For some twelve years also a feature of the Commencement program has been the annual play given by the senior girls, usually on Tuesday evening of Commencement Week. The list of plays presented includes, _She Stoops to Conquer_, (1905); _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, (1906); _Cranford_, (1908); Euripides' _Alcestis_, (1912), in which the classical entrance to Alumni Memorial Hall was used most effectively; _Prunella_, (1914); _The Piper_, (1916); and in 1919, Percy McKaye's _A Thousand Years Ago_. Within recent years, "Masques," an organization of University women, has given unusually artistic performances of Pinero's _The Amazons_, (1918), and Barrie's _Quality Street_, (1919). The Department of Oratory has also interested itself in the drama and is responsible for several well-considered presentations of such plays as Galsworthy's _Silver Box_; Kennedy's _The Servant in the House_, (1916); Ibsen's _Pillars of Society_, (1917); and Masefield's _Tragedy of Nan_, (1918).
Contemporary interest in pageantry has likewise not been without its effect in the University, as was shown by a praiseworthy though perhaps over-ambitious pageant, _Joan of Arc_, given under the auspices of the Woman's League on Ferry Field in 1914, and a less elaborate but more effective celebration of the Shakespeare Centenary two years later, entitled _The Queen's Progress_, given in Hill Auditorium. The Cosmopolitan Club, composed of the foreign students, has also taken advantage of the same spacious stage to give two elaborate entertainments in 1916 and 1917, an _All-Nation Review_, and _The Magic Carpet_.
This brief outline of student dramatic efforts in recent years reveals a multiplicity of interested organizations as well as a wide variety of offerings. Necessarily this has given rise to rivalries and sometimes inadequate preparation, though it has stimulated a vital and intelligent interest in the drama as an actual form of artistic expression. One of the greatest needs these student actors and their Faculty directors experience, is a university theater which will, in effect, be an actual dramatic workshop. These conditions have led to the recent organization of a University Dramatic Society, composed largely of members of the Faculty and a few students, whose aim is to correlate the work of the various dramatic organizations of the University and to arouse interest in the project for a Campus Theater. As a producing organization it made its bow in December, 1919, when, with the co-operation of the Michigan Union, it produced a most finished performance of Reginald DeKoven's operetta, _Red Feather_.