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Vol. 101

FEBRUARY, 1921

No. 4

T

The 47 Workshop

By GEORGE P. BAKER

HE Johnston Gate is the official entrance of Harvard College. Passing through it early any autumn evening, you will see a little group of young men and women near the door of a long building on your right, evidently waiting for some one. The building is Massachusetts Hall, storied with memories of its successive uses as dormitory, as barracks for Revolutionary soldiers, as dormitory again, as lecture-rooms for courses in history and economics, and as drill-hall for members of the R. O. T. C. during the recent war. For years now its lower story has been given over to the 47 Workshop. That waiting group means that the hour is close on seven-thirty, when workshop rehearsals begin.

When the low double door is opened, you may echo the words of a faculty member on seeing it for the first time, "What a queer old rattery you 've got here!" Your first impression of the rectangular room, thirty feet by one hundred and fifty, is bewildering confusion. You have entered under a medieval archway of canvas, against which a waggish property-manager has set two imitationmarble pillars, one surmounted by a Russian brass pot, the other by a New England tea-kettle, and hung high above all a placard, "Furniture and Undertaking." On every side is scenery, stacked in wooden compartments or packed flat against the walls. In one corner is a

seemingly inextricable tangle of large properties: tables, fireplaces, bits of staircase, tree-trunks, chairs, and stools. Other large properties are piled on top of closet-like inclosures diagonally opposite, in corners at right and left. One is the tiny office of the Workshop; the larger is the room where small properties and lighting apparatus are kept. At the lower end of the room drops and gauzes rest on brackets. An ungainly wooden structure just in front of these drops, which looks like a medieval batteringram, is a staging of different levels for scene-painters. Not even the middle of the room offers wholly free space. The ceiling rafters, put into place long before the days of iron girders, require the support of two iron pillars. From these, broad white lines run slantwise to piles of scenery at the back of the room. On these lines wooden chairs have been so placed as to suggest a room with doors and windows. The space thus inclosed, twenty feet at the front by twelve feet deep, represents the stage in Agassiz House, Radcliffe College, on which Workshop plays are produced. Just in front of this suggestion of a stage are a gilded, high-backed bench and a small, dark table. If you have happy memories of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet, these will look familiar. Bidding farewell to the American stage in a performance of "Hamlet" at Harvard University, he passed on these and other properties to the 47 Workshop as

Copyright, 1921, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

417

evidence of his generous interest in it. To-day its director conducts rehearsals from this bench, across this little table. To left and right of these are set chairs facing the inclosed space, from which members of the Workshop may watch the rehearsing. And even as the seeming confusion has simplified into these details, you come to understand that here is an ordering, but badly crowded because of insufficient space.

People of all ages have been coming in. Some go to the rows of chairs flanking the director's table, students who, as part of their work in play-writing, are required to watch rehearsals carefully; members of the company not acting; and an occasional visitor. Others join the group who, entering first, have been sitting on or near the semblance of a stage: all these are actors. To and fro move other young people, readjusting furniture on the stage or bringing small properties from the neighboring storeroom. The director, entering, quickly takes his place at the little brown table. A young man, giving a final touch to one of the stage properties, comes to a chair at the director's left and takes up the prompt-book. At the director's right sits another young man, the author.

What is this play? Not something already given on the professional stage, and not, except in the rarest instances, a play of another country as yet unperformed on the American stage. The author is one of the group of would-be playwrights to which most of the watchers belong. The play they have seen grow in the class-room till the director believes it ready for trying out. They know what are the questions, technical and human, which discussion of it has raised. Most of them have taken sides for or against certain qualities in it. Some believe that the director is justified in giving it a chance; some do not. In all this lies the reason why at moments the listeners lean forward to watch absorbedly the working out of some stage position or the handling of a scene. That is, the plays produced, whether of one or more acts, come, except in the rarest instances, from English 47 or English 47a, the two courses in playwriting at Harvard, which are repeated at Radcliffe, the college for women.

The plays written in these courses are of three kinds: those which are never finished or which, when completed, do not justify themselves; those which have promise, but seem to the director not yet to warrant careful production before the Workshop audience; and those which, like the piece in rehearsal, deserve this opportunity. The first group are relegated to the desks or waste-baskets of their authors; the second, as far as possible, are acted in this room, after brief rehearsal by aids of the director, for his criticism and that of the classes. The proportion of the third group is large, for English 47a is open only to those who have shown unusual ability in English 47, and admission to the latter course depends on competition. From the one-act manuscript annually submitted the first of June the director will pick not more than from twelve to fifteen persons for the course, and he reserves the right to reduce this number to any extent he may think wise if the manuscripts submitted submitted show slight promise.

Rehearsals the world over are pretty much alike, dull enough after a few minutes, unless the watcher is specially interested in play, author, actor, or producer. What differentiates a Workshop rehearsal from amateur work is the evident absorption of everybody in his task. When an actor goes off stage, it is to work on his lines, or, stepping into the office or property room, to confer as to his part, costume, or kindred matters. Any attempt by a new actor at the social amenities common in the wings at an amateur rehearsal is quickly squelched by the actors of longer standing. At any noise on the side lines the director stops the rehearsal. Sociability, for which many amateur organizations seem primarily to exist, comes only before the rehearsal or in pauses to rest the actors. Then, while the director consults with his aids as to any questions awaiting his attention, lookers-on and actors mingle. Rehearsing in the Workshop accords in at least one respect with ideas of Mr. Arthur Hopkins in his booklet, "How 's Your Second Act?" At the earlier meetings there is no attempt to force any set of movements or any definite interpretation of character on the actors.

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