A first-rate importation form Mars is the Classical Club's production of the Birds of Aristophanes. A combination of the imagination of Jules Verne and Salvador Dali could not have concocted such a triumph of weird and otherworldly wildness as kicked up the dust in Sanders Theatre last night. Fantastic masks, brilliant costumes, lighting of all colors of the rainbow,--it's impossible to describe, but the nearest thing to it is Barnum and Bailey at their best, minus the elephants.

Yet out of all this phantasmagoria, from beneath this flood of (to most of the audience) incomprehensible Greck came a show, a swell show, a hit! There was none of the respectful boredom with which the audience greets far too many Classical Club productions. Instead the stiff-shirted, bespectacled audience let down their back hair and roared with laughter, applauded like mad.

For the brilliant success of the show the cast is mainly responsible. Their enthusiasm, their esprit de corps, their sense of comedy, all made the audience forget they didn't know Greek and have a grand time anyway watching some of the best horse-play this side of Broadway, a Sophic Tucker version of a Greek poem, an angel on roller-skates, a Heracles in striped pyjamas, and above all, Harvard as the Cloudcuckootown! Backing up the cast was an original musical score and masks, costumes, backdrops, done with skill and rare humor. Congratulations should also go to a gentleman named Aristophanes who constructed such an up-to-date plot. Histories say that the script clicked some 2500 years ago. It clicks today, too.