Contrary to prevailing Harvardian calumnies, there's plenty of culture at MIT, including a great deal of the conventional sort. This story stands out in my memory, however, even in some pretty stellar cultural company.
It fell to our East Campus House Committee to bring to pass a perfectly magical cultural event that I’m going to try to describe. Not in the hope that you’ll be able to reproduce it—I’m firmly convinced that that can never be—but because I count it among the miracles that have taught me about the love of God.1
It was 1961: MIT’s Centennial Year. Everybody was remembering a hundred proud years and laboring to make memories that would last another century. Aldous Huxley and e. e. cummings were lecturing and reading in our halls of assembly and broadcasting over our airwaves2 and along the audio cables that complicated our ledge-walks.
We in East Compost cherished a long and distinctive tradition of sponsoring only the dead minimum of parties and other conventional social gatherings, in firmly-intentional contrast to the policies of the fraternities and even of other dormitories.
So, some consternation ensued when the powers that be passed along to the East Campus House Committee, via the Dormitory Council and therefore via my reluctant self, an urgent mandate to plan and bring to pass some sort of event of memorable cultural value. Also a $50 budget. More money then than now…
Given our traditions and predilections, how could we possibly cooperate to leave a coherent cultural mark on the Centennial? Our customary hacks, however subtle or sophisticated, didn’t really fit the description. Nor did hall-hockey, mega-water-fights, or any of the other ways in which we usually came together to do things. It’s not that we were without culture, but rather that our cultural preferences tended to vary widely and individualistically, to be more solitary than collaborative, and to partake of a sense of humor bordering on the sardonic.
We argued and agonized. More than one meeting bore no fruit. Until my good friend Charlie Weller, Third Floor Hall Chairman (if I recall aright), brought one of his constituents to an ad hoc “let’s try one more time” House Committee gathering. This parishioner of Charlie’s stood out for oddness in this very individualistic assembly. I’m going to call him “Lance,” inasmuch as I don’t remember his real name. Not one whose company I ever sought out. Presumably brilliant, on some level, but then that went without saying, in those Sputnik-haunted days and corridors.
While Charlie shrugged and rolled his eyes and the rest of us sat by slack-jawed, Lance made us a thunderstrikingly strange proposal. He’d relieve us of the burden of our assigned event and promise us something cultural that we’d always remember, but in return we had to buy his plan sight unseen and do it exactly his way, with no further negotiations or modifications. The budget, said Lance, was plenty. We’d also have to give him the green light to arrange a partnership with our very opposite numbers at Senior House.
Well, we debated, but not nearly as long as we’d already done to no avail. Seeing no real alternative, with tremblings, we cast our lot and our budget with Lance and invited him to reveal this non-negotiable plan of his. Before long, we convened the first (and likely only-ever) joint conclave of the East Campus/Senior House governing Committees. Where Lance laid it on us:
- We were now irretrievably committed to mounting a full, costumed outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in the L-shaped courtyard between Senior House and the President’s House.
- Much of the action was to take place in the courtyard itself, among the audience, who would occupy folding chairs. Palace scenes would mostly happen on the Senior House balconies; the President’s wall would double as Fairyland. The halls of Senior House and the President’s back yard would be our backstage.
- This would be a reading performance: nobody would have to memorize lines.
- Lance would allocate parts at random, with no right of appeal nor, one supposes, demurrer. Nobody with previous stage experience would be eligible for a speaking part.
- There would be no rehearsals. Lance would walk each actor individually through his entrances and exits. The cast would meet for the first time at the one and only performance.
- We’d borrow costumes from Dramashop. Except for the inexpensive paperback script from which each of us would read, the munificent budgets of the sponsoring organizations (us and the Senior Housers) would be combined and spent on very nice cookies and punch for audience and cast to share afterward.
A few misgiving voices rose to challenge our commitment. Had they been able to propose any concrete alternative, they might have prevailed. As it was, they subsided, and we set to work with doubting hearts to make the best of our Centennial obligation.
The randomness of Lance’s casting remains in historical doubt, but nobody then or now seems to want to point any fingers. The central rôle of Puck went to Mary, the daughter of Dean of Students John T. Rule. I’m morally certain she had prior stage experience, but she delivered a performance that I remember as treading the line between fetching and dazzling—what I could see of it, from my usual position in the “wings.” And her central position in the cast guaranteed that the prominent Rule family would attend in force.
In the same pulsating vein, three of the four named Fairies were President Jay and Kay Stratton’s daughters, Cathy, Cary, and Laurie. If it hadn’t already been a foregone conclusion that the Strattons would come to this activity in their back yard, this casting decision surely applied the stamp of certainty.
