Class! Did you ever hear such a voice! Class! Did you ever see such a face!
Isadelle Couch
Man is what his microbes make him.
Jeannette Marks
Analysis of drama, the writing of orginal plays, systematic correction of defects in speech, education in psychology, practice in expressive posture and the 'Modern Dance,' and the receipt of professorial criticism all make up a composite experience that sets the college actor apart from the stock-company marionette. If he is good, the college star can be a delight and a marvel. Ordinarily he is a shade too prudent and many shades too self-conscious to go all the way out for his part in the grand manner. Acting before one's own classmates and instructors is a little too much like acting before one's own family. It can be done, but it takes the assurance of a John Drew or an Ellen Terry to carry it off.
The college girl is mortally afraid of being 'stagey.' In daily life that is a good healthy fear; but behind the footlights it makes the college girl 'play down' her part sometimes like the actors Bernard Shaw rails against in his introduction to Lillah McCarthy's book of reminiscences. There, one remembers, Shaw points out that it is quite as bad for an actor to underplay his part for fear of being called 'stagey' as it would have been for Titian to do all his portraits in black and white for fear of being called 'painty.'
In getting ready for a college play, students do not in the least mind being 'painty.' The scenery crew lives and breathes in a can of paint for days. But if you utter the word 'stagey' within gunshot, the whole set and all of the actors shrivel up and blow away. They perish at the least suspicion that anything is overdone, unless the thing is deliberately a burlesque.
That is a reason why, speaking by and large, a college play goes best if it is fairly 'light' with an edge of satire to touch it off. Twelfth Night goes better than Macbeth. Hay Fever goes better than Mourning Becomes Electra. The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife is the best bet for Anatole France. Moliere is capital. We never had a more bewitching performance than the recent acting of a certain freshman in tall pointed hat and white cotton wig as Le Medecin in Moliere's play. An act or two from that performance ought to be repeated as a curtain-raiser in some all-college entertainment with the original cast.
This does not mean that college dramatics should never be serious. Many a serious drama goes well, especially if not well known. Besides, every college generation should have the experience of coming at least one cropper with a too-heavy play. Our generation did, in the 1910's, with Athalie. The gaiety of the audience over the too Sidonian cruelties of that Old Testament monarch (in French at that) shook the apparatus in the Gym. I wonder, now, if the modern dramatic crowd could get away with Athalie. It's altogether a better audience to play to nowadays - not quite so 'giddy' I think - but then I never saw them confronted with the more solemn moments of Racine.
The college girl, like the college man, is ordinarily much the best in lively impersonations verging on the 'take-off.' The gift of mimicry can manifest itself in a variety of ways from the most primitive to the most occult. It begins with the local 'take-off,' not by any means always an unkind caricature but often a perfect echo of some familiar voice and replica of gesture that interprets some campus figure without burlesque. No college should be without its characters who lend themselves to such treatment. The matter of being aptly 'taken-off' is not at all the opposite to a compliment. The best-loved celebrities are most frequently honored in this way. Even Mary Lyon in her lifetime furnished material; Mrs. Stowe tells us that there were girls who could imitate her way of saying 'You won't do so again, will you, dear?' Students in English universities used to impersonate Tennyson in the act of reading his own poems. And on our own campus at the dawn of the twentieth century there appeared for a moment an Englishwoman who came from one of the literary families of Great Britain. Her method of saying the word 'obscure' was instantly appropriated. It was done in the Oxford manner, but with an extra touch - impossible to bring to the ear in spelling - not exactly 'obscuah,' nor yet exactly 'obskyu-ah,' but wonderful plunder for the mimics. One sentence of hers was chanted like an anthem by those who were conning her accent: 'Descended as I am from a long line of eminent ancestors who have bean [sic] men of the pen and the gown, I have an hereditary bias in favor of all that is humble and obski-ahhh.'
