University of Virginia Library

ONCE UPON A TIME,
Roger Stevens, now chairman of the Kennedy Center,
decided that the ancient idea of drama festivals should
be resurrected in order that the nation's colleges and
universities might benefit from the competitive challenge
and interchange of dramatic expression, with some
earning the right each year to display their theatrical
wares in a professional setting.

He first proposed the idea at an ANTA meeting, then
at an American Educational Theater Association
meeting. But the idea had to be sold, and who better to
knock on Madison Avenue doors than Peggy Wood, then
president of ANTA? Her salesmanship turned on an
American Airlines executive, and their sponsorship,
together with funds provided by the Kennedy Center,
the ATA, and the Smithsonian Institution, brought
Stevens' idea to fruition.

Two years later, American Oil Company got
interested, then a year and a half ago the Kennedy
Center officially opened its doors, and today the result is
a healthy American College Theatre Festival.

Stevens is only peripherally connected with it now,
however. In fact, sharing an elevator ride to the second
floor offices in the Eisenhower Theatre, he had to ask

what was playing at the Festival on that given day.

The man in charge of the Festival at this juncture is
Frank Cassidy, a gray-haired, elfin figure whose total
immersion in college theater has made him a leading
authority on the subject.

Sitting in his office above the Eisenhower stage
between the matinee and evening performances of
Volpone, Cassidy elaborated on the goals of the ACTF.

"Its primary aim really is to upgrade the university
theater world, and, by so doing, also make it have a
greater impact...to get it more connected to the general
life of the university and the university community,
because in these days when there are practically no first
rate touring companies any longer and professional
repertories only in about 30 of our cities, if there's an
audience to be developed, it's got to be done through
the university theaters. And there is something about the
festival idea that helps broaden the college or university
community's interest in the theater department. It has
also helped – and this is one of the things it set out to
do – in trying to make a more direct connection
between the university theater and the rest of the
theater, the profession. It's begun to sort of bridge that
gap."

Given that theater cannot afford to be an ingrown,
isolated activity, does he think that academic theater
concentrates too much on egocentric theorizing at the
expense of practical experience?

"To a very great extent I would agree that this is one
of the problems of college theater. And, curiously, the
more prestigious the institution, the more aggravated the
problem seems to be. There is, first of all, the very fact
that the department itself has such an enormous
enrollment that they don't even need to go out and look
for an audience on the rest of the campus. Thye don't
have to have the English department come to see
Shakespeare; in fact, they'd prefer not to because there
will be purists who will say the actors should have said
perseverance my boy, not perseverance. Or they don't
go to the German department and invite them to
become involved in a Brecht production.

"Well, it seems to me that this is exactly what the
theater departments should do in a university. They
should utilize its intellectual resources. If they don't,
they very much tend to turn inward."

Cassidy is of the opinion that, for aspiring actors, the
smaller, less prestigious colleges are more desirable simply
because they offer more opportunities to perform. For
learning the technical ropes, however, he feels that the
high visibility drama institutions such as Yale and
Carnegie-Mellon are still the best bet.

But what exactly is the role of college theater? Where
should its emphasis be?

"Now naturally, understandably, and rightly so, the
university theater should be to some extent conservative.
It should be a treasure house, the repertory of the past, a
living library let's say. It's very hard to do revivals of
plays in America and make them succeed professionally.
So there's every reason to think that because universities
can do things more cheaply, then that's the way the
repertory can be kept alive. I wish the university
theaters would do more exploration of the American
plays of the past. They do relatively little there. You
have Tennessee Williams revived, and a little O'Neill, and
Our Town, and that's about it. But I don't think I've
ever seen on a Festival list a play by Sidney Howard, or
Sidney Kingsley, or Robert Sherwood, or Clyde Fitch.
And some of those plays are eminently revivable."

Dealing with young people all the time, how does he
propose to "bring them back" to theater in America,
which has continually nurtured a middle-aged audience?

"They've got to have a theater that interests them,
that has some connection with their lives. We didn't have
any trouble getting young people to go to Hair or
Godspell or a lot of the things Joe Papp does at the
Public Theatre in New York. But if you're going to aim
your theater at the surgical stocking set and pretend that

the American world is all lying back sometime before
1941, then there's really no reason for the kids to come.
I don't think it's an economic problem. Kids go off and
spend lots of money going to rock concerts, and they
travel half way around the world to go to them, so the
cost of the theater ticket is in no way prohibitive. That's
not the problem; it's what goes on inside the theater."

Finally, having seen more college productions this
year alone than most people see in a lifetime, what is his
personal opinion of Volpone?

"I think it was a charming production, the whole
irreverent air that has been taken with it. I think there
are many enormously inventive things done in it. I like
the music, I like the whole rag bag technique. I love the
bed as treasure trove. I think the three freaks are
marvelous. I think those are its pluses.

"I don't think the three birds have come off totally. I
do think Mark Hat tan has made his bird into man; the
others sort of stayed birds somehow. I don't think their
performances were as totally achieved there – that's on
the negative side. There's a fierceness in the play that I
think is lacking in the production, and I think could be
there, even done in this cavalier fashion – an inner
cruelty that curiously is suggested in a way by the three
freaks and the birds, but that at moments doesn't really
pay off somehow, at least as much as I think it could
have. But for the most part my reaction to it is very
much plus."