Braver than Broadway

Lancaster, Pa. is a thriving city with 60,000 inhabitants, six movie houses, but no theatre. No road company has played there since 1930. But, thanks to the enterprising Green Room Club of Lancaster's Franklin and Marshall College, the town is not left playless. Under the direction of scholarly, energetic Darrell Larsen, who has coached plays at F. & M. since 1927, undergraduates produce four shows a season, each running a week. From a male student body of 900,300 try out annually for dramatics--many more than go out for football.

Lancaster girls play the feminine roles in Green Room shows, and costumes are rented; otherwise everything connected with the productions -- acting, staging, lighting, scene-designing--is done bythe club itself. About half its audiences are drawn from the campus, the other half from the town.

The club, careful to mix its shots, has produced such classics as Everyman, Twelfth Night, Dr. Faustus; such a novelty as W. S. Gilbert's Tom Cobb, or Fortune's Toy; such modern plays as Biography, High Tor, The Petrified Forest. Last week it tackled John Webster's difficult Elizabethan horror play, The Duchess of Malfi, proved itself braver than Broadway, which last produced the play in 1858. (Two seasons ago Orson Welles planned to do it, got cold feet.)

Story of a young duchess who marries her steward, only to be persecuted and finally strangled to death at the command of her disapproving brothers, The Duchess of Malfi. swirls with the dark, cruel, guilty emotions of the Elizabethan theatre. Its splendid imaginativeness, its impassioned poetry, lift it above mere violence and gore. But it is horrifying rather than terrifying: there is so much bloodshed at the end it is impossible to keep stabs on it.

The Green Room's college cast offered a smooth, intelligent performance. If they often Jacked force, and could almost never suggest the dark corners of the Renaissance soul, they were seldom stagy, seldom obscure, spoke blank verse with distinction. Broadway might have done better, but Broadway refuses to try.

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