Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/88

 64 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA Ye Liberty Theatre is the Oakland home of good- class plays and concerts. To Idora Park one goes for frivolous diversions. The new Municipal Au- ditorium on Lake Merritt has seats for 13,000. The Greek Theatre of the University of Califor- nia at Berkeley is built in a natural amphitheatre at the foot of a mountain east of the campus, after the plan of the one at Epidauros in Greece. It was dedicated in 1903, the initial per- formance being The Birds, played by University students in the