Harvard's Secret Court to Eliminate "Unnatural Acts"

   

Cyril Wilcox, a young man from the class of 1922 on the brink of being kicked out of Harvard, breaks out in hives right before exams. He withdraws from Harvard due to illness, goes home to Fall River Massachusetts and commits suicide by gas in his bedroom.

Probably not an unusual story, right? So, why have two plays been written about it, and why couldn’t I wait to get home to read the original Crimson article from which the plays were based.

Well, here is where the story gets a bit more interesting. Before Cyril’s commits suicide, he comes out to his straight-laced older brother, who later finds two letters from Cyril’s classmates talking about an underground gay scene at Harvard. Pissed off, Cyril’s brother tracks down the man that Cyril had a homosexual relationship with in Boston and beats out the names of others from him. Cyril’s brother then confronts Harvard. Harvard in turn forms a five man secret court to identify other homosexuals and immediately expunges them from the university and Cambridge. Fourteen men are found guilty by the court. Shortly thereafter, another man commits suicide (this time by poison). Ten years later, another commits suicide by gas and another dies in single car crash. Some eighty years later, Harvard apologizes.  

The secret court files remained sealed until the story were revealed in early 2000s. Now, this story has been dramatized in two plays – Unnatural Acts and Veritas. Unnatural Acts is currently playing at the Classic Stage Company and a reading of Stan Richardson’s Veritas, a standout from the International Fringe Festival, was held at the Laurie Beechman Theatre last week. 

This story is so interesting that either play is worth seeing. However, Unnatural Acts does a far superior job at dramatizing the events and introducing us to and humanizing the young men who were kicked out of Harvard for homosexual acts in the prohibition era 1920s.

While discussing Veritas at a tight table of men and women at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, a gentleman sporting a Yale baseball cap asked what were the themes in Unnatural Acts (which I recommended that he see as soon as possible). I am not sure that you need themes when portraying true abhorrent events. 

But here is a stab at a few themes.

• Homophobia.
• The ugly parts of our nation’s history. Also check out The Scottsboro Boys incident, which takes place only 10 years after the Harvard trials and shortly before two of the Harvard men most likely took their lives. By the way, the boys were the 9 black teenagers falsely accused and imprisoned for gang raping 2 white girls on a freight train.
• How fear and self loathing makes you rat out your friends and even take your life.