For most of us, all that remains from an evening at the theater, or the ballet, is a program and a ticket stub. The three-dimensional enactment can never be repeated in the same way, and little more than memories are left to mark each unique performance. Fortunately for theater historians, and for stagestruck fans wishing to conjure up theatrical life from the past, tangible artifacts of the productions have been saved by persistent collectors who recognized the value of old papers and faded photographs.

Housed in Pusey Library in Harvard Yard, the Harvard Theatre Collection is celebrating its 100th birthday as the oldest American collection of its kind with an exhibit entitled “One Hundred Years, One Hundred Collections” selected from its riches of backstage ephemera. Curated by Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, who has been assisted by present and former HTC staff members, the display has been pulled from millions of items in the collection’s stacks. They range from the February 3, 1794, opening-night program of the first theater built in Boston to a script of Macbeth annotated with notes and drawings by early-20th-century designer Edward Gordon Craig to letters written by Tennessee Williams to his grandparents when he was an Alpha Tau Omega pledge at the University of Missouri.

The name of this noncirculating collection, a division of Houghton Library, Harvard’s rare-book repository, is a misnomer. The HTC includes an enormous amount of material from the theater, but there are also significant masses of photographs, programs, scene designs, and other relics from the worlds of dance, opera, circus, magic, music, musical theater, fairground entertainments, puppet shows, minstrelsy, toy theater, performance art, and management of all the above. The geography and time periods cover countries around the globe from the 16th century onward.

A fair question to ask would be how Harvard comes by a theatrical library when the university neither offers an undergraduate drama major nor allows the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training of the American Repertory Theatre to grant Harvard degrees to its graduates. Just chalk it up to human inconsistency and the circuitous paths of institutional history.

The HTC began in 1901, when a group of former students determined to honor the memory of Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard College and an expert on 18th-century British actor David Garrick, by giving a collection of Garrick engravings to the library. One of those alums was George Pierce Baker, the Harvard professor who led the famed “47 Workshop” playwriting course that listed Eugene O’Neill among its students. Before he defected to Yale, Baker encouraged the establishment of the HTC and secured the first significant collections from several former Harvard students.

Since then, many important donations have followed, both from Harvard alumni and from those attracted by Harvard’s reputation and longevity. Former student Ernest Lewis Gay, a distant relative of John Gay, left an important collection of material from productions of the English playwright’s most important work, The Beggar’s Opera. Melvin R. Seiden, class of 1952, continues to add to his gift of more than 150 original drawings by Al Hirschfeld that the artist has augmented. Archives documenting the Hasty Pudding Club, the American Repertory Theatre, Harvard student productions, and Boston Ballet grow at the end of each new season. When Tennessee Williams, who had no Harvard connection, died, his will stipulated that a large portion of his papers come to the HTC. George Balanchine’s personal assistant gave the contents of his apartment at his death, even though the archive of New York City Ballet, which Balanchine founded with Harvard alum Lincoln Kirstein, remains in New York.

To wander among the remarkable images in the cases and on the walls of the exhibit is to dream of personalities long gone. Leon Collins, the beloved local tap dancer, is caught in motion on stage by a photograph; it’s accompanied by a pair of his metal taps. Scene designer Eugene Berman brushed in a dancing figure over the handwriting in his letter to composer Igor Stravinsky. Even if you allow plenty of time for a visit, there’s no way to choose a favorite thing to covet for your own.

“One Hundred Years, One Hundred Collections” is on display at the Harvard Theatre Collection Reading Rooms in Pusey Library and the Exhibition Rooms of the Houghton Library, Harvard Yard, through July 27. Viewing hours are from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free and open to the public.

Issue Date: June 7-14, 2001