The Pagcant Players

The Pageant Players-who will perform in the Quincy House Dining Room-helped to lead a vanguard in the radical theatre movement of the late '60's, when they united to present plays with a radical politico-cultural focus to the audience of the streets. They work in mime, sometimes narrated, with very little dialogue, relying heaily upon movement, sound, music, masks, and props. The troupe develops its material through collective improvisation-spontaneously generating new ideas to suit changing political environments-as their plays assume substantive significance in particular daily and geographic contexts.

The Pageant Players deal with the themes of war, alienation, sex, education, the destruction of the natural environment, and the oppression that they view as encroaching upon their daily lives. Using images derived from their bodies, stage movements, sounds, and props, they attempt to depict "what is beautiful in the world, while describing the forces that would destroy that beauty." In addition to their theatre, the company also offers open workshops on "deobfusticating the mystique of the artist," image-making expressive of inner and outer realities, street theatre, and mind-body exercises to break down "intellectual-motional-physical inhibitions and generate energy-joy-communication."

The troupe's origins were political rather than dramatic. Initially a group of friends involved in political organizing in New York, the company was formed as a more creative vehicle to convey the members' ideology at demonstrations and gatherings throughout the city. Since their first play, The Paper Tiger, performed at an anti-war rally in November, 1965, the Pageant Players have been workings in streets, parks, laundromats, churches and schools in an effort to reach a wider audience, uncommitted to their view of social change and communal living. As their dramatic sophistication increased, the group has developed a theatrical style uniquely its own, prototypical of the more recent guerrilla troupes like the Burning City Theatre which have blossomed around the country.

"We work in a loose way, comments director Michael Browne. "People come in with different ideas for plays. We'll discuss them, choose one we like, and begin to improvise. Or we work with dreams as a natural source of material. The form is very open. We may be a tree, a street, a noise, a mood, the wind. . . . In our workshop, which is open to the public, we do basic theatre exercises and play games. People have fun, and learn a little, too. At present we are working on a new form of theatre for the streets and campuses-a form that lets us make a play on the spot about whatever is pertinent that day and we are experimenting with stock characters and stock forms."

Included in the group's traveling repertory is The Water Play, a short work about the revolutionary implications of ecology. The play tells two mortality tales-the first mourning the death of a once-upon-a-time lovely river (killed by a polluting Union Carbide plat) and the second extolling praise upon the Good Samaritan who saves a weary, fellow traveler from the certain doom of thirst, resulting from the impurification of the river's water.

Dreams is an improvisational work in which the cast members disclose and interpret their dreams with a stylistic uniqueness that the Pageant Players have engineered, and the Chanukah play relates the Maccabis' struggles against the Greek occupation forces, which is seen as a parallel to the present conflict in Vietnam, reflecting also the role of the American resistance movement against the war.

While most of the company's plays offer criticism of the contemporary morass they see about them in America today, the Pagcant Players seek also, in their mode of theatrical presentation and the public affirmation of their collective lifestyle, an alternative system of joyous human inter-relationships-a "pageantry" of life. Says Nadine Hack, a new member of the group, "We will dance and make music and fight and make love and make the revolution."

Speakers

Several evenings will be devoted to drama symposiums, led by playwrights and their critics. Arthur Copit-whose recent play, Indians, jarred audiences into confronting the vast discrepancy between the myth and reality of America's treatment of the Indian-will debate with Evergreen and Village Voice critic John Lahr. Lahr's recent biography, Notes On A Cowardly Lion, has made a camp hero of his father, Bert Lahr, and helped to cause the enormously-popular revival of Alice In Wonderland, to the delight of Bert Lahr fans everywhere. Kopit wrote and produced Oh Dad Poor Dad while still at Harvard, for which he won the Outer Circle award in 1962.

Playwright Charles Gordone will be featured on another right to discuss his widely-acclaimed three-act play, No Place To Be Somebody -the drama about a young and ambitious black saloon-keeper in an urban ghetto. Gordone's play is a brilliant affirmation of his own black ethos, yet it has achieved universal magnitude in the power of its characterizations.

Lillian Hellman, another guest dramatist, first established herself as a major force in American theatre with The Children's Hour -a psychological drama dealing with lesbianism-that shocked audiences when it first opened in 1934. Later, she wrote The Little Foxes, and Toys in the Attic (1960), and was last year the recipient of the National Book Award.

Film

Gasting for 3 Lives for Mississippi

Film director Michael Ritchie will combine his guest appearance-during which he will screen and discuss his recent movie, Downhill Racer -with a talem search for unknown actors in his upcoming documentary, ? Lives for Mississippi Ritchie's films have been hailed by critics for his inventive style in fusing the emotional impact of fictional drama with the harsh realism that makes them feature documentaries. The script for his current cinematographic endeavor is now being written by Jean Claude van Itallic '58, based upon William Bradford Huie's book about the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Ritchie has selected Harvard for his casting ground on the basis of his past success in filling three major roles for Downhill Racer in a similar talent search conducted at the University of Colorado. He is seeking unknown actors instead of Hollywood stars because of the documentary nature of the film, and emphasizes the lack of necessary dramatic background for would be candidates. Close physical resemblance to the slain figures is non-essential, since the three civil rights workers looked different in several photographs anyway, but Ritchie is searching for approximate look-alikes in general appearance to the principal characters-Andy Goodman, Mickey Schwerner (who tended toward overweight), and Rita Schwerner (who appeared small and spindly). He is also anxious to interview any black students from south of the Mason-Dixon line, since there are many roles to be cast for young Mississippi blacks, including the part of the lead character, James Chancey, Ritchie will be assisted in his selection of actors by student directors at Harvard, who will pre-screen applicants next week before their final interviews during the weekend of April 18.

Man of the Year

The most lauded guest of the season will be Quincy House Man-of-the-Year, Arthur Penn, who has accomplished the rare feat of spectacular success on both stage and screen. His direction of Bonnic and Clyde was a film landmark, and he has just emerged with another movie great, Alice's Restaurant. Mr. Penn's earlier film credits include The Miracle Worker. Mickey One, and Left-Handed Gun, which will be shown during the Arts Festival. No less impressive have been a stunning series of theatrical successes which include Two for the See-Saw, Miracle Worker, and Wait Until Dark.

Environmental Art

Introducing the Art Festival's present season will be a demonstration of the objects of Franz Walther, a young German artist recently on display in the "Spaces" exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art. Walther will transform an environment into a functional space, in which he plans to teach participants to employ his instrument-things in a series of exercises designed to inspire creative exploration of their inner thoughts. He hesitates to call his pieces "art," referring to each one, instead, as an object-instrument-topic-piece-work-thing-plant-unit-concept.

Literature

Guest Stephen Spender has long fascinated the world with his politics, criticism, and poetry that helped shape the course of twentieth-century literature. In the 1930's, he led a new movement in English poetry, along with W.H. Auden. Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis. He later founded and edited the magazines Horizon and Encountes, and again returned to literary attention in 1968 with the publication of The Year of the Young Rebels, a book about student activism. Mr. Spender is also well-known for his brief flirtation with communism while in Spain where he was writing poetry and translating the work of loyalist poets during the Civil War. He expressed his disillusionment with the movement later in an article contained in The God That Failed.

Sports

Heywood Hale Broun, another visiting speaker, has been considered in "artist" for his transformation of the television medium into a literary art form. In his four and a half years of sports?ating on CRS, he has combined a journalistic flair with his dramatic background to emerge with legendary "wrap-ups" of sports information, delivered in a style of elevated pr??, almost poetic in their rhythm.

Music

Painist Joseph Bloch, who has been hailed for his musical virtuosity throughout the world, will perform in an afternoon concert with an esoteric selection of the work of Seriabin and Haydn. In an evening recital. Miss Artmenta Adams-whose recent New York debut brought rave reviews to the young Julliaird School pianist-will play the work of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Swanson, and Prakofiev.