Making the Harvard Square bookstore rounds in May of 1964, you would have come across a cheap-looking mimeographed publication called The Pageant of the Beasts, by Anonymous. Selling (in fact best-selling) for a dime, it told of a forest full of animals who put together a pageant in honor of White Swan, a local poet laureate whose 40th birthday it was.

The Pageant of the Beasts was an in-joke, written for the benefit of a tightly knit little in-group, and virtually meaningless to anyone else. The beasts of the tale were the actors, administrators, and friends of the Loeb Drama Center. The pageant was the Loeb's great Shakespeare Festival, a project which had already alienated or attracted enough people to buy up Beasts' full press run.

Whether the characterizations in this little fable were correct or not is debatable. But the idea of portraying Loeb people as animals was unquestionably a stroke of genius. Like animals, they (a) growl, (b) bite, and (c) growl and bite each other more than the common enemy. Maybe this is characteristic of theatre people everywhere, but it was certainly true of the Loeb community in the Spring of '64.

Under the leadership of Daniel Seltzer, then acting director of the Loeb, the Shakespeare Festival had brought in a whole new group of undergraduates, relegating the old club of entrenched semi-professionals to minor roles and inbred cocktail parties. Seltzer had passed the torch from one generation to another, and the older crowd wasn't having any of it. They talked behind his back, mailed hastily drafted protest letters to the Crimson, thought about or actually wrote works of vengeance like The Pageant of the Beasts.

The Pre-Loeb Era

The politics of Harvard drama did not begin with the Loeb. Even the current line of development must be traced back to 1945, when the foundation of today's webwork of theatre bureaucracy started taking shape.

In the years following the Second World War, theatre at Harvard was monopolized by a batch of initials-- HDC, VTW, HTW, and HTG. The Veterans' Theatre Workshop, formed in '46, quickly established its pre-eminence over the 30-year-old Harvard Dramatic Club as the University's major producing agency-- but the VTW, unlike the HDC, lacked permanency. It thrived on the strength of its founding members, who graduated without establishing any lasting undergraduate organization.

The VTW (later the Harvard Theatre Workshop, or HTW) passed out of existence in the Spring of '49. It was subsequently revived as the Harvard Theatre Group (HTG) but again it became defunct when its founders graduated. Consequently the Fall of '53 saw Harvard theatre on what looked to be its last leg: the HDC.

Long burdened with second-string talent, just getting over two financially disastrous productions (including a $9,000 Man Who Came to Dinner with Monty Wooley as guest star), the HDC was hardly in a position to assume dominance over Harvard theatre. Only an uncommonly talented new generation of people enabled the HDC to meet the high standards which had previously characterized its competition. Director Stephen Aaron, actors Colgate Salsbury, Harold Scott and D.J. Sullivan -- all were from the class of '57, and they became the nucleus of a rejuvenated HDC.

House drama societies also sprang up through the '50's, most of them specializing in one area or period of drama. Winthrop did musical comedies; Eliot did Shakespeare; Lowell became known for the Lowell House Opera; Leverett produced mainly one act plays; Dunster and Adams spread out in all directions.

Alongside the HDC and the House Drama Societies were two collegewide groups devoted to musical works: the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players, established in '55, and Drumbeats and Song, production outlet of the Radcliffe Grant-in-Aid Society, which like Old Faithful has uttered forth with one musical comedy per year since '49.

The Golden Age of Harvard theatre may be just a myth. But the '50's were clearly a time when undergraduate drama thrived on its limitations -- cramped facilities, lack of funds, faulty technical equipment -- and above all on the absence of a drama center.

The Coming of The Loeb

While President Conant was less than gung-ho about the idea of a university theatre, his predecessor, A. Lawrence Lowell, had actively opposed one, going so far as to refuse unsolicited offers of money for the purpose of establishing a drama school. Conant's successor, Nathan Pusey, felt differently. Early in '54 he announced his support for a drive to finance construction of a theatre, and when John L. Loeb '24 donated a flat million to the cause, its realization became a certainty.

Chosen to head the new theatre was Robert H. Chapman, then associate professor of English. Chapman had come to Harvard on a crest of popularity -- the adaptation he co-authored of Billy Budd was an immense critical success off-Broadway. While the merits of his anti-McCarthy play The General were hotly debated, it was anti-McCarthy, and its production at Harvard generated an aura of romantivism about its author.