THE THEATRE OF THE STADIUM

Two sequences of thought apparently so divergent as the Stadium and Miss Margaret Anglin seem to have no meeting place that is not the result of hyper liberalizing the meanings of each. There has been headline material in both within the past two days: the Stadium in the settled matter of wooden seats. Miss Anglin in her plan to produce the Electra of Sophocles in the Greek temple of Roger Williams Park in Providence. Connection between these unlikes lies in the out of door drama, of which Miss Anglin is now America's greatest exponent, and of which the Stadium in more felicitous years was America's best known amphitheater.

Although many spikes and cleats have done their obliterative best, the Stadium has not quite lost the touch of a buskined foot. The Joan of Arc of Maude Adams was one of the first plays to be presented here, and "Caliban", the effort of Percy Mackaye to go Browning, and Shakespeare, one better was given shortly after the World War. And the classical play has not absented itself from classical setting, for the "Iphigenia in Taurus" of the company of Granville Barker likewise saw worthy performance in appropriate surroundings. Within the year Miss Anglin's "Electra" has been produced in the Greek Temple of Berkeley, California, out of door stage of the University of California. Thus the fear of commercialism, natural suspicion when the stage touches the college closely, is a bugaboo of timidity, rather than a corollary common to all such intimacies.

Next Tuesday the Stadium exercises of Class Day will in annual fashion remind many that Harvard has found at least one more use for a temple consecrated particularly to the happy warrior. But the bonds that once joined the Stadium with the drama of the open air have been allowed to slacken. Past example has proven its worth as an amphitheater. Acoustic difficulties spring up forthright in the layman's mind: the professional has on at least three occasions found them negligible. The association between the Stadium and the theatre's best in artistic out-of-door production is more real than the present desuetude would testify. The man, or the organization, that whispers a realization of present availabilities into the moribund theatrical initiative of Harvard will serve art, his University and himself.