Baker v. Baylor

In his 28 years at Baylor University. Drama Professor Paul Baker turned the Texas Baptist school into a renowned center of experimental theater. The Waco wizard's 1953 Othello split the tortured Moor into three separate characters; later he got Actor Burgess Meredith to be anchor prince in a three-faceted Hamlet. To train graduate students, in 1959 he opened a stunning repertory theater in Dallas, the only theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In baffled admiration, the late Charles Laughton once called Baker "crude, irritating, arrogant, nuts and a genius."

But Baptist-founded Baylor is going to lose Baker, even if he is its main claim to academic fame. Man and school have fallen out in a dispute that started in December, when Baker's T 70-seat Baylor Theater staged Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. To one performance came some church-sponsored teen-age girls. Grownups accompanying them were shocked at O'Neill's dialogue--no four-letter words, but a drizzle of expletives such as "goddam whore!" When they protested, Baylor's President Abner McCall ordered Baker to delete the profanity as "not in good taste for a church-related university."

Baker had cut profanity from earlier plays, but this time he refused; for one thing, O'Neill's widow, in authorizing the production, had stipulated that no cuts be made. McCall closed the play and 190 Baptist ministers all over Texas gave him a rousing vote of support. Baker stewed for a couple of months, and then resigned as of the school year's end. "We didn't know what we would be faced with once this kind of censorship set in," he explained. With him went not only his wife, who has taught math at Baylor for 24 years, but also all eleven members of his drama department.

But Baker is not out of a job. San Antonio's aggressive Trinity University, a Presbyterian school, has delightedly hired Alumnus Baker ('33) as head of its speech and drama department as of next fall. (He continues as director of the Dallas Theater, which is independent of Baylor.) Last week Trinity also took on five of his Baylor colleagues, plans to give Baker a new-drama building and campus theater. The Baptists still are not sorry. As one minister explained it, college and professional theater are two different things, and of late "the plays at Baylor have been approaching the professional level."

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