Proposed Mew Webster Hall

Construction Will Begin on Theater and Auditorium Plant When Funds Are Available

[FROM SPECIAL COMMITTEE REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT]

YOU MUST THINK of Dartmouth College, of any college, as a collection of men, not as a collection of buildings or money or even of books. The College began with the lonely, stubborn, willful Scholar, determined to bring the word of God to the savages, though that meant he should become a voice in the wilderness. But around him gathered other scholars and those who could hear their words, and then, because these men's work was known to be good, the buildings and the money and the books came. And the work grew.

But through all this growth, the men of the College have remained one in feeling, student and teacher, alumnus and administrator, united in the work, united in the belief that it remains good, united in attachment to the site, to the buildings, to all those who have shared the work on the site and in the buildings. This mysterious unity, this strange devotion, lies in the spirit, but it takes intellectual and material forms. It is furthered by Library and laboratories, by classrooms and stadiums, by meetings and partings, by voices and gestures, by shared joys and shared troubles, by common high endeavor. This is Dartmouth College's most precious possession.

This spirit is precious and must be preserved, and if possible furthered still. The President and Trustees believe it can be furthered still by providing a place where all the College can be gathered together under shelter. At present, there is no such place.

At the opening of College, at Commencement when weather is bad, only a few more than half the College can meet in the largest hall. These are the College's great occasions, the day when its high aims are reiterated for the ear of the nation, and the day when the proof of its work is presented to the world. But today not all the College can share in those occasions. To provide for those occasions the President and Trustees have had prepared plans for an auditorium to seat 2,700 people, all the College and its guests.

But the building must be useful for as many purposes of the College as possible. The plans therefore contemplate that the building serve as an educational instrument in daily, not merely occasional, use, and be capable of meeting demands that may be made in the future. The auditorium itself suggests use as theater and as concert-hall. To locate there the College's work in music and drama is natural. Both these activities, in the curriculum and outside it, have grown with the growth of the College, and both are now inadequately provided for in plant and are now obliged to work under great difficulties. Both are creative, morale-building activities. Both absorb time and attention from large numbers of students, and both are directed by well-equipped and successful leaders. Both activities interest and attract people not members of the college community, yet both are properly educational and of high value in the educational process.

But the dramatic and musical activities appeal at different times to audiences of different sizes. Therefore it is planned that the large auditorium be divisible by curtains to accommodate audiences between a minimum of 850 and the maximum of 2,700. Besides, a Little Theater to seat 420 is provided, connected through the stage and stage-workshops with the larger auditorium, so that flexible and economical service of both stages and both auditoriums is possible.

In the forepart of the building the music department and its activities will be housed. In the rear, separated from the musicians by the large auditorium and the spaces about it, will be the theatrical activities. Since the forepart of the building can be sound-proofed within its parts and from the rest of the building, both the musicians and the players may be working in the building.simultaneously.

There through the mornings all week classes in music will be meeting, pianos and phonographs will be playing. In the afternoons will gather classes in play production and the drama, with work in scene and costume design, in the history of the theater, in creating brave and wonderful illusion. In the evening rehearsals in both music and drama will go on. The band, the glee club, the orchestra, the chorus, the choir, the jazzbands, and solo instrumentalists will center their work here. The comics and tragedians, the hissable villains and their pure victims, the utterers of poetry and buffoonery will strut the stages. The modern language clubs will give here their plays and concerts in their tongues. The fraternities will compete in performance of one-acts and the student playwrights will be enabled to see their work in production. Motion pictures in foreign languages and educational films in English will have showings here. And at times of formality men of light and learning will fill the auditoriums with the sound of their wisdom. This building will be full of life.

SUMMER DRAMA FESTIVAL

And since it will supply facilities for theatrical and musical performances of all sorts, this building may tempt professional visitors to offer the College their best. The long-established and impressive concert series, which has included such artists as Flagstad, Rachmaninoff, Lily Pons, Tibbett, Kreisler, Schumann-Heink, and such organizations as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, will be given there.

