Building, Literally, A New Theatrical Vision
As the curtain comes down on another busy year for Harvard College theater—over 50 productions in various venues, including Agassiz Theatre, the Loeb Drama Center and student houses—the undergraduate community of actors, directors, playwrights, designers and technicians eagerly awaits the biggest opening of all: the New College Theater, located on Holyoke Street at the former site of the Hasty Pudding Theater. Though the debut of this venue is still a year away, its imminence signals the arrival of a new era for college theater, a sea change that will include new staffing and the potential for a concentration in drama.
The new facility will be tailored to support undergraduate drama with full flying facilities, an accessible orchestra pit, and full audience amenities at a location convenient for both collegiate and general audiences. In his annual letter to the faculty, Dean William Kirby noted that “this theater will be the only facility on campus dedicated exclusively to undergraduate theater production and students’ professional development.”
With the Hasty Pudding off-line, Agassiz Theatre was packed last season, especially in the spring. At one point Common Casting, the Athena Theatre Company’s The Vagina Monologues, the South Asian Association’s Ghungroo and the Woman of the Year ceremony with Halle Berry were all competing for space. Earlier in the season, the Gilbert and Sullivan players were able to construct the elaborate set for Ruddigore on the Agassiz stage.
The fall saw an innovative production of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, followed by Actéon by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, staged in the Horner Room with music faculty including Prof. Thomas Kelly in the “pit.” The spring saw two full musicals (Chicago and Footloose), another Gilbert and Sullivan (The Yeomen of the Guard), Aristophanes’ The Birds, a Freshman Musical, and three senior recitals.
As usual, there were dozens of other productions in the houses receiving production advice and support from the OFA. Threepenny Opera at Lowell House and Dialogues of the Carmelites at Dunster House were elaborate productions.
A special triumph was the effort spearheaded by a small group of students to buy a portable stage. By pooling resources Dunster House, Lowell House and the Harvard Early Music Society were able to share the cost with the Office for the Arts to obtain a professional-quality stage that will be managed by the three groups.
And in the midst of everything, the new Harvard Dance Center opened at 60 Garden Street in September (see Dance, page 4). The production equipment, designed by Alan Symonds (Technical Director and Adviser for College Theatre), is designed to support the ambitious goal of using the large space as both a performance venue and as an active rehearsal space. In performance mode the space is fully equipped with high-quality facilities, to fully support dance activities and also to encourage theatre students to explore another art form.
Learning From Performers
In 2005-06, students got first-hand insights from notable theater artists brought to campus in the OFA’s visiting artist program. Adam Guettel, whose score, lyrics and orchestrations for the Broadway musical The Light in the Piazza won Tony Awards last year, conducted a master class for eight undergraduate composers, lyricists and performers in the Winthrop House Junior Common Room, with other students attending as observers. That evening at John Knowles Paine Hall in the Music Building, Guettel also participated in a conversation moderated by Michael Mitnick ‘06 and Carol Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music, which was open to the public. Guettel discussed his artistic influences and creative development, interspersed with both recorded and live examples of his work.
Writer, producer and former Australian champion swimmer Tony Fingleton ‘67, who told his coming-of-age story in the critically acclaimed novel Swimming Upstream and its film adaptation of the same name, discussed producing the successful off-Broadway musical Preppies during a seminar on October 21 co-sponsored by the Office of Career Services.
Another alumnus, playwright Christopher Durang ’71 (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, The Marriage of Bette and Boo), was the recipient of the 2006 Harvard Arts Medal. After receiving the medal from President Lawrence H. Summers in a ceremony at Agassiz Theatre on May 5, Durang talked about his career and creative process during a conversation moderated by actor John Lithgow ’67.
Visiting Director Project
This year’s guest of the Visiting Director Project was Brendan Hughes, who in October staged a production of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s Lulu. Hughes, a 2004 graduate of the directing program at the Yale School of Drama, spent five weeks on campus developing the production, which involved students not only as actors but also as dramaturgs, designers, choreographers, technical crew members, and videographers.
Mary Brazelton ’08 of the Harvard Crimson heralded the play as “a definite artistic success…one of the most successful campus dramas in recent memory.”
The Visiting Director Project is an annual collaboration of the Office for the Arts, the American Repertory Theatre, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club that provides opportunities for Harvard undergraduates to develop full-scale theatrical productions on the main stage of the Loeb Drama Center under the guidance of professional directors.
The importance of Hughes’s residency was threefold: It exposed Harvard students and the broader community to a young theater artist from a graduate-school background who is successfully creating challenging work; it introduced students to new ways of interpreting a classic dramatic text; and it gave students learning and mentoring opportunities in technical aspects of theater production. The latter component was enhanced and expanded by the participation of guest lighting designer Sarah Sidman ’93.
