Revival in Washington

For 17 years, Washington's $12 million Folger Shakespeare Library--the world's best--has sat in the shadow of the Library of Congress, attracting sightseers and scholars. Last week its custodians broke the hush of the folios and the quartos by giving Shakespeare a production.

Drama-starved Washingtonians approved; for the past eight months, the Negro-exclusion issue has left the capital without a professional theater (TIME, Aug. 9). Into the library's finely detailed, 270-seat reproduction of a roofless, balcony-ringed Elizabethan playhouse (which had housed many a learned lecture, but never a play), ticket holders crowded for seven sold-out performances of Julius Caesar. Television cameras moved in for an eighth performance.

The Folger's theatrical debut offered a pointed aside on the National Theater's decision last summer to abandon plays and show movies, rather than accept Actors' Equity's ruling that Negroes must not be barred from the audience. Julius Caesar sold tickets to all applicants, had a sprinkling of Negro customers--and not a hint of a fuss.

The Folger's players, who had to use the Folger's boiler room as overflow dressing quarters, were The Masquers of Amherst College, alma mater of the library's late founder, Oil Millionaire Henry Clay Folger. As a London director of 1600 would have it, they performed without sets, in frilly Elizabethan costumes instead of Roman togas. One non-authentic touch: girls were cast in the two feminine roles. The program explained: "We have somehow lost the knack of training juveniles to play female parts."

On an uncovered, two-story stage like Sir Laurence Olivier's version of the Globe in Henry V (but without Olivier's broadly stylized interpretation), The Masquers' performance gave fresh point to Shakespearean conventions demanded by a theater without scenery or a curtain: the numerous exits & entrances, the corpse-bearing processions, the scene-setting dialogue.

Though the play filled every seat at $2.40, the Folger's small capacity left it $1,500 short of expenses. But it was a critical hit in the Washington press and a hit for the new regime (nine months) of Library Director Dr. Louis B. Wright, 50, a go-getter with a passion for enlarging the Folger's usefulness. Said he: "I haven't the foggiest idea of sitting up with a corpse or running a mausoleum."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.