Broadway Breeding-Ground

College dramatics today are not only more of an art than they once were; they are very much more of an industry. At Yale, Wisconsin and Stanford, drama departments boast opulent budgets and even million-dollar playhouses. Yet the most newsworthy and perhaps the most notable of college drama schools--Catholic University's in Washington, D.C.--has a theater that holds just 350 people and a current production budget of $3,700.

Moreover, Catholic University has been producing plays for less than eight years. Yet in that time it has attracted most of Broadway's and Hollywood's bigwigs to its productions. It has tempted such performers as Sara Allgood, Dorothy McGuire, Florence Reed, Robert Speaight to act in them. It has had offers to broadcast over every big network and is now getting offers to televise. It has tried out shows for Gilbert Miller and declined to try them out for Arthur Hopkins. It has seen its homemade "musical biography" of George M. Cohan lead to a smash movie, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It has seen two other homemade musicals, Count Me In and Sing Out, Sweet Land!, produced on Broadway. Last month Lute Song, which Catholic University tried out last season, also opened on Broadway. Last week C.U.'s stage version of The Song of Bernadette started Broadway rehearsals.

This handsome record stems largely from never playing safe. Catholic University has always refused to "warm over" recent Broadway hits. It prefers things that come out of its own workshop or off the top shelves of the classics. Last month C.U. took its first shot at American mystery melodrama--with William Gillette's creaky, 46-year-old version of Sherlock Holmes. The production, staged with finesse, was clever enough to make the creaking sounds seem, fairly often, creepy.

Head & Shoulders. Heading C.U.'s drama department is zestful, 39-year-old Father Gilbert Vincent Hartke, who shouldered the experiment nine years ago. He started off trying to raise $100,000 for productions, wound up with $200. There were some close shaves. Once Robert Speaight guest-acted for four performances in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Then C.U. staged a fifth performance--to raise enough money to pay him.

It was the musical about Cohan, in 1939, that put C.U. on the map. Playwright Walter Kerr, then & now a member of C.U.'s drama department, got the idea when he found a sheaf of Cohan songs in an old trunk. Hollywood had had the idea before him, but in spite of waving $100,000 checks at Cohan, had got nowhere. Cohan let C.U. dramatize his life for nothing.

Today C.U. offers five productions a season, for three weeks each. From a box-office standpoint, they could easily run much longer. But if they did, Father Hartke remarks, the student-actors' grades would take some awful nosedives. Even as it is, they almost always drop. But the stagecraft holds up.

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