To an enchanted audience at the Hasty Pudding Friday afternoon, Siobhan McKenna held forth with strong statements about the state of modern theatre and made this chronic complaint a vivid one. "I am sorry I am late," she said with a trace of Irish brogue, "I was at a party last night." Then, after a preview of Hasty Pudding songs, Miss McKenna sat down to answer questions.

Quite simply, this is a woman who captivates an entire room with one gesture, her intensity and variety of expression, her luminous grey-green eyes, her very Irishness, makes people squirm in unlimited approval. She spoke with that "passionate subjectivity" which she finds lacking in theatre today. "I think that people who are not subjective are dull-I believe in total involvement. The theater is not just stages and actors and tickets, it is the audience. Actors owe it to their audience to participate with them, to possess them, to let them help in the creation of a spirit."

She talked about the Cambridge Drama Festival this summer: "The audience loved it. They were people who had perhaps never been to the theater before... you know in this country people feel ashamed about doing what their friends don't, they think it is raising their station.... this way they could tell their friends that they had been to a picnic in a tent...they loved getting wet, they really did. They got involved with me and I with them."

On reviewers: "Reviewers, if they care about the theater, will not be kind...kindness is the worst sort of cruelty." With a laugh she added, "I myself am kind. I could never be a reviewer. But Kenneth Tynan writes the best reviews today...I once asked him whether he thought up his clever phrases to fit the actors and he answered that the actors definitely inspired the phrases...Kenneth (Tynan) really cares and he is never boring."

On television: "I am not really interested in television; I rarely watch it. But I decided to do some when an old lady came to see me in New York. She said she used to go to the theater when she was young but she lives in the hinterlands now and can't get in. She said she lives for drama on television, so I decided to forget about you people for awhile and play to my old lady in the hinterlands. Do you know, I got very involved."

On advance ticket sales: "I was talking to Henry Fonda about his play which had such an advance sale. He said it is like dying to go to the theater night after night when the audience sits there and says 'show me.'... theater is turning into a business and it's terrible...authors should write and not care about being produced... I am an author's girl, but I have no respect for the author who lets himself be murdered during production...and when young actors break through today, in spite of the agents, it is a miracle."

"I think I'm going to laugh," Miss McKenna said. "I'm not going to be able to help myself. All the directors and producers are having heart attacks, and most of my friends will have heart attacks soon. I guess someday I'll have one myself. It's a good way to go, I guess."

Miss McKenna spoke some time with Maria Livanos, star of Poor Dad, etc. She had not seen the Harvard production, but she said that its title showed it to be "the one bright spot." Titles, she maintains, are indicative of plays, and titles, like theater in general, need a courageous face-lifting.