THEATER CHRONICLE
THE THEATER AND THE ACADEMY
The theater is, in fact, already in our colleges and universities.
It
has been there, more and more, since G. P. Baker started work forty
years ago. Practical work in the theater, along with creative writing,
and practical work in music, painting and sculpture, is firmly entrenched
in educational institutions all over the country. Which means, among
other things, that playwrights and directors, like poets and painters and
musicians, may be at least partially supported by education. The uni–
v:ersities are already among the chief patrons of the living arts in
America. I want to speculate here on some of the questions to which
this relationship between the theater and the university gives rise.
From the point of view of a college or university which is trying
to provide a liberal education, it seems obvious that the theater could
be an educational tool of great and unique effectiveness. Liberal edu–
cators are supposedly trying to lead the student to the sources of our
tradition, and through the study of a limited number of its masterpieces,
to show him its fundamental disciplines of the mind and of the spirit
We find it very hard, in practice, to sort out the vast heritage, and to
agree on a curriculum of manageable scope. But in almost every list
of worthies you will find Sophocles and Shakespeare, Moliere and
Ibsen, recognized along with Aristotle and Locke, Galileo and Sigmund
Freud. We easily assume, with Hamlet, that great drama does mirror
human nature; that it presents an abstract and brief chronicle of its
times, wherein we may glimpse moral and political culture as it actually
availed in human life.
But the classics, even when we can agree on what they are, are
likely to seem a bit irrelevant to our sophomores. We face, in every gen–
eration, the tough problem of the transmission of culture; and we find
that even when masterpieces mean something to the teacher they may
say nothing to the student, and that the arts of life and letters, when the
clue is lost, may die.
It
is at this point that the college theater, as dis–
tinguished from the mere sedentary reading of drama, may perform a
uniquely valuable service. For the purpose of theatrical production is to
