To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

If "The Moon is a Gong", announced by the Harvard Dramatic Club for its spring production, conforms to the dramatic rules set down by its author, Mr. John Dos Passos, in a recent number of Vanity Fair, we may be sure that the play is of questionable merit. The essay to which I refer is in substance an attack upon the "literary" drama. "We may as well admit," the author begins, "that for our time there are no questions of aesthetics."

May we indeed! In describing the first night of John Howard Lawson's "Processional," Mr. Don Passos, who takes the play as his model, compares the surprise of the audience to that of a maiden lady on a roller coaster for the first time. To him, the drama as we have it is the work of such a maiden lady, and he wishes to substitute for it something comparable to the obvious popular method of the roller coaster, an engine which he appears to think has been a powerful instrument for good in the development of our American culture.

Such an article is merely one of in tellectual carelessness. To relegate the literary quality in drama to the limbo of the old fashioned is to countenance the easy tools of the theatre in place of the more difficult and exacting technique of illusionism. If "The Moon is a Gong" is of the same pattern as "Processional", with characters reduced to readily comprehensible types, conducting their impossible business to the strains of a the less jazz band, we may rest assured that the play chosen by the Dramatic Club is a slip shed evasion of the method which its author confesses himself incompetent to handle.

It is regrettable that the Dramatic Club should see fit so to waste its time. Patrick Morgan '26