Meanwhile, Rauch, with four Ex shows behind him, convinced the Radcliffe Office of the Arts to give him one of its largest grants ever, and on a fine May afternoon he led about 100 people down John F. Kennedy Street to the Yard with flags and balloons and treated them to a peripatetic performance of Vladimir Mayakovsky's Communist fable Mystery-Bouffe. By the end of the odyssey, the "audience"--nearly indistinguishable from the cast--had been through Hell (the Freshman Union) and Heaven (the steps of Widener Library) before achieving technological apotheosis in the Promised Land, which turned out to be the Science Center.

Rauch: The HRDC open book had a note in it the other day asking why we keep doing experimental crap, why don't we ever do Company or Fiddler on the Roof? What they don't realize is that those shows were incredibly innovative once. I don't want to cling to the innovations of the past; why museumize? It's perfectly fine to do, but it's not the same kind of risk-taking.

Warner: I hate the word "experimental" Saying "avant-garde" is just a copout, either something works or it doesn't

Rauch: Yeah. There's the pleasure of doing an innovative twist. But ultimately the pleasure lies in doing it because it's the only way."

Neither Warner nor Rauch would suggest that they always agree on theater issues, or even that they agree most of the time. Even when they do agree, or seem to, their work turns out vastly different. Within the close-knit HRDC community, observers and friends agree emphatically on the main difference between the "Paul aesthetic" and the "Bill aesthetic," though they have different ways of putting it into words. Inevitably, there are partisans, as well as a fair number of people who are quite sure they could distinguish a Rauch or a Warner production if they were put down in front of it in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

"There's no denying there's a certain look to Paul's shows, a sort of homosexual, mylar, glitzy look," says Peter Howard '84, a former HRDC board member who has acted for both directors. "It's the old paradox of trying on the one hand to attract an audience, to make them want to come back to the theater, and at the same time to threaten them and change their lives. Paul tends to be more confrontational."

"In a way, their two approaches symbolize two sides of Harvard theater--the sensationally experimental versus the humanly experimental," suggests. Ted Osius '84, a fellow director and Rauch's freshman roommate. "Bill really wants to be able to take his shows to Des Moines, Iowa, and have people understand them. Paul is more likely to have very complex intellectual ideas, in which accessibility isn't really the main point."

The common wisdom among theater watchers is that Rauch leans toward the first, appealing side of Howard's paradox, while Warner is more likely to shock and horrify Warner embraces and encourages this interpretation. "Theater is change, it's revolution," he says. "It should frighten people, change them so they don't know what to expect." His shows have sometimes drawn flak from offended critics for their heavy emphasis on sex, particularly bisexuality and androgyny--which he calls "crucial" for breaking down preconceptions, citing David Bowie as an artistic hero and model. The "Paul aesthetic" also includes mylar--greatly in evidence in Twelfth Night and Agamemnon--electronic music, sinuous or overtly sexual body movement, and provocatively incongruous props. His attacking bear in Winter's Tale at the Agassiz this fall wore a Brown Bruins baseball cap and set fire to his victim's back with a cigarette lighter. The classically pastoral feast several scenes later was catered by McDonald's.

Rauch's "aesthetic" is harder to define. Rather, when people talk about him, the theme which comes up again and again is the clarity and honesty of his vision into people--those in the script and those he is dealing with in rehearsal. "Bill has an amazing ability to get at what's most important in a script, most true in it for us now," says another friend. During rehearsals, Rauch lays great emphasis on working through ideas with actors, seeing what develops spontaneously. "For me there's always been that tension," he says, "between having everything planned out and letting things happen naturally. I'm not that good at working things out on paper; I'm better with people." In the last week of rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet, which had an immense cast, he managed to spend an hour alone with each actor.

When actors talk about working on his shows, an impressive number of them tend to wax fervent. "To work with Bill is the most incredibly uplifting experience possible for an actor," says Nick Wyse '84, who played Romeo for him on the mainstage. "He's considerate and has a unique way of nurturing what is best in people, and I've never seen him lose his temper with an actor. Actors can be very bitchy people--I've gotten that way myself, it's so easy to get horribly temperamental--and you feel so damn guilty at the end of it because he's so good-hearted."

"He has just the right balance of technical skill and humanitarian insight--it's really something special," adds Nela Wagman, another longtime friend and colleague. "I haven't been directed by anyone at Harvard who comes close to him."

'For me there's a tension between having everything planned out and letting things happen naturally. I'm not that good at working things out on paper; I'm better with people.' Bill Rauch

'Theater is change, it's revolution. It should frighten people, change them so that they don't know what to expect.'   Paul Warner

Rauch shies away from articulating a philosophy but admits to a continuing fascination with theatrical structure. "The actor can only work if the structure is just right, and the structure won't be any good unless the acting is absolutely straight on." The types of innovations he has tried reflect that preoccupation. When he directed Chekhov's The Seagull in the Agassiz last spring, in what was perhaps the most uniformly acclaimed Harvard production in recent years--he seated the audience on stage and moved the actors around among the rows of empty seats--isolated, trapped, or lost.

Even more startling, from a theoretical point of view, were the implications of the Kronauer Group's experience and especially of their culminating show this spring, Medea Macbeth Cinderella. Taking three familiar pieces of theater with vastly different conventions--a Euripides, a Shakespeare and a faintly dippy modern musical--he placed the actors for all three in an arena, they rushed around, colliding and mingling and doggedly pursuing their separate stories Soliloquies lined up with Greek choral laments and song lyrics. There were enough theoretical implications to set anyone afloat.