The image has triggered many elegiac comments about the times – maybe it’s partly because the rehearsing students are seen in 1960s hairstyles and fashions, not Greek costumes; and to be sure, the foggy scene does make it seem dreamy, appearing out of distant memories, like an ancient myth.
After some sleuthing, I discovered brief remarks, in a Theater Times article, by the very teacher who’s standing in the scene with clasped hands, Professor Robert Cohen, who retired from UCI in 2015:
“This was the 1960s,” Cohen recalls, “which was the heyday of experimental theater, and my Oedipus was intended as a revolutionary production. […] Ansel Adams shot for about three hours. It was a foggy day, which I regretted but he didn’t. He was enthusiastic about the work we were doing, asked tons of questions, delighted in our Greek chanting and improvised dancing. He had a large format camera [more likely Hasselblad, as posters above suggest] and shot sparingly, but each of the images that I eventually saw was superb. He had no assistant, and I don’t recall that he used any light reflectors or other paraphernalia now common on such shoots. It also turned out that he was a theater buff, very active in his community theater in Carmel, where he lived at the time, and extremely keen on avant-garde theater, which is how we classed ourselves. So, we became friends in the process.”
A cultural time and place whose flaws and aspirations are long-vanished, but not forgotten.
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