So long as the Loeb Drama Center remained a vague vision for the future, everyone could see it in his own image. Students could think of the Loeb simply as a stage to be used as freely as any other. Some faculty members could envision a gradual evolution toward a formal drama school. Others, to whom this idea was repugnant, only hoped the Loeb would be professional, respectable, and faculty-run.
Chapman himself spoke of a compromise between a drama school and "laissez-faire amateurism." Many undergraduates saw in the statements of Chapman and others the possibility that Harvard's new drama center would be used as a device to implement tight faculty control over undergraduate theatre. Such fears were hardly quieted as administrative plans for the Loeb gradually developed in the Spring of '60.
Chapman announced the creation of an elaborate two-committee play selection process, under which established Harvard drama groups could offer production plans to a student-faculty advisory committee. Final authority, however, was vested in the Faculty Committee on Drama.
Dean Bundy assured undergraduates that the Faculty Committee would rarely exercise its authority, but students responded by asking why the committee had to exist in the first place.
Several other announcements in the same period did little to mollify the growing student contingent of anti-Loebites. The HDC, which had already started discussing possible inaugural productions, was jarred to hear that Chapman's assistant, Stephen Aaron, would direct the first play at the Loeb. Several years earlier, Aaron had been Harvard's foremost student director. Now, despite all his efforts to represent the interests of undergraduates, he became a symbol of faculty control.
Another cause of undergraduate opposition was a preposterous faculty report stating that the Loeb should produce only "recognized classics of the stage." Vague, and only briefly adhered to, this prospectus for play selection was mainly directed against musicals and Broadway fare. But it was interpreted by some to exclude lesser known serious plays as well. Quite reasonably, students active in Harvard theatre began to fear the Loeb would become a showcase for faculty-dominated professionalism.
The Inauguration
Troilus and Cressida, the grand opening production of the Loeb Drama Center, was universally acknowledged to be a bomb. Brooks Atkinson, who came up to review the play for the Crimson, said so unreservedly. Undergraduates said so in tones ranging from surface disappointment to unconcealed pleasure. Troilus's importance was more than ceremonial, however. It weakened the case for Loeb professionalism, since it was hardly a success. It also weakened the status of its director, Stephen Aaron, whose tenure as assistant director of the Loeb was to be extraordinarily brief.
Aaron, like Daniel Seltzer today, was the partisan of the undergraduates. But his youth and consequent lack of influence made it impossible for him to function effectively with the faculty; his connection to Loeb officialdom put him out of favor with undergraduates as well. Aaron frequently offered unsolicited advice and was forcibly ejected from at least one Loeb rehearsal to which he came uninvited.
Right from the beginning of his career as director of the Loeb, Chapman established a policy of putting himself above politics. He was an administrator, a professional -- something of a George Washington in that his success in the pre-Loeb era brought him to a position of authority where he could leave the bickering to his juniors. In some ways this proved a good thing. Chapman was able to maintain the respect of both his fellow faculty members and the undergraduate community. But the price of this respect was considerable: answerable to both the students and the Faculty Committee, Chapman was forced to adopt conciliatory rather than positive positions.
On a few questions he remained unconciliatory. Chapman to this day objects to musicals -- particularly to their high production costs. He is mistrustful of student productions, pre-
"Chapman was an administrator, a professional - something of a George Washington in that his success in the pre-Loeb era brought him to a position of authority where he could leave the bickering to his juniors." ferring ones in which the undergraduates play minor roles and learn from their elders. This has consistently been the pattern of Chapman's own shows: graduate students, faculty members and local professionals take the lead roles, Chapman directs, and undergraduates -- expect for a small number of established stars -- are relegated to bit parts, or to hammering nails.
Since the productions Chapman has directed at the Loeb have generally been excellent, his undergraduate exclusion policy has been an unpopular one -- at least among undergraduates.
During the first few years of the Loeb's existence, Chapman's emphasis on professionalism created a tightly knit clique of older actors (including, it is true, a few precocious undergraduates, who worked often in Loeb productions and quickly became the in group. Other students were just visitors to the Loeb; these people saw themselves as permanent residents.
Play Selection
Political change at the new drama center was slow in coming. Aaron's departure climaxed the major debate (a personal one) of the Loeb's first year. He was replaced in the Fall of '61 by George Hamlin, an old friend and co-worker of Chapman's.