Traveling theatrical companies may appear, and the building may, it is hoped, attract theater groups willing to undertake a summer season in Hanover. In this con- nection, the ideal theatrical arrangements of the new building would make it possible to bring the finest professional talent of the theater to Hanover with facilities second to none in the country. The location of the College, in the center of the mountain and lake vacation regions of New Hampshire and Vermont, would enable it to provide a wide district with artistic entertainment. A summer drama festival might create at Dartmouth the first and only great summer center for the American drama, attracting patronage and interest and talent from all parts of the country.

Through such a festival, and through the events offered during the academic year, this building would serve a community and region which is steadily becoming more integrated, more aware of its peculiar flavor and attractiveness, njore eager to cultivate its differentiated and distinctive personality. To the inhabitants of the region and to its many summer visitors, the building could be a cultural center, a center for refreshment and enlightenment.

Suppose the building to be built. As you approach it from the campus, which it faces at the southeast corner, you see its facade includes the familiar and beautiful columns from the front of the present Webster Hall, and you notice that the building bears the Webster name. You find it conspicuously placed, close to parking areas, easy of access. Behind the facade the roof rises in easy steps to the high stage house. This is a large building, but its bulk is unobtrusive.

After you pass between the columns you enter the vestibule through the striking bronze doors from old Webster. Ticket offices to right and left can serve any size audience. Beyond the vestibule is the Memorial Lobby, decorated with murals commemorative of Daniel Webster and of great events in the history of the College. Slender columns support the roof of the lobby, and stairways on its right and left sides lead to the lounge and the balcony. Directly in front of you a few steps go down to the floor of the large auditorium. Offices for the building director and the chairman of the music department are on the same floor as the lobby. On the floors above are music classrooms, a Capehart room, and more music department offices. Under your feet, beneath the lobby, are a large music rehearsal room, an instrument room, and storerooms.

If you mount the stairs to the lounge you find yourself looking down on the Memorial Lobby from a platform commanding the building's front entrance, through which you just came. Behind you, to right and left, stretches the lounge, which may be used by the musicians for rehearsal when the balcony is not used. In the center of the lounge is a soda bar, and on each side of the bar is a small room, useful as a coatroom and with a piano in it for practice. You see that the lounge serves a double purpose: for the use of the music department and for entrance to the balcony. Doors at each end of the lounge lead to open air terraces, useful between the acts in good weather.

Now you go down the steps to the lobby again, and thence under the platform of the lounge toward the auditorium. You are in a wide promenade, which continues on three sides of the auditorium. The promenade is decorated with theatrical, motion picture, music, and art exhibits, many of them in niches individually lit. These exhibits include models of Greek, Renaissance, Elizabethan, and modern theaters, scene designs, pictures of famous performers and performances, scores of famous musical works, and reproductions of paintings.

There are three exits from the promenade on each side, besides the large center entrance through which you have just come. This building can be filled and emptied very rapidly.

Now you move down an aisle toward the stage. At first the balcony is above your head, but the seats among which you are now passing have all a clear view of the stage. On this floor 1,600 people can be seated.

You cross the cross-aisle leading to the side promenades and continue toward the stage. Now you have left the balcony behind. When you reach the orchestra pit you turn and look back. During your progress someone has closed the curtains under the balcony at the rear of the cross-aisle, so that now the auditorium, without the part curtained off, contains 1,800 seats. From your place at the orchestra pit you see the fine sweep of the balcony as it rises. Eleven hundred seats are there, all with clear view of the stage. But while you watch, the curtains at the cross-aisle in the balcony close, and you are now in a theater which seats 850, 700 on the floor, 150 in the balcony.

These curtains dividing the auditorium are colored but not gay. Color is lent to the auditorium by hangings painted in abstract designs above the line of the balcony to your right and left. Below the balcony line the walls are decorated in wood. The auditorium is artificially lit, of course, and most of the light seems to come from the low dome in the ceiling. The effect of the whole is of great spaciousness, but also of cheerfulness and vivacity.

Concealed in the dome, but visible from your present position at the orchestra pit, is the projection gallery for lighting the stage and for motion pictures. And if you throw back your head and look straight up you can see additional openings for lighting, hidden from the audience in the ceiling of the fore-stage.

