Noble Experiment

For the past two months, U.S. televiewers have been getting a drama diet with a loftier intellectual content than that of Broadway. The high-vitamin source is Masterpiece Playhouse (Sun. 9 p.m., NBC-TV), which began its experimental run with Ibsen's suicidal Hedda Gabler and ends it this month with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. This week, for its sixth performance, Masterpiece staged a fast-paced, absorbing performance of Shakespeare's Othello.

Under the searching eye of the television camera, and compressed into an hour's playing time, the TV Othello became a taut, single-minded study of the crack-up of the tormented Moor (played by Britain's Torin Thatcher) under the evil persistence of lago (Alfred Ryder). Producer Fred Coe managed to fill, but not clutter, the TV screen with a swirl of movement, created a sense of space by letting his cameras probe down colonnaded halls and into drapery-hung apartments.

NBC was persuaded to set up the heavy-budget Masterpiece Playhouse ($10,000 a show) by Amherst College's scholarly Curtis Canfield, who hopes the series will prove to televiewers that "there's something pretty good about the classics, in spite of the fact they're spoiled for us at school." A longtime student of the drama himself, Canfield, 47, has been teaching at Amherst since he graduated there 25 years ago. Head of the college drama department and director of the Masquers (who last year presented Julius Caesar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington--TIME, April 11, 1949), Canfield has been spending his sabbatical as a full-time NBC producer, will return to Amherst this fall.

So far he is not sure just how his noble experiment is working out. "The letters we've had so far are from obviously nice people," says Canfield, "but they all seem to live in the New York suburbs. We haven't had much response from places like Louisville."

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