1963 MODERN DRAMA CONFERENCE The fifth Modern Drama Conference, Modern Language Association of America Conference #19, was held on December 28, 1963. Professor Stanley Weintraub of Pennsylvania State University presided and introduced the panelists who spoke on George Bernard Shaw's impact on modern drama. In his paper on Shaw's positive impact, Professor Stephen S. Stanton , University of Michigan, enumerated criteria for determining Shavian influence. A writer has been affected by Shaw when he has borrowed or adapted to his own dramatic purposes one or more of the following: Shaw's faith in the betterment of man through Creative Evolution and the Life Force, Shaw's methods of character portrayal, Shaw's use of stylized, witty, and intellectualized dialogue, Shaw's mixture of farce and more dignified comic techniques and situations, or Shaw's use of comic inversions in situation, action, etc. Professor Stanton then discussed instances of Shavian influence upon specific plays of modern playwrights-O'Neill, Sherwood, Eliot, and Brecht. The plays of Brecht, for example, reveal the episodic and loose form of Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, and the later plays. In the increasing emphasis of these later Shaw plays upon a pessimistic world-view, upon social .chaos at the expense of character development, and upon the absurdities ofoutworn capitalism, Shaw may have laid the groundwork for some of the fantastic tragicomedies of today's European theater. Professor George E. Wellwarth, Staten Island Community College, asserted that Shaw's influence sharply declined after the production of Saint Joan in 1923, although his reputation remained high. Shaw became an institution and a quasi-respectable pillar of society, and thereby ceased to be an influence. Shaw's dramatic technique, derived from Ibsen and the well-made play of the nineteenth century, had little to offer to the avant-garde. Philosophically and temperamentally, Shaw's kind of play, worked in an optimistic direction by implying that social problems could be solved. Shaw has had little connection with, and nothing to offer to, the anti-intellectualist drama of the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Expressionists, and the "theatre of the absurd." Shaw's influence also declined through the weakness of his followers. Professor Weintraub presided over the lively discussion which followed . If there was any direction in which this discussion worked, it was to suggest that Shaw the playwright is still much alive, whether or not he has immediately influenced his contemporaries or his successors in the drama. FREDERICK F. W. McDOWELL ...