Sometimes the floor of the orchestra pit will be raised so that you can go straight up onto the stage from where you now stand. But now you move to right or left and ascend a few steps to stage level. You pass first beside a side-stage, with its duplicate opposite. These may be used in theatrical production or on academic occasions serve as boxes. Above them on both sides is the organ in its air-conditioned chamber.

On the stage you find large workingspaces to right and left. Above you the stage-house rises high enough to fly a thirty foot cyclorama, though the working-spaces are roofed to allow for rooms above. You see the cables, controlling the curtain and for flying pieces of scenery, running over the gridiron at the top of the stage-house, and at one side the pin-rail to hold the cables. On the other side of the stage-house, still in the area above your head, is a succession of tiers for properties. In the left corner of the stage as you face its back wall is the elevator shaft, which runs from the basement to the property shelves. The floor of the stage is thoroughly trapped, so that scenery and properties may be lowered to the basement, and so that entrances and exits may be made from below in performance.

When you pass through the back wall of the stage you are in a large workroom. A painting frame faces you. To your right the space of the workroom makes an L turn and becomes the working-space of the Lit- tle Theater stage. By this arrangement scenery may be moved from the stage of the large theater through the workroom to the stage of the Little Theater, and the workroom serves both stages.

Both stages, the working spaces above them, and the work-room between them, are particularly adapted to the use of wagon stages for rapid scene changes. Wagon stages are low platforms, mounted on wheels or casters, and bearing scenery already built so that it may be wheeled into place. In presenting Shakespeare, for instance, wagon stages are very useful in accomplishing the changes of background his plays require.

MODERN STAGE EFFECTS AS you enter the stage of the Little Theater you find its back wall is a permanent plaster sky-dome, useful in obtaining the same lighting effects, especially for outdoor scenes, as are obtained in the large theater by the cyclorama. This stage floor is also trapped. Behind the working space on the right is an outdoor loading platform for trucks.

Now you face the auditorium of the Little Theater from the stage. Again, as in the large theater, are side-stages to right and left. The Little Theater auditorium, all on one floor, seats 430. This auditorium is simply but charmingly decorated. Lighting for the stage comes from another projection gallery above the rear of the auditorium, and this gallery, too, is equipped for motion picture projection. There are also masked light-sources at the sides of the auditorium.

At the top of the slope of the auditorium you find a wide foyer, from which steps lead down to the entrance lobby at street level. Below this lobby is another, leading into rehearsal rooms in the basement. One of these rehearsal rooms is decorated so that it may be used for social purposes in connection with Little Theater performances. Above the entrance lobby is a small library.

You are now in the basement, which in this part of the building is enough above ground to get natural light. From the lower lobby of the Little Theater you pass down a corridor toward the front of the building, with a row of offices on your right. There are three floors of rooms above these offices: more offices, file rooms, seminar rooms, studios, accommodating classes, managers, heelers, publicity men, and the entire administration of the activities under the direction of the Council on Student Organizations. At the end of the corridor you find a second rehearsal room. From here, turning left, you pass under the stage to a third rehearsal room, and thence to rooms for orchestra and chorus. From the orchestra room a corridor leads directly to the orchestra pit.

Above the orchestra and chorus rooms on the stage level are a green room and carpentry shop, and above them two floors of dressing rooms. At the top of the building are a costume shop with plenty of space for sewing machines, and a large room reserved for possible extension of the College's work in radio or motion pictures.

You come out of the building on the west side, toward the Inn. Over your head arch the old elms. As you turn toward the campus, you will feel that you have seen a building designed to bring men together, to unite them in work and play, to train them in hand, eye, ear, and mind, to give them joy and laughter, to move them to pity, to bring them sweet sound and high thinking, a place where dreams are made real, and where men's best hope, education, may be greatly served.

DESIGN OF THE LOBBY OF PROPOSED AUDITORIUM Entrance to the spacious foyer will be from the campus and from College Street, with a few broad stairs leading down to the floor of the auditorium and a double stairway leading up to the balcony.