Every Sophomore Play and Junior Show has been replete with 'take-offs.' And in a Playshop production recently there was an impersonation with an impersonation that was capitally done. The student-actress who took the part was supposed to impersonate a frail old gentleman. That to begin with was a masterpiece of fussy yet delightful semi-invalidism. In one of the scenes the old gentleman offered to entertain his cronies with a monologue he had composed in which he would 'be' a romantic lady he had known when he was young. He borrowed a flowered chiffon scarf for a shawl, and a rose for his hair, and languished in the corner of the sofa while talking in an airy falsetto - a doubling of the impersonation motif so well done that the audience was captivated by the old chap deliciously pretending to be a lady. One quite forgot that the trick was a wheel within a wheel. It was the sort of tour de force that a perceptive young college performer can manage better than more high-and-mighty parts.
There are exceptions. There was a lovely Juliet in the class of 1919. We had a gorgeous Shylock in 1909 when the brilliant Hindu girl, Dora Maya Das, interpreted the Jew. Ever since, one has wished to see a Hindu actor with just such expressive think hands and watchful visage play the part. We once even had a good Cyrano; and for that hero the old adage about bad luck at the dress rehearsal and good luck at the public performance certainly held true. On the night of the dress rehearsal Cyrano's long nose came off in the midst of sword-play and flew out into the section reserved for the reporters of the College News. Their preview was suspended while Cyrano's feature article was being hunted for under the benches by the representatives of the press. Bad luck at the dress rehearsal; good luck at the play.
At present they would probably get in a man to play Cyrano. That is one of ht emost enlivening new ideas on the Connecticut Valley campus - the exchange of talent among the college so that in one or two performances of each year some college for men borrows a few actresses and lends a few actors in return. The plays are then given first on one campus and then on the other so that the rehearsals serve a double purpose. Men from the faculty are also persuaded to take part. All in all there is a versatile troupe on the college boards today.
The greenroom is more versatile than it used to be, too, and so is the stage. Anyone who used to struggle with the sketchy resources of Dramatic Club in 1911 is envious of the equipment now. To begin with, we played our plays in the Gymnasium, much as the Wellesley Barn Swallows used to play theirs in 'The Barn,' and if the drama happened to be a scenic one we had to rig the place from the rafters down. It was like trying to give a flower show in an armory. We had some flat wing-scenery. We had a good many ropes. We used to think it was all right to use 'flat properties' if no solid ones were at hand. If we needed a palm tree, we cut it out flat and painted it and stood it up like a paper doll, supporting it in a wavering manner from some front at the top by one of the ropes. In wandering through our deserts, the hero had to be careful not to joggle our palms.
When it came to lighting, we felt more than thankful if our footlights would work at all. After we once got them all to shining, we were the last persons to disturb them. We used the same lighting whether in the Forest of Arden or in the yellow satin ballroom of Beau Brummell. Now, in Chapin Auditorium, lighting is almost an actor in every play.
This is partly a development of the times and partly one of the contributions of Playshop. Playshop's equipment is not so ambitious as to be unwieldy, but it is imaginative enough to set a pace. With its miniature experimental theater, its model stage, its workrooms tucked away within itself as snugly as in the architecture of a ship, the tiny laboratory of play-writing and play-producing is what its designer intended it to be, 'a working tool.' It contains a great many working tools in its cupboards: dyestuffs and carpenter's implements and 'stock' for making sets, and all manner of devices for the lighting of times of day and weather. The back of the stage recedes into a Keene cement dome - a kind of cyclorama bowl that fills magically with light and color and illusion of depth and distance.
Given in ingenious lighting system and plenty of gelatin strips, the place is ready to be filled with the atmosphere of three-dimensional weather, in which can be suspended shadows of bridges at sunset, shadows of gray bridges in the rain, shadows of towers by moonlight, shadows of crags at sea, all looking as if they were standing in the air. There is no need to paint back-drops with elaborate towns and city arches, because with the use of a tiny cut-out held before the lights one can throw the object, made of shadows, on that dome as a reality - more real than the insubstantial pageant on the stage.
For example, in a park scene the wall of the park was built in a practicable solid-property style, with benches and a garden set out before it. Then for the arching tree about and beyond the wall, a sprig of arbor vitae was stuck in a spool and held before the light so that its shadow, immensely enlarged, was cast into the blue afternoon weather of the dome. The illusion of a great shadowy tree with no leaf stirring was all that was needed to send the imagination back into the cool distance beyond the wall. Afterward people flocked behind scenes begging to be told the secret of the tree. 'Show them the tree,' said the Director, and an actress fished among some spare electric-light bulbs entwined with wire, and found the sprig of arbor vitae still mounted in its spool.
