See this story's original coverage in The Crimson.

In the spring of 1956, The Crimson announced the arrival of a new trend: “Revived Dramatics Activity Parallels Theatre Interest.” Noting the “revival of ‘dramatic spirit’” among undergraduates along with a “new drive for theater” among all students, the announcement was followed by a similar article next fall that characterized the trend as a “boom in dramatic activity” on campus. In 1957, the year’s tally of theatrical productions rose to an impressive 45 (not including the Houses’ Christmas pageants).

“There was an upsurge of interest in drama in those years,” Stephen A. Aaron ’57 recalls. “Everybody was doing plays all over the place. They were done outside, in the Adams House swimming pool, in the Eliot House dining room. Everybody was putting plays in every possible place.”

According to Aaron, the growth of a theatrical community at Harvard was both rapid and unexpected.

“I came to Harvard in ’53 and the president had just recently said that there was no place for drama in education,” Aaron says. Fortunately, limited faculty interest wasn’t enough to discourage Harvard’s many aspiring actors from seeking out opportunities to perform.

“As the years went by, the support for theater grew and grew. We kept doing spectacular productions,” Aaron says.

John H. Poppy ’57, former president of the Harvard Dramatic Club, recalls similarly changing times. “The productions suddenly got to be very ambitions in physical terms and dramatic terms,” he states. “We actually devoted a lot of energy and some risk in building things and going downtown to rent lights and scaffolding.”

Poppy remembers a production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman” as a defining moment in the revival of Harvard dramatics.

“Until then, theater at Harvard had been the equivalent chamber music: a small setting, one act plays, not terrifically ambitions. The show opened on the night of a tremendous blizzard. We figured nobody was going to come but the theater was packed.”

The show, which opened to a glittering review from The Crimson, was an important achievement that would serve as a precedent for shows to come.

“It showed that a bunch of Harvard kids could get together and put on a serious dramatic production,” Poppy says.

GIVING THEM THE GULL

Also in that year, a highly anticipated production of Hamlet marked the 100th production by the Harvard Dramatic Club (HDC), the most prominent of the 14 theater organizations on campus. Aaron directed the play, which was performed in Sanders Theatre and enjoyed a reported budget of over $4,000. According to Aaron, the production stood out as a highlight of Harvard’s theatrical heyday.

“Sanders Theatre had been cited 50 years before as the finest Shakespearean theater in the country. We took out the seats in the center and built a stage there,” Aaron recalls. “It was remarkably well acted. We were trying to simulate what it was like to see the play in those days when it was first done. We brought the lights up at the beginning to simulate daylight and they never changed during the whole production.”

Given the celebratory nature of the 100th production, producers decided to make the final performance truly memorable. “In the final performance I thought to give it a real gull,” Aaron says, “we did it without an intermission. It was fascinating to see the audience take their own intermission. You could see them dozing off and thinking about other things. Then they came back to it all as Hamlet re-took the stage.”

Such experimental techniques were par for the course that year, as the atmosphere surrounding each new project fed students’ creative whims. Grants to the Houses by the Ford Foundation and others funded workshops in theater and visual arts.

“They encouraged workshops to be done anywhere,” Aaron says. “A workshop was not a full-fledged production of something, it was an experiment. We used to joke in those days that it was an experiment in terror.”

Several students chose to independently finance the plays they wanted to see performed. The American debut of Jean Genet’s play “Deathwatch” was one such independent undertaking, produced by John M.S.W. Eyre ’57. Also directed by Aaron, the play earned the critical acclaim of The Crimson and was later invited to perform at the Yale Drama Festival in the spring of 1957.

In addition to the generosity of student patrons, The Crimson attributed the rise of drama at Harvard, in part, to the post-WWII influx of eager thespians, whose numbers had been depleted during the war. The HDC’s creation of a training program preparing novice actors to tread the Harvard boards also contributed to the increasing popularity of Harvard dramatics.

TOO MUCH THEATER?

As the popularity of theater on campus grew, concerns arose that there was indeed too much theater at Harvard. Such sentiments prompted The Crimson to call for a “regulation of drama at Harvard” to keep the “drama renaissance more a flowering and less a mushrooming” in a 1957 editorial. The HDC was solicited to set up a master calendar of dramatic productions—much like the one in place today—in order to prevent competition for ticket sales and end the “glut and fast” of theater goers who were forced to choose between five productions in one weekend, and zero the next.

Scheduling conflicts were not the only concerns that accompanied the rise of theater, and some worried that the pressure to achieve financial success with a production had begun to overshadow the artistic merit of several productions. But fears that Harvard was becoming a “Little Broadway” were met with the staging of several original scripts written by Harvard undergrads, notably a stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” by F. William Kaufman, III ’57 and “Six Strings Cut,” an original play authored by Wallis W. Lawrence ’57.

As the unprecedented level of student participation in theater grew it became increasingly obvious that undergrads’ interest in the dramatic arts was here to stay. In light of this, the HDC and Student Council began to clamor for the creation of a student theater to house Harvard’s dramatic productions. The inconvenience of holding plays in dining halls and other unorthodox spaces, combined with the impossibility of producing every student production in Sanders, contributed to efforts to create not only a home for Harvard theater of the time, but also for generations to come. Harvard’s Visual Arts Committee supported the notion of a Harvard student theater and echoed the student council’s suggestion in recommending that “a theater program be inaugurated at Harvard and that it be housed in the proposed theater.”

“Others [non-students] all became quite vocal about theater and quite vocal about the fact that Harvard did not have a theater,” Aaron says, recalling the determination of then Dean of the Faculty McGeorge Bundy to secure a dedicated performance space for students.

“I think we had this feeling that we had started something,” Poppy says, “and that given the substantial nature of the productions we did, I guess it would have been natural for us to assume that once the ball gets rolling that it will keep on rolling and bigger things will develop.”

Though the theater was not opened until 1960, three years after Aaron and his classmates had already left Harvard, the Loeb Drama Center still stands as a reminder of the theatrical Class of 1957.

—Staff writer Nayeli E. Rodriguez can be reached at nrodrig@fas.harvard.edu.