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The nation's oldest dramatic institution will shatter its traditions in 1998 by casting a female to play Lady Pudding-on-Airs in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' one hundred and fiftieth production, Paradise Lost and Found, reported The Harvard Crimson last fall. Could it be? No. The Crimson got it wrong. Lady Pudding-on-Airs, played by a man, is a female character who plays a man who plays a woman, that's all.
The Hasty Pudding Club began in 1795 as a sociable secret society. Its rich history will be exhibited from February 10 through April 17 in Pusey Library at the Harvard Theatre Collection, the official repository of Pudding archives. The collection holds a trove of memorabilia turned over by the club or given by alumni, says curator Frederic W. Wilson, including programs, handbills, reviews, original scores and books of plays, boxes of engaging photographs, and many exuberant original painted posters.
 HARVARD
THEATRE COLLECTION/WIDENER PHOTOGRAPHIC SERVICES |
At first, club members amused themselves not with plays but by staging mock trials. (In 1811 a defendant was condemned "for the detestable practice of punning." Puns, of course, became as much a Pudding trademark as men in drag, with characters named Jemima Fysmoke and Giovanna Dance.) The Pudding's first theatrical was Bombastes Furioso in 1844; it featured the fetching Distaffina. Women are now involved in many aspects of each production, but Anthony Calnek '84, in The Hasty Pudding Theatre: A History of Harvard's Hairy-Chested Heroines, writes that the closest a woman has ever come to appearing on stage was in 1955, when costumer Lucy Barry shrieked from the wings. Each of the 20 men in the cast of Happy
Medium had tried, but none could produce a sufficiently bloodcurdling scream.
Grafton
D. Cushing '85 interpreted the title role in Joan of Arc,
April 1885. Right: Poster proclaiming the first appearance of members
of the class of 1875--in two May 1874 Pudding productions called
The Double-Bedded Room and Don't Reckon Your Chickens,
&c. HARVARD THEATRE COLLECTION