With The Players
ONE NIGHT WE found Martin Howell's fingers wiggling at us from across the Little Theater in Robinson. And not so many days later Steve Bradley and Anne Hurlburt stepped in to watch tryouts for What a Life, the show forced on us for Fall Houseparties by what is becoming The George Abbott Tradition. Always Pete Cardozo is not so far in the offing, patching freshman themes for the English department. This is fine incentive for the freshmen, to have the Gargantuan figures from the Player's past (not so far past; we still remember you with affection, '39) cast before them.
It reminds us of our own freshman year, so long ago, when the giants of '39 were juniors coming to try-outs the third night and stealing the parts that we had sweated after. In this age of little black men we can only wish fervently with Warner Bentley that '43 will produce "ten Steve Bradleys." We ourselves have been satellites for so long that our repetitions of inflections caught from the old stars sound as but dull echoes.
Already the freshmen have demonstrated their talents in the first play of the reorganized Experimental Theater, Ibsen's The Wild Duck. Charles McLane '4l", who first achieved Scandinavian fame in the Night of January Sixteenth, played a sensitive Hjalmar and was supported by a cast of competent '43's. The new organization entails a directorate of seven men, Professor Watson, Professor Pressey, Warner Bentley, Henry Williams, Ted Packard, Chester Garrison and Herbie Landsman, who will so direct policies of play selection as to better coordinate the Robinson productions with work done in the drama courses presented by the English department. What a Life is to be presented on November 17 and 18. The play was written by Clifford Goldsmith and first produced in New York in the spring of 1938. When it went on tour last fall Bill Blees '3B was in one of the major roles. At this time the cast has not been picked, but your correspondent predicts that James Andrews, of no little experience with the Players and with summer stock, and Herbie Landsman, fresh from Paris and quite contemptuous of European "decadence," will have parts. A Broadway actress will, according to precedent, be imported for the feminine lead.
This season has its innovations, sponsored by President A 1 Eisman and Social Chairman Chet Garrison. The Players are going to conduct a seminar meeting after Christmas vacation, open to the college, to discuss the plays that we have seen in New York. And a tour is being arranged to try out the Carnival show, before it reaches Webster (how soon that will become, fondly or not so fondly, "Old Webster.")
