Forty minutes into a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Yo-Yo Ma ’76 at a Harvard arts event, a fire alarm went off in Sanders Theatre, sending the comedian, the celebrated cellist, and a sold-out crowd outside. A group of about 50 protesters from the University’s graduate student union awaited them.
Thursday’s event, “Arts for Life’s Sake,” was the latest installment of the Office of the Arts’ (OFA) “Learning from Performers” series, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. No cause was identified for the alarm, but the event, billed at 90 minutes, did not resume.
“I’m so grateful to all the students and staff who spent an enormous amount of time and energy preparing for such a special evening and am profoundly sorry that it ended in such a disappointing way,” OFA director Fiona Coffey said in an emailed statement.
Members of the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW), who are currently on strike at the University, held a picket line in front of the theater before and during the event, beating drums and holding signs. Chants and air horns could be heard inside. Outside, after the event had ended, the crowd watched the protesters, who held signs saying, “AI can’t replace me,” “Protect noncitizen workers,” and “Teachers, researchers for a fair contract,” and chanted slogans like “1-2-3-4, Harvard pay your workers more.”
Evan Lemire, the vice president of Harvard’s Graduate Student Union, told Harvard Magazine that the union had previously planned to picket the event, and that the evacuation was a coincidence.
“Harvard is an institution that holds prestigious events with prestigious speakers. That prestige is built on the labor of graduate student workers,” he said. “We were here to be loud, and to ask Yo-Yo Ma and Stephen Colbert not to cross our picket line.”
“We are just as surprised as everybody else what happened with the event; we don’t know about the fire alarm,” he added.
The union had previously appealed to Colbert and Ma to cancel their planned appearance in solidarity. In an Instagram reel posted late Wednesday night, graduate students noted Colbert’s membership in the Writer’s Guild of America, and his presence on the picket line during that union’s 2023 strike.
Before the evacuation, Colbert and Ma, who have been friends and collaborators for years, began the conversation by fielding questions from Harvard students. Colbert, who ended his 11-year run as host of CBS’ The Late Show this past spring, talked about his latest project—co-writing a new Lord of the Rings movie—and the commonalities with writing for a topical, daily TV show.
“You’re not really doing trenchant analysis,” he said of both projects. On TV, “I was mostly there to make a connection with an audience,” he said. “Writing, and scene work, is the same thing. You’re writing about the relationship between people, between the characters. What do they want from each other? Can they achieve it or not? What is the engine of desire that is driving them? In very simple ways, that is what writing a monologue is like. I want to connect with you.”
Ma, a musical prodigy who chose to go to Harvard as an undergraduate to pursue a liberal arts education rather than attend a conservatory, talked about music and art—professionally done or not—as the connective tissue that makes for a rich, satisfying life.
“To continue to participate in music, it’s not about being a professional,” he told the students in the audience who had musical backgrounds but had come to Harvard to study something else. “It’s about having a way of expressing your inner life and your inner voice. Because no two people can play the same notes in the same way.”
Ma, who attended Harvard College in the 1970s, has a unique connection to the “Learning From Performers” series, which was started 50 years ago by Willams Professor of Urban Planning and Design Jerold Kayden as an undergraduate. As a student, Ma played in a master class given by famed cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, among the first-ever events in the series. Thursday’s event kicked off with a grainy, black and white clip of Ma in a turtleneck playing for Rostropovich, the student’s floppy hair moving in time with the instrument that would make him a household name.
