Shakespeare on Wheels

When Margaret Webster was three years old, her mother, the late Dame May Whitty, used to read her to sleep with Shakespeare. Those words have been ringing in Miss Webster's ears ever since.

This week the U.S. theater's most successful director of Shakespeare's works (sample feat: she made a hit of the Maurice Evans Hamlet in the uncut version, running 4 1/2 hours) is launching her most ambitious Shakespearean venture. She is sending out a motorized touring company to play Shakespeare on a scale--and with financial assurance--unprecedented by any other troupe of Broadway caliber.

The Webster company, traveling in a bus, a truck and a station wagon, will barnstorm 87 cultural outposts--mostly colleges--on a six-month tour of 33 states and three Canadian provinces. Besides half a dozen technicians, the company consists of 21 players. The plays this season will be Hamlet and Macbeth.

What makes the picture even prettier, for Miss Webster, is that Impresario Sol Hurok is in it. He has booked the troupe on the same basis as the touring Met or a Marian Anderson recital, has guaranteed minimum gross receipts all along the way. The show will cost the playgoer 60-c- to $3.60, depending on the local sponsor; in some cases, admission will be free, with a school fund footing the bill.

Miss Webster has fondled the idea of this touring company for years. She thinks it high time to rescue her favorite playwright from the productions with which collegians and road shows have too often slandered him.

The initial investment ($40,000) promises many a dividend. Crowed a press-agent last week: "There are nearly 2,000 colleges in the country, and most of 'em don't even know yet they can get Margaret Shakesp-- godammit, I keep calling her Shakespeare!"

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