Me, I drew a genuine bit part, that of Egeus, father to Hermia. Normally listed second only to Duke Theseus in lists of dramatis personae, but granted by the Bard only two short and rather querulous scenes. My costume featured a marvelous, heavy, ankle-length wool cape, which I was just ham enough to swirl about in my sparse moments on stage.
So we collected our paperback scripts, went through our parts individually with Lance, and got costumed and made up at Dramashop. On the big night, a numerous and locally-stellar congregation did in fact assemble on the folding chairs.
I wish I could provide a coherent account of the performance. You’ll have to use your imagination, and it’ll fall short. You really had to be there. One brief example, to illustrate the difficulty. My excellent friend and fellow MIT Concert Band clarinetist Joe Goldfarb drew (again I doubt the randomness) the rôle of Moonshine in the play-within-a-play. Where (Act V, Scene 1), in his truly spectacular Brooklyn accent, he intoned:
This lanthorn doth the horned moon present…
Myself the man i’ the moon do seem to be…
this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog.
To get the full flavor of this comic climax, you have to assimilate Joe’s classic manner of speech, in which, for example, “this dog” has three syllables, resembling, sequentially, “diss” “dough,”and “ugg.”
Near the outset, I delivered my first resonant line: “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia!…” Then for much of the rest of the performance, I hunkered in the President’s yard, behind its surrounding wall, in company with other bit-players. Including, as it turned out, the lovely Laurie Stratton, whom I had heretofore admired from afar but actually met only on rare, rather formal occasions.
Well, as it happened, Laurie’s somewhat skimpy fairy-costume wasn’t really adequate to the chilly evening, and she gave some visible evidence of distress, even in the moonlit gloom. Fetched up as a gentleman, what else could I have done? I invited her into the coziness of my big wool cape, and we kept each other warm in the most chaste manner imaginable, until one of us had to arise to the call of another cue.
For bashful, virginal, nineteen-year-old me, this innocent little interlude was fraught with a great deal of hormonal electricity. I don’t flatter myself that it was so for her. I don’t recall that Laurie and I ever met again.3 But I suppose that you need to know about this part of the story, if you’re to decide what to make of the rest of my account.
…For my recollections put this evening in a very sparsely-populated category: that of perfectly magical, one-off, irreproducible occasions of amazing joy. I’ve been blessed with a few such; this is the most secular of them and therefore the one I feel most free to recount here. For each, I won’t live to return enough thanks to the Source of all marvelous things.
As I recall it, the prevailing mood around the very nice fifty-dollar cookies and punch was rather breathless. Something had happened. Reminiscent of Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, blurting out: “…it is good for us to be here…” However enhanced and distorted my personal experience may have been, it remains an objective fact that we, MIT, and Shakespeare had a huge, memorable, cultural success in the Senior House courtyard, despite all reasonable expectations.
I don’t know what ever became of “Lance.” I seem to have heard that he dropped out of MIT without graduating, but that’s as uncertain a recollection as any. It’s only now, half a century later, that it occurs to me how perfectly his achievement on our behalf fits with the classic “hacking” ethos that infused and shaped my East Campus experience: unexpected and even counterintuitive results from clever and unconventional techniques, playing fast and loose with “the rules” as required, and all executed in an atmosphere of high spirits and, sometimes, low humor.
Here’s how I reported the same event in a letter to Valerie the next Sunday, April 30:
Tech
April 30, 1961
Dearest Valérie,
...Had a big triumph-type occurrence Friday night that all but pulled this small tool out of his perennial depression. As follows:
Shakespeare orgy was held, celebrating Old Willie's birthday. We had a highly informal reading enactment of Midsummer Night's Dream, advertising of which drew us a capacity crowd of distinguished people out for a good deal of fun. Dean Rule's daughter, Mary, played Puck and really stole the show. She's 15 years old and a natural-born, freckle-faced ham. Once, she lost her place by turning one page too many and started reading some of Oberon's lines. Then, realizing that the lines were unfamiliar, she grinned, muttered, "Lord, what fools these actors be," and picked up where she should have been, bringing down the house.
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I had the only straight part in the whole thing: Egeus, the villainously proud old curmudgeon whose sole function is to act as a foil for a whole playful of delightful tomfoolery. Well, I poured all that's dramatic in me into that obscure part and had the satisfaction of having the director gently berate me afterward for making the principles [sic] look sick! Yep, I'm bragging -- so there! Pres. Stratton, ex-Pres. Killian, Deans Fassett and Rule, and a couple of reporters were very flattering afterward. Just thought you might like to know that your aged boyfriend is moderately famous now -- only a week after being in the slough of despond.
The whole thing was immensely successful -- largely because there ws no expectation of an artistic production. Nobody was nervous, because we all had scripts there with us. Everybody just plain had fun, and in the process a great deal of the basic hilarity of the play came through that might not have shown in a more self-conscious production...I honestly haven't had half so much fun in a long time...
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