Wolfe in Waco

Talking sleepily, the students file in. The room fills; one boy jumps to a stage, calls out, "Let's go." Stiffly at first, the class waggles fingers, wrists, arms and spines in a ragged ballet of calisthenics, then switches to vocal knee-bends: OHO, OHO; AHA, AHA; ZZZZHH, ZZZZHH ; UMPAH, UMPAH; OOOOH, OOOOH. The personage in whose honor the morning rites are performed is abrupt, autocratic, rumpled Professor Paul Baker, 47, head of Baylor University's department of dramatics. In the judgment of Actor Charles Laughton, an old friend, Baker is "crude, arrogant, irritating, nuts and a genius." He is also one of the most effective college teachers in the country.

The course that begins with the arm waving ("It gets the blood circulating; there's no point in my talking to a lot of dead brains") is called Drama 106. But Paul Baker's object is to spade up whatever creative ability a student has. By sweet reasonableness or sour harangue, he prods course-takers to write stories, paint pictures and compose music. False notes and failed paintings are unimportant in this basic course, which is required for Baylor undergraduates; all Baker wants students to do is "get acquainted with their own minds--which, incidentally, very few people do during a lifetime." The drill team quality of the calisthenics is deceptive. Says a colleague: "His respect for the individual mind is infinite. He has the uncanny ability to see some talent in just about every student, and he will do almost anything to develop it."

Anchor Prince. Baylor's furious fountainhead of theater is burningly scornful of academic mediocrity, preaches that "great teaching lies just short of prophecy." His own contribution to anticipating the future has been to establish at the Baptist school in Waco, Texas one of the most fertile experimental theaters in the U.S. In 1953 he startled Shakespeareans with an Othello that split the Moor into three abstractly made-up characters who represented separate aspects of the tormented hero's character. Three years later he persuaded Actor Burgess Meredith to quit his role as Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon, be anchor prince in a four-hero Hamlet. Last week Baker stood by as 115 student actors presented his headiest experiment: a complex, three-hour dramatization of Thomas Wolfe's sprawling novel. Of Time and the River.

Paul Baker began acting in plays while he was a schoolboy in Waxahachie, Texas, went on to study drama at the town's Trinity University. In 1933 he studied at Yale under the university's late famed Drama Professor George Pierce Baker (no kin). Next year he had set up a shop in a onetime chapel at Baylor, produced an experimental play. All the while he inveighed against the restrictions of conventional theaters--theaters with "one box for the actor and another box for the audience and that's all." The first thing he decided to do, Baker recalled last week, "was to break out of the old box."

Swivel Action. The theater he persuaded a dubious Baylor administration in 1941 to build had 170 seats and five stages--main decks to the left and right of the audience and dead ahead, with two smaller stages rounding out the corners between the main areas. The audience was so nearly surrounded by Baker's theater-in-the-horseshoe that it needed--and got --swivel chairs to follow the action.

The swiveling required by Baker's latest production would exhaust a nautch dancer. Six months ago, with the help of a squad of drama students, Baker set about extracting playable scenes from the river of words in the 912-page Wolfe novel. In the final version, put together by Playwriting Professor Gene McKinney, there are 40 episodes strung through three acts. Characters chat back and forth between the left and right main stages, and an episode that begins squarely north of an onlooker's nose will fade out, be picked up southwest of his left ear. Backdrops are the misty, indistinct shapes of Catawba, Boston, London or Paris, projected from colored slides.

Chanting Chorus. Much of the novel is Wolfe's continent-swallowing description of racing trains and the swarm of cities. Says Baker: "Nobody speaks these parts. But you can't throw them out, or you lose the essential statement the book offers--the sight, smell, touch, feel and sound of a place." To speak Wolfe's impassioned prose poems, Baker invented a chanting chorus of five actors, representing the five senses, and added figures representing Time and Change. Then he added another visual dimension: short cinema sequences shot by LIFE Photographer Eliot Elisofon. When youthful hero Eugene Gant is brooding, for instance, on the death of his father, the chorus tells of what touches Gene most--the powerful stonecutter's hands of the elder Gant. On a gauze curtain, as the recitation progresses, flashes a film showing old Gant's hands at work carving a tombstone.

As Meredith points out, Baker is not an actor's director--his complex presentations make the player subordinate to the play. Senior Ron Wilcox, who plays Gene, and Graduate Student Dugald MacArthur, who is Gene's friend Starwick, do not dominate the play as they would in a conventional production. While Baker is directing, says one student actor, "he has an almost abnormal sensitivity to human beings. At times he's almost childlike with anger. But he has a very deep and real concern for his students."

How successful is the alchemist's amalgam of Wolfe, Time, the River and Baker? Reported TIME Correspondent Tom Martin from Waco after opening night: "Of Time and the River was a first-rate performance. The acting is good, but it is in the total execution--lighting, sets, rhythm, movement, staging--that the Wolfe epic comes alive."

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