Over at Sanders Theater later this term both the Veterans Theater Workshop and the Dramatic Club will make another try for postwar popular success. This time, in the absence of fig-leaf and reincarnation, critical interest will center around the quality of the production rather than the meaning of pompous and obscure authors. In Shaw's "St. Joan" and Odets' "Waiting For Lefty," local thespians have two tested and playable dramas, while the HDC's additional offering, Saroyan's "The Ping-Pong Players," can turn out to be almost anything, and probably will.

On the face of the matter, financial success should be proportionate to the excellence of the productions. But the value of the student body as an audience will be at test no less than the worth of the two theater groups. Having expressed their preference in the veteran group's poll last month for Shaw as an author and for English satire and sophisticated comedy as a category, students will get a compromise from the veterans in the non-comic "St. Joan," while the HDC blithely ignores the lowly position of modern sociological drama on the ballot and proceeds with Odets. This puts it up to students themselves to demonstrate, on the one hand, if they will back up lunch-time enthusiasm with action at the box-office, and on the other, if the poll-answerers comprise the bulk of undergraduate theater-goers.

The test would be truer, of course, if the veterans had chosen "Pygmalion' or some other Shavian comedy. But the only available local theater is Sanders, which once frightened Charles Addams, and no comedy could hope to overcome its intense and ancient gloom. Its other limitations, such as the absence of a curtain and the lack of opportunity for an imaginative set designer to cut loose, have also contributed to the selection of the plays, none of which requires more than a suggestive skeleton of scenery.

Nonetheless, the situation stands clear. Two successful dramas, one near the top group on the popularity ladder and the other squarely in the bottom one, will hit the boards this spring. The results should show whether or not as one puritanical undergraduate commented on the poll, "drama has no place at Harvard except as a critical exercise."