Poets, Actors Reminisce On Experimental Theater

Aggasiz Theater last night became home to the now defunct "Poet's Theater" as part of a tribute to the small Cambridge drama group that specialized in performing the dramatic efforts of poets.

The second-half of "The Wake For The Poet's Theater," a two-night tribute to Cambridge's former experimental theater, was devoted to performing selections from five plays that the poetic company premiered.

Dressed in street clothes, and reading from scripts, actors from across the East Coast presented the terse and complex rythyms of the verse drama that was the staple of the Poet's Theater, which closed in 1968. Two plays by Lowell Professor of Humanities William Alfred, "Agamemnon" and "Hogan's Goat," comprised the body of tonight's performances.

Founded in 1950, the group espoused a mission of staging productions which would not ordinarily find sponsorship, with a special eye to the dramatic efforts of poets.

According to the recollections of William M. Hunt '36, who hosted last night's events, the troupe occupied an incredibly tiny room on Palmer Street, until a fire razed the theater.

After last night's dramatic montage, one former performer recalled with a smile and a smattering of poetic license, "the theater was so small that we all had to breath in at the same time."

Operating on a shoe-string budget, and keeping one step ahead of firemen who would have closed the theater as a fire-trap, the Poet's Theater became the stopping point for numerous literary luminaries, Hunt told the overflowing crowd.

Tuesday night some of those playwrites, critics and groupies of the theater company, eulogized this fixture of Cambridge's cultural past. Besides Alfred's works, the company has staged plays by the likes of Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren and Archibald MacLeish.