In 1921, Theatre Intime moved into Murray-Dodge under the leadership of Louis Laflin '24 and became a ``legitimate'' campus organization. The emphasis at first was on serious and/or original plays. (Some 150 student-written plays have been put on. Of ``classical'' authors, Shakespeare leads with 18 different plays produced, followed by Shaw with 16 and O'Neill with 8. )
A fire in June 1933 gutted the interior of Murray Theatre. It was remodeled that summer into roughly its present shape. World War II posed a more serious crisis. After three years in which Murray was given over to Navy lectures, a group of former Triangle and Intime members re-established the organization, reaching heights in 1948 with a memorable production of ``Richard II.'' Their momentum carried over into the formation of the summer University Players. This was nothing new, for some of Intime's leading spirits had helped found the original University Players at Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1928. A third outcropping of talent in 1968 brought to life ``Summer Intime,'' which at this writing is still going strong.
Some Intime ``stars'' who have sparkled in professional theatre are Bretaigne Windust and Erik Barnouw '29; Joshua Logan, Norris Houghton, and Myron McCormick '31; Robert Chapman '41; Philip Minor '50; Charles Schultz, Hugh Hardy and Daniel Seltzer '54; Clark Gesner '60. Among Intime's ``memorable'' productions were Tolstoy's ``Tsar Fyodor Ivanovitch'' (1929); Toller's ``Man and the Masses'' (played in the new McCarter Theatre in 1931); ``Time of Their Lives'' (a play about Princeton by Robert Nail '33); ``The Great God Brown'' (1936), which earned a telegram of congratulation from Eugene O'Neill; and Giraudoux' ``The Trojan War Will Not Take Place'' in the early 1950s. For over half a century Intime has steered a generally successful course between the demands of the box office and the desire to do seldom-produced plays.
Herbert McAneny