38                                   Erik Barnouw

Near the end of the Broad\\ay rim my wife and I went to see
The Visit. 1 had not seen the Lunts for some years. Afterwards we
went to the stage doot and I sent in my card, without any idea of
what to expect. Almost at once, word came that we were to be
admitted. As we went in, both Lunts came bursting from their
dressing rooms and greeted us as if we were old friends. It seemed
astonishing, as out relationship had always been so formal: the
famous couple and the young instructor, Mr. Lunt, Miss Font¬
anne, iVlr. Barnouw. But we chatted gaily, and reminisced. Then
Lunt made an extraordinary statement. He said something along
this line: "You know, that thing \-ou did for us. The Great Ad¬
venture—we listen to tiiat now and then, in AA'isconsin. We have a
recording of it. The theatre is a very strange business. You work
in it for half a century, and you have nothing to show for it. Ob,
we have clippings, and stills, and posters, things like that. But that
recording, that gives us an idea of what we were like. I'm going to
have an LP made of it."

Today gteat performances can be preserved via magnetic tape
or numerous other processes, but the career of the Lunts belonged
largely to an earlier era when performances indeed x'anished into
thin air. I don't know if Lunt had an LP made from his record¬
ing; I hope so. It was an off-the-air acetate recording, very perish¬
able, on sixteen-inch discs, now obsolete. I bad such a recording
too, and deposited it for preservation in the National Archives.