The Genial Hermit

English 160, "Drama Since Ibsen," twice outgrew its assigned lecture halls, and finally lodged in Sanders Theatre, making Sanders to lecturers what the Palace was to Vaudeville. The reason for 160's sudden sprouting was Robert Chapman, Assistant Professor of English. His intense interest in things theatrical has drawn both dilletante and serious student with equal force.

He views his rise as an academic Horatio Alger with slight misgiving. "I've had to rewrite most of the lectures," he says. "In that cold and austere Graeco--Roman setting you stand up in your toga and pontificate. You can't be intimate in the Mohavi Desert."

Except for Sanders, Chapman has always been on most intimate terms with the theatre. President of Princeton's Triangle Club, he wrote their annual show in his senior year, and remembers it sketchily as being "no better or worse than most--just abysmal." As he acted in many college productions, his interest in the theatre grew, but, receiving no Broadway offers on graduation, he sequestered himself as an instructor at the Berkshire School until he joined Naval Intelligence in 1942.

In 1947 he and Louis Coxe wrote the first draft of Billy Budd. Neither remembers who first suggested it since both had specialized in Melville as undergraduates. After the Experimental Theatre produced the play in '49, they rewrote it for an interested Broadway producer. "We did it in six days over a barrel of Martinis," Chapman remembers with a contented grin. "God, what a wonderful time it was!"

But when Billy Budd opened in New York, the good times were over. Received with near-adulation by the critics, the show nightly played to a handful of friends of the authors, theatre habituates and an occasional tourist who couldn't get tickets for South Pacific. The theatre world did its best for Champman's first effort. One group, calling it a major contribution to the American stage, took a full page ad in the Times urging New Yorkers to support it. The actors voluntarily cut their salaries to the legal minimum, to cut operating expenses. And after each performance in Cyrano, Jose Ferrer asked his audience to see Billy Budd the next night, promising a challenging theatre experience. Despite all these efforts, Billy Budd closed after three months.

His experience with popular theatre taxes added venom to his lecture style. Bitterly sarcastic to everything he considers mediocre on the stage, he damns the famous and obscure with fine impartiality, saving complete admiration only for Shaw. But despite the vigorous showmanship of his lectures, Chapman is no hardy extrovert. Only a small group of undergraduates can claim more than a mild acquaintance with him. In fact, his tendency to stay apart has given one colleague the false impression that his favorite amusement in the exercise line is swimming. A friend on the team says it's a cinch that he's one of the best swimmers on the faculty.

This conditioning keeps him in shape for his energetic lectures. He delights in playing the roles he discusses, and throws himself about the lecture platform entertaining, as much as instructing, his class. Admitting that he is a frustrated actor, he nevertheless claims that he gave up professional aims soon after he left Princeton. "I don't like living from hand to mouth, which is what an actor must do," he explains. "Not that I want too much security, but an actor lives in too precarious a state. The only ones who make a real living are those who go to Hollywood, and you can't get into the movies unless you're young, blond, and preferably female."