The final offering of the C.D.F. was Much Ado About Nothing, with Sir John Gielgud as both Benedick and director. Gielgud gave us a clean, crisp, meticulous production, beautifully and symmetrically staged in keeping with the symmetrical, Renaissance style of the play. Having played Benedick off and on for 28 years, he gave a performance that was marvelously nuanced. Still, as he himself has admitted, he is not an ideal Benedick. The part demands more brio than he has inside him to give. He plays the clarinet when he should be blowing a trumpet. Yet he was careful to choose a Beatrice that would properly balance the see-saw, in this case Margaret Leighton.

George Rose's booming and Falstaffian Dogberry was definitive. Hurd Hatfield was perfectly cast as the villainous Don John, and Micheal MacLiammoir was a laudable Don Pedro. In several of the other roles, especially female, the performers were not up to Gielgud's demands.

Having forsworn the part of Hamlet a few years ago, Gielgud now says he will not play Benedick again after this production finishes its present run on Broadway. When someone objected, he replied, "I'll always be left with Lear and Prospero."

This C.D.F. season must, on the whole, be written down as a commendable success, far in excess of what could legitimately have been expected in such a short time and under such unpredictable circumstances. William Morris Hunt '36, the C.D.F.'s Executive Producer, has announced that 80,000 persons attended the summer's offerings. The major remaining problem for the new Theatre is its acoustics. During the summer several amplification arrangements were tried; the one used for Much Ado, the sole proscenium production, turned out to be the best. But the acoustics are still not wholly satisfactory; perhaps the solution demands a concave roof and solid, airtight walls.

Group 20 Players

The Group 20 Players had a particularly fine season--their seventh--with only one lapse out of a schedule of five plays. By coincidence they opened with the same work as the C.D.F.'s finale: Much Ado. It was directed by Ellis Rabb, who joined the company for the first time. Rabb is one of the finest Shakespearean actors anywhere; though still very young, he is one of a handful who can boast of having acted in all thirty-seven of the Bard's plays. He provided a warm, even-keeled production on William D. Roberts' stunning, three-story set, complete with lanterns and garden swing. As Beatrice and Benedick, Rosemary Harris and Barry Morse made a strong pair of unwilling lovers, spitting out their wit with clarity and verve. They were less reliable than their C.D.F. counterparts, but at times surpassed the Gielgud-Leighton team. (Alfred Drake still remains the best Benedick this country has seen in years.) Some of the supporting men were poor, but the women were better than Gielgud's.

A Streetcar Named Desire, the better of Tennessee Williams' two great plays, forced director Rabb out of the realm where he belongs. Determined to find a "new" interpretation, Rabb supplied a long program note full of fuzzy theorizing and such ideas as: "Awe is antithetical to pity. Pity is indecisive; in awe there is no escape." In stripping Blanche DuBois of her nobility and routing out all traces of pity for her, Rabb distorted the play out of all proportion. As Blanche, Cavada Humphrey fought a losing battle, and was the only cast member even to attempt mastering a Southern accent. Robert Blackburn's Stanley was not animalistic enough, but Chase Crosley made him a sweet wife. The best part of the production was the set, with its half dozen gaudy, flashing neon signs.

Jerome T. Kilty '49 returned to Wellesley to direct and star in his adaptation of Shaw's Man and Superman, which drama critic Elliot Norton '26 has called "the greatest comedy of the 20th century." An uncut performance would last eight hours, and most directors simply throw out the lengthy "Don Juan in Hell" interlude, which is the most brilliant four-way conversation ever written. Kilty's skillful blue-penciling enabled him to retain about an hour of the Hell scene, which makes the last act more meaningful since it refers to the infernal dialogue specifically.

Barry Morse, who is regarded as Canada's leading actor, gave a sparklingly burnished performance as Jack TannerDon Juan, and Rosemary Harris was his delightful pursuer and ensnarer. Kilty was fine in the double role of the brigand Mendoza and the Devil. His production constituted the high point of the Weslesley season, as it had two years previously.

The company then offered, under Basil Langton's direction, a 55th anniversary production of Sir James Barrie's classic fable for both children and adults, Peter Pan. As Peter, who has from Maude Adams to the present always been played for some reason by a woman, Miss Harris was captivatingly pixyish. Eric Portman might have brought more bravado to the traditional double role of the Father and Captain Hook. Ellis Rabb provided an unbeatably riotous Smee, an elaboration of the Starveling he did in Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford a year ago. The production employed the original music of John Crooke, which Barrie himself had termed "delightful." And special equipment was set up to allow four characters at once to fly through the air.

The Wellesley season wound up with an impressive production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, directed by Athan Karras, a native Greek with considerable experience in his country's great classics. He presented a movingly stylized and austere show, using Gilbert Murray's not too satisfactory translation (Yeats' is no better; there is still need for a truly actable translation). Barry Morse, whose forte is high comedy, made an admirable Oedipus, but he could not plumb the depths of his final scene. Sydney Sturgess was badly miscast as Jocasta; but Ellis Rabb acted as cathartic a Tiresias as one is ever likely to see. The corporate delivery of the Chorus of Elders lacked rhythmic precision.

Boston Summer Playhouse

Lee Falk, who for a dozen summers had produced plays in New England Mutual Hall, decided to throw in the towel after losing money the past two summers. Stepping into the gap came the Boston Summer Playhouse. The first offering, a dreadful item called Fair Game, was given an insultingly inept performance. After a quick reshuffling of plans, the Playhouse bounced back with a fairly amusing production of F. Hugh Herbert's delightful sophisticated comedy, The Moon is Blue, in which Frank Langella and Frederick Morehouse '59-3 performed with considerable skill. Jan de Hartog's The Four-poster, a series of lovely vignettes of married life, came off moderately well in the hands of Tad Danielewski and Sylvia Daneel; but the play really cries out for polished husband-and-wife teams like Hume Cronyn-Jessica Tandy and Rex Harrison-Lili Palmer.

The Playhouse hit its peak with an excellent production of Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge, a powerful and almost successful attempt at a new kind of poetic realism in the field of tragedy. Robert J. Lurtsema brought first-rate dynamism and nobility to the leading role of Eddie Carbone. Dana Bate was fine as his older cousin Marco. And Dean Gitter '56 played the lawyer Alfieri with intelligence.

The four characters in The Glass Menagerie, the other of Tennessee Williams' two great plays, captured only some of the work's beautiful subtlety and fragility. Once again, the best job was turned in by Frank Langella as the son Tom. The Playhouse then resurrected the famous 1844 play The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, "a moral domestic drama by W. H. Smith and a Gentleman." Marilyn Miller staged the work in period costume and old-school ham acting style; and the result was unflaggingly hilarious. Booing, hissing, and the throwing of peanuts were actively encouraged. A pianist furnished background accompaniment on a worn upright; and during the intervals singers favored the audience with such oldies as "'Til We Meet Again," "Curse of an Aching Heart," "Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird," "Father, Dear Father, Come Home to Me Now," "I'm Just Wild About Harry," and "Please Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone." The Playhouse is closing its summer schedule currently with a production of Louis Peterson's Take a Giant Step, a sensitive treatment of Negro adolescence that has enjoyed two New York productions in recent years.