Magic

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.

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 ini the process a great deal of the basic hilarity of the play came through that might not have showqn in a more self-conscious production...I honestly haven’t had half so much fun in a long time...

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