Back from the war in 1946, he taught for a while at Princeton and Berkeley. In the late forties he was called to New York to work on his dramatization of Melville's novella, Billy Budd.

Billy Budd marked the beginning and in some ways the end of Chapman's career as a professional playwright. Chapman had written six plays before he showed one to anybody. "I don't think they exist anymore," he says, and he doesn't seem to regard their loss as any great tragedy. He wrote Billy Budd with a Princeton colleague, Louis Coxe. In 1949, it was produced at an uptown off-Broadway theatre. Two years later a second version opened on Broadway to mixed reviews. The play promptly became a cause. John Mason Brown's notice in the Saturday Review reflected the tone of its admirers: "Those who did not see Billy Budd did their bit to discourage the theatre from doing its best. They turned their backs on courage and distinction."

The show only ran three months, but it came within two votes of winning the Drama Critics Circle Award. Chapman's favorite playwright, his paragon, is Shaw, and Billy Budd revealed in Chapman a Shavian concern for getting across a message of morals and ethics.

A wag recently said, "I wonder what happened to Chapman. Maybe Melville stopped writing." That is not what happened to Chapman. Between the time his play closed off-Broadway and opened on, Chapman had to do the cocktail party circuit, wooing backers. He and Coxe had to rewrite the play several times to suit other people's preferences. All this was distasteful to him and is one reason why he calls himself an "ex-playwright."

Another reason is his Shavian notion that a playwright must work from personal conviction and direct experience. "Unless you live out in the world, you're writing imaginary plays, from other people's plays. I can't get worked up about that. When you write a play, you have to want to write it so bad that not writing it gets to be annoying, intolerable."

Shortly after Billy Budd, Chapman wrote The General, a play critical of McCarthy which was given a fine amateur production in Cambridge. In the 14 years since then he has finished only one other play, about Orestes and Electra. The first act-and-a-half of another sits in his desk. He no longer works on it.

Although Chapman has maintained his professional standards, he has turned away from the professional theatre since he came to teach at Harvard in 1951. He teaches not because he can't do, but because he has abdicated from doing. He still acts and directs at the Loeb, but that is not the real thing, and he knows it.