Contrary to popular belief, drama and theater were not natural outgrowths of Freshman Orientation. Though the week is full of fine directing (“In this icebreaker, we’re going to sing!”), and fine acting (“Oh my God, it is so good to meet you!”), theater does exist at Washington University outside of calculated pageantry. Fortunately, its quality is often quite good, and everyone involved in producing, seeing, and assessing it is made immensely happy.

There is always the extraordinarily rare instance, however, when theater can go dreadfully wrong. The most notorious of such moments occurred in 1937 when a young and unknown Wash. U. undergrad wrote a one-act play. The young man was Tennessee Williams and the play, “Me, Vashya,” was so wretched that it placed fourth in a campus playwriting contest. The winning playwright, A.E. Hotchner, went on to become a successful writer and now has a campus playwriting contest and studio theater named after him. Williams, however, did not take losing lightly. He left Washington University in protest and went on to become one of America’s greatest playwrights.

Williams, though, did not stop at simply leaving the school. Adding insult to injury in one of his best-known plays, “The Glass Menagerie,” Williams attempted to immortalize Washington University as a loser. When the protagonist Tom is asked by his mother to save up for a “night school course in accounting at Washington U.” by quitting cigarettes, Tom replies, “I’d rather smoke.”

“Me, Vashya”, meanwhile, was produced for the first time in history two years ago in the theater that bears the name of his defeater, the Hotchner Studio. Reviewed by Laura Villines, it was called “mediocre” at best, with “characters [that] lacked depth and artistry.”

The quality of theater at Washington U. has not subsided since it lost Tennessee Williams in a fury of anger one day in the late 1930′s. Indeed, if anything, his example may have proven to be a great benefit to the university. Just as Shakespeare’s theater was once a great democratizer of art, so theater at Wash. U. has always brought the masses together to revel in drama and music.

From the cavernous Edison Theater, to the on-site performances of some of Wash. U.’s more alternative theater companies like Thyrsus, who have put on plays in bathrooms, classrooms, and tunnels-theater at Wash. U. is the most popular artistic endeavor produced by the University and for the University. While films and music may dominate the lunchtime discourse, only at the theater can that girl in your anthro class be transformed into a wailing and mourning woman in a Greek tragedy. Only in the theater can a group of relatively privileged undergrads by day become proletariats in a Bertolt Brecht play about class struggle by night. Only in the theater, in other words, can Tennessee Williams be mediocre, and an amateur actor great. Who would choose cigarettes over Wash. U., anyway?

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