Cloudy, 61° F
Curtain up on the Adams Pool Theatre, former home of the naked swim, now home to undergraduate directors creative enough to practice theater where Franklin Roosevelt practiced his breaststroke. Enter, stage left, a spring semester senior crazy enough to write, direct, and stage an adapted work in this performance space, where the audience sits on a ramp that used to lead into the water, and the actors are in the deep end (or off it).
Preproduction of “Take Her, She’s Mine” began last October. I found the script in the Widener Library stacks and was struck by its thematic relevance. The show, a 1961 Broadway hit, follows a California girl to a fictional women’s college, dramatizing her experience with her cautious father, sophisticated roommates, changing times, and Ivy League boys. Women have taken vast strides in the 50 years since the original production, but the play’s depiction of the female Ivy League experience felt surprisingly familiar.
I set to work on an adaptation, “Take Her, She’s Mine — Revisited, the 50th Anniversary.” The play was vintage, but we made stylistic and interpretive decisions with a modern eye. We brought in veteran Harvard actors, cast some first-timers, and gave a couple of varsity lacrosse players their big breaks playing Harvard men. We set our version at Radcliffe, rewrote the doting-father character, spiced up the jokes, and worked in a sexy soundtrack of ’60s songs.
The production got off to a swimming start, but soon encountered resistance. Rehearsal space was elusive, funds were scarce, and the pool theater’s limited technical capabilities and one-week residency policy demanded meticulous planning. The cast and crew rose to the challenge, working around the clock, improvising solutions, making academic sacrifices, and committing time and money to the show. In the end, it was a hit. We exceeded capacity for every performance and added a preview audience (mostly friends, family, and the lacrosse team).
The project was transformative. The new actors all want to act again, the seniors wish they had started on stage sooner, and I hope to continue directing after graduation. But, as enlightening and satisfying as the show was, it also demonstrates the difficulties in students’ creating theater on campus.
Theater here is often kind of a guerrilla operation. The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC) hosts more than 40 undergraduate productions annually, and that doesn’t include the dance, improv, and a cappella shows happening almost every weekend. The campus teems with creativity and talent, and the HRDC supports the dizzying parade of loads and strikes of productions that take place in the Loeb, Ex, Agassiz, New College, and Pool theaters. But the balance between creativity and resources still seems off. High demand for venues explains why you see a full-fledged production of “Cosi fan Tutti” in Lowell Dining Hall, and why my company and I spent two months rehearsing in a squash court. To develop as a serious, preprofessional director, producer, or technician on campus is a challenge requiring personal initiative, unfaltering commitment, immense resourcefulness, and a network of supporters. It’s not unlike staging a play in a pool.
During my freshman year, I played Aphrodite in a Harvard production of “Metamorphoses” (coincidentally, also a play in a pool, this one built and filled with water in the Loeb). As the cast lounged around in Greek headdresses and bathing suits, the seniors told me how lucky I was to be a new freshman at Harvard. It was 2007 and drama was on the rise, and an arts task force was pushing forward initiatives to expand course offerings in theater. The Undergraduate Council was going to provide more funding for productions, and the Office of Career Services was encouraging students to pursue careers in the arts. Four years later, lounging poolside at our rehearsals, I was telling the freshmen in my cast something similar.
“All the world is a stage,” and one of the things I love about theater is that it can happen anyplace — in parks, in barns, on rocky cliffs, on ships at sea, and in swimming pools. However, given the size, scope, and influence of the institution, I hope Harvard continues to find permanent spaces for theater in the lives and studies of undergraduates.
If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student and have an essay to share about life at Harvard, please email your ideas to Jim Concannon, the Gazette’s news editor, at Jim_Concannon@harvard.edu.
