STILL THE THING

If the notion can have survived from more Puritanical days that the theatre is a sink of iniquity from which the college man should hold virtuously alcof, it receives its death. How in the announcement of Professor Stuart that the Triangle Club is about to build a four hundred thousand dollar experimental theatre at Princeton. Not a few of the recent innovations in scenery and lighting, such as the cycloramic cone and the "rainbow" effect, have originated among students at eastern universities. With exceptionally complete equipment and a professedly experimental attitude Princeton ought to have little difficulty in becoming, as Professor Stuart hopes, "a dramatic center."

That college should find it desirable to test new ideas of staging, as well as to train playwrights, is somewhat of an Indictment against regular producers. In his recent book Oliver Sayler wrote to the American producer that: "At his worst he is without parallel for ignorance, incompetence. At his average, he is an excellent showman. The fact that experimentation is costly explains perhaps why until recent years very little departure was ever made from the usual manner of selecting and presenting plays. Even low the public is somewhat apathetic to innovations, as certain English producers discovered to their sorrow. So if the tendency to mediocrity in dramatic performances is to be overcome, the impulse must apparently come from the universities where the future playwrights and producers can experiment without being directly dependant upon popular favor.

But it is not enough for college dramatic clubs and workshops merely to advance the mechanical technique of staging plays. A race of dramatists is even more necessary. If the prediction to Halcott Glover that by a rebirth of idealism drama will be swung from its morbid tendency to realism and attain its true "place in human and international under standing" is correct, it would seem that the first signs of a dramatic revival ought to appear in the work of college and universities; for seeds of idealism find but scant nourishment along. Broadway Should Princeton's new theatre inspire talented dramatists as well as train actors and expert stage managers it may well become with its superior equipment, the storm center of the new idealistic movement. In any case, its success will encourage those optimists who hope for improved facilities for the 47 Workshop.