This issue marks a step in an uncertain direction for The Harvard Review. While many college magazines long to reach audiences outside their universities, the Review has abandoned its usual political emphasis to publish an issue that will be of interest chiefly at Harvard. The issue suffers, indeed, from the insularity of some of Harvard's more inbred magazines; the subject is "The University and the Arts," but the contributors do not include an artist who is not associated with a university, or a scholar who does not consider himself an artist or impresario. Only two contributors have no immediate connection with Harvard.

It is disappointing that the Review should have limited itself to Harvard when an article on artistic activity at other universities would have been useful. But with this reservation, the issue is an excellent one. One nice thing about artists is that some of them write well. For once a Big Name writer (in this case Harold Taylor) has not let the Review down. "The Role of the University as a Cultural Leader" is a fine bit of noisy name-calling. The Visual Arts Center's Robert Gardner has contributed some thoughts on the visual education of undergraduates. Professor Leon Kirchner and Boston Globe music critic Michael Steinberg offer a "dialogue" that has not been well edited; it leads up to many issues but explores few. Perhaps the prize piece in the issue is "The University as an Atelier," by David Handlin '65, for Handlin alone conveys some feeling of urgency about the education of undergraduate artists.

Two articles, however, ought to be read in Cambridge with special care, for they constitute the most articulate recent contribution to one of Harvard's more windy permanent debates--the one that concerns the role of the six-year old Loeb Drama Center.

It has now been six seasons since the Loeb opened, and the uncomfortable administrative arrangements that were born with the theatre have not yet evolved into anything more conducive to good drama. Harvard organizations seem to run on discontent, but nowhere in Cambridge is so much unhappiness so openly displayed as at the Loeb. Everybody has a gripe, and often it's a serious one. Freshmen and sophomores complain that a "Loeb clique" has taken over the building; experienced directors bewail the lack of talented actors; and many students are extremely unhappy about Harvard's administration of the building.

The Review solicited articles from Daniel Seltzer, associate professor of English and associate director of the Loeb, and Thomas Babe '63, a graduate student who has worked on the main stage as actor, director and playwright. Seltzer's article is a visionary discussion of the possibilities of university theatre; Babe's is a critical report on the evolution of the Loeb. Taken together, the two articles offer quite convincing evidence that theatre at Harvard is not being used with much wisdom.

Seltzer lists five reasons why drama should flourish in a university. Theatre makes use of other art forms he says; it valuably illuminates the connection between literature and history; in a university it finds a true amateurism; it is of value to individual students' educations; and it can help establish a permanent repertory of plays.

It is difficult to maintain that the Loeb has done any of these things for Harvard theatre or Harvard students. The spirit, the amatcurism, and the educational value, such as it is, preceded the Loeb and have not been greatly enriched by it. Ambitious attempts at combining drama with other art forms--unusual music, or original sets--have been notable for their absence from Sixty-four Brattle Street. As for the repertory of plays, Seltzer lists three kinds of plays a university ought to perform: "chestnuts," rarely produced classical plays, and very new plays. The Loeb's recent seasons have been heavily weighted towards the first category, with the second represented once or perhaps twice a year, and the third much too rarely.

Modern European plays come to the main stage via Broadway. The only American plays produced, aside from the required original student play every other year, have been Long Day's Journey Into Night and A View from the Bridge, the one surely a chestnut, the other hardly a rarely performed work.

Strangely, the spirit of experiment--which Seltzer considers one of the undergraduate theatre's greatest potential advantages--scarcely exists on the Loeb main stage. Babe's article suggests several reasons why this may be so.

I--THE STUDENT BUREAUCRACY

If you want to direct a play on the Loeb mainstage, you apply to the Harvard Dramatic Club executive committee--a very odd bird indeed. The HDC does not elect the committee--the five-man group nominates its own new members, and only a vote of the club, by mail, against a nominee can defeat him. Before the creation of the Executive Committee last spring, elected officers voted on applications for shows; the club gave up the old structure when it was told (by the students who appointed themselves the executive committee) that the Loeb Faculty advisers would only deal with them, and not with an elected group. In return, the HDC, then substantially in debt, was offered enough benefit performances to bail itself out; free tickets to Loeb shows for HDC members; and a rash of other promises that never panned out.

One problem with the new arrangements became clear last fall when the committee met to chose directors for the spring term and found that three of its five members had themselves submitted applications for main stage slots. A second arose this Spring when the committee elected a majority of technical workers over actors and directors.

The committee setup has caused complaint on two grounds. First, it has been said that the self-perpetuating nature of the group has made it more cliqueish than before and more prone to accept the applications of other old Loeb hands. If a director has put on a play in the Loeb Experimental Theatre, someone on the committee, or one of the Faculty advisers who sit with them is likely to have seen it. If he has acted in Loeb shows and directed elsewhere, his Loeb friends will probably have seen his shows. But if he has no connections at the Loeb, he is far less likely to be chosen. Thus Robert Ginn, who has acted at the Loeb, was awarded a main stage show after directing Adams House's Andorra last Fall. A less well-known group from Lowell House is considered less likely to be chosen this Spring.

Another major complaint has been that when the HDC established the committee, it also approved a rule that no undergraduate could direct on the main stage unless he had previously directed two shows elsewhere. With competition for the main stage becoming fiercer, the student with the most successful shows is likely to come out on top--and success in this case usually means good reviews and Loeb word-of-mouth on the worth of a production.

So the undergraduate who eventually wants to direct on the main stage is tempted to try conventional plays and eschew experimenting, which may lead to failure. The process also tends to fill too many Experimental Theatre dates with shows clearly not experimental. Once he has his main stage show, he must "succeed" if he wants another, and one result of this has been remarkable: more and more of the acting at the Loeb is being done by a coterie of graduate students or Boston residents. A show with a majority of undergraduate leads is a rarity, and shows have been produced at the Loeb without any undergraduates in the cast at all.