Another real contribution of Playshop is the way in which the odds and ends and shreds of ability in a given group are utilized. Perhaps a girl is gifted in stage directions for moving the characters into action; perhaps she is gifted in dialogue. Perhaps she has plots but no persistence. Perhaps she has persistence but no words. All sitting around a table made of 'a board and two saw-horses,' the group works out a scene. New lines are tried on the stage before they are accepted. Everybody learns fragments of several parts and experiments with different characters before the play is done. Many sides of a student's dramatic talent are brought out in a single scene. Nobody has constantly to be the villain; nobody has always to die.
Of old we tended to elect certain players for certain types of parts and keep them at it regardless. A good hero in She Stoops to Conquer would also be the hero (not quite so appropriately) in The Lady from the Sea. Dramatic Club nowadays develops its stars by giving them diversified yet possibly parts. The same actress in a recent year swept the boards as one sophisticated heroine, one fantasy heroine - and Sir Toby Belch.
Of all the casting problems of college dramatics, however, the most interesting one to witness is the problem of casting the Faculty Play. Consents of the potential dramatis personae are obtained while the play is being composed. Some of the parts are always built around certain indispensable figures. For instance, Miss Woolley has always consented; and a special part has always been written for her. No more striking evolution on the campus can be cited than the evolution of Miss Woolley's part in Faculty Play. It used to be considered suitable to have her act only like herself; conducting a stage business meeting or answering questions as the Lady From Philadelphia, or coming in for an all-college tableau in cap and gown. But as years went by she was given more and more dramatic parts, working up to a frivolous society lady in Lily Langtry furbelows coming to enter her daughter at college at the peak moment of Mount Holyoke Milestones - and culminating with her top-flight performance of a later year as the Countess Popovics, wife of Count Popovics, a visiting lecturer on China and World Peace. For the part of the Countess, the President was clad in exotic raiment with a hat of many feathers, and she brought down the house when she turned to her stagehostess and remarked, 'I say to my husband, it is such an interesting subject, China and World Peace.'
Faculty Play is always a comedy of manners. The college would feel defrauded if the Faculty did not hit the local customs off. The 'Eager Students' must be impersonated, and so must the 'Un-Eager Students' and the Faculty themselves. The villains of the piece must be the professors of the most unimpeachable dignity. In The Trials and Sorrows of Jenny Junior, for instance, years ago, the student who had incurred one too many conditions for her welfare was the Registrar, to whom you went for instructions if the same fate fell upon you. One song of that drama swept the campus - the 'Wail of the Prom Men.' In that era the inns and eating nooks were catering to a vogue for the 'aesthetic' in foods. Everything had to be extremely dainty. A hearty young college man just in from a sleigh-ride used to look askance to those aesthetic meals. Using an assumed name to cover all the inns, the Wail of the Prom Men began
They took me to the English Nook
To drink a cup of tea
And to eat some little crackers that
Were not enough for me . . .
and went on through many doleful stanzas sung in rich baritone voices by a group of men on the Faculty, each with white carnation or gardenia in buttonhole. The tune was catchy, and the lyric did much to hasten in a more nutritious world.
In general, however, Faculty Play is not a didactic piece. It is imperiously demanded by the students every four years, so that each college generation has one chance to see the Faculty in full dramatic lustre. The class of 1936 last year was worried for fear the Faculty was not going to give them a play. So they prepared a petition:
Dear Miss Woolley and Members of the Faculty:
We, the class of nineteen hundred and thirty-six, having attained unto the dignity of caps and gowns, join in humble supplication. We beg to point out that our four years at Mount Holyoke are but dust and ashes when we consider that they contain no legitimate Faculty Show. The triumph of our seniority seems to us but a poor thing if we are not also privileged to witness the traditional descent of the Olympians to our level. Let it not be said that the level of the class of 1936 was unworthy of such a descent. We who are about to graduate, beseech you. We realize with trepidation that already we are not unblessed, since within our time fell the Scholarship Fund's unparalleled contribution to History.
