Off-Broadway Production Planned For Alfred's Play, 'Hogan's Goat'

Hogan's Goat, a play in verse by William Alfred, professor of English, will be produced off-Broadway this fall.

It will open Oct. 7 at the American Place Theatre for a three-week run, and if it is successful there, will move to another off Broadway theater to complete its run.

Alfred described the play's subject as "the effect of politics upon the lives of people in an Irish-American community in 1890." He said he is indebted to "one of the most beautiful books I've ever read," The Uprooted, by Oscar Handlin, Winthrop Professor of History, for its discussion of "the shock of coming from one culture to another."

Casting will begin in August, and Alfred is "trying to talk them into open casting. I believe that there are many people in New York who are good in the theater who haven't had a chance. But then, of course, you do get some nuts," he added.

Alfred said that a director will be chosen in July, and remarked, "Most theatrical directors are like bad directors of orchestras; they change the music to express themselves."

Alfred said that he will continue revising the play throughout the summer and early fall. He is not yet sure whether his heroine will live or die.

Hegan's Goat was produced at Sanders Theater in the fall of 1953, and Alfred has read selections from it to Cambridge audiences many times since then. In the summer of 1961, the CBS television program "Lamp Unto My Feet" presented a portion of the drama.

His first play, Agamemnen, a modern treatment of the classical legend, was given in concert readings at the Loeb in the fall of 1963.