arts at Harvard. Whether Harvard will follow Yale and many other American colleges and universities (especially the big state schools) and establish a proper theater department remains to be seen, and is surely a long way off if ever. University presses carve out their fields of specialty and leave other fields to other presses; perhaps that's the way it is, or even should be, with universities and fields of cultural and intellectual activity. Let Yale have professional arts training; we'll content ourselves with humanistic gentlemen (and gentlewomen). Of course, the same argument would not apply to Physics or History, say: let those who wish to pursue those fields apply elsewhere. Why should the performing arts be optional when other areas are deemed integral?
It seems to me that this time of transition – of president and provost and deans, at the ART and the Office for the Arts, and of the Harvard campus itself over the next decade and more – would be an ideal time for a serious, broad-ranging, faculty-driven reconsideration of the arts at Harvard.
And that very much includes theater.
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