But lest you think on the strength of that performance to postpone your activities until next year, we make haste to chant the words of the immortal Gilbert and Sullivan:
The Show that you gave freshman year, tra, la,
Has nothing to do with the case.
Tradition goes on, never fear, tra, la,
The Quadrennial Show must take place.
So here's to the show that you're going to give,
And here's to our Faculty, long may they live
Members of the Senior Class
The taste for drama goes on, never fear, at a college. That is one phase of Little Theater that the cinema will not displace. The original shows and the interpretation of older dramatists will always draw an audience. Something is needed to take the place of the old-fashioned 'Exhibition Days' and 'Examination Days' when parents and friends assembled to watch the skilled intellectual tennis game between examiner and the examined. Those events at the college in the middle of the nineteenth century were not nearly so much examinations as they were triumphs of showmanship. Not only parents but newspaper reporters attended and sized them up. It is amusing to note that in the round of the colleges 'South Hadley' always played to a good press, and often the Governor of Massachusetts was present for the day. The show-piece was the examination in Butler's Analogy conducted by Miss Anna C. Edwards; and Dean Emeritus Florence Purington was once unexpectedly its dramatic star. With her permission we shall conclude our discussion of drama with the adventure she lived through.
She was a senior. In preparation for Examination Day, every senior had a private session with Miss Edwards on 'Butler,' and not only answered questions but recited the Conclusion by heart. The dress rehearsal was so thorough always that the newspapers marveled at the 'high order' of the examination, 'lacking that hesitancy in reciting which is characteristic of the male student however familiar with its subject' - and calling this examination in another year 'one of the most beautiful exercises in the whole round of literary anniversaries, collegiate or academical.' So we see what the Class of 1886 had to live up to.
Miss Purington memorized the Conclusion and recited it perfectly to Miss Edwards. But she knew that Miss Edwards usually asked the Senior President to recite the Conclusion at the public examination; therefore with great dispatch she dismissed it from her mind. Nora Abbott could worry about that.
On the morning of the examination things went as usual like clockwork. Miss Edwards had fired off her questions over the heads of the audience, and the seniors, facing the audience (which sat with its back to Miss Edwards), had fired the answers back. Florence Purington had not yet received a question. Nora Abbott had. Miss Edwards had gone down the alphabet as far as Purington and then had skipped to 'W' and was working her way inexorably back. Miss Purington saw what was coming. Says she, recalling it even today with her pulse going faster, 'I did some wild raking round in my mind!' The sensation was comparable to what a senior would feel now if she had to go on unprepared as the leading lady at the Commencement Play. The Conclusion as written by Butler, Lord Bishop of Durham, is a long piece of close reasoning, second only to the passage that was always referred to as 'the
(At this point in the margin of one of the old texts there is a stage direction in lead-pencil: 'Speak slowly, not confused.') And the Conclusion went on and on until it wound up with
It was not a piece that lent itself to bluffing. yet here was the future Dean Purington called upon to bluff. She did it. She recited that Conclusion on demand, not indeed as Butler wrote it, but in a voice so even and memorized-sounding that nobody except her examiner and her teammates knew that she was giving, not the words, but a resume of the Analogy. Afterwards she went to Miss Edwards to apologize; 'and,' she concludes when she tells the story, 'you should have heard Miss Edwards laugh.'
It's a lively custom, college dramatics - 'a scheme, not a fixed, but a progressive one [to quote freely from Butler] equally with respect to what has been, what now is, and what shall be hereafter.'
The observations of the last chapter lead us to consider this little scene of human life, in which we are so busily engaged, as having reference, of some sort or another, to a much larger plan of things . . . . Whether we are in any way related to the more distant parts of the boundless universe into which we are brought, is altogether uncertain . . . .
so that we are placed, as one may speak, in the middle of a scheme, not a fixed, but a progressive one, every way incomprehensible; incomprehensible, in a manner, equally with respect to what has been, what now is, and what shall be hereafter.