Advertisement

Pudding Script Comp Under Fire

The Hasty Pudding Club, which completed its script competition Wednesday, left some script writers dissatisfied when it chose a futuristic drama, "A Thousand Clones," for this year's production.

Paris K.C. Barclay '78, who wrote the music for last year's Pudding Show but whose lyrics the Hasty Pudding rejected this year, said yesterday the club encouraged needless numbers of people to devote their summers to script writing.

Seven Scripts

He said in the last three years, there were only one to four scripts in the competition while this year there were seven. Another contender in the competition, Jun Makihara '79 said the Pudding "will encourage practically anybody to write a script."

Matthew F. Boyer '79, another contendor, disagreed, saying everyone in the competition "knew damn well when they wrote the script that there was going to be competition." He said. "That's part of the game." He added that the club "did things as fairly as they could, they didn't string anyone along unnecessarily."

Advertisement

Philip D. Murphy '78, one of three Pudding vice presidents of the theatricals, said yesterday the Pudding encouraged all authors to write since "we did not want to narrow ourselves to any particular script."

He added that there were an unusual number of people competing this year and the club "conducted a very, very fair competiion."

Barclay also criticized the Hasty Pudding Club's choice, complaining not about the quality of the script chosen but about the exclusiveness of Harvard's theatre community. He said the script's authors, Jaqueline S. Osherow '78 and Andrew S. Borowitz '80 unduly dominate theatre at Harvard.

All Over

Both Osherow and Borowitz are involved in the Harvard Premier Society and the Harvard Lampoon, and Borowitz is president of the Radcliffe Grant in Aid in which capacity he chose his own script, "Gars and Goils" and himself as director for this fall's production, Barclay alleged.

Osherow rebuffed Barclay criticism, saying the "Pudding doesn't pick a show by spreading the wealth," they choose the show which "serves them best."

She added that Barclay had done a significant amount of theatrical work himself. She said he wrote at least four major Harvard shows and writes reviews for the Independent.

Borowitz could not be reached for comment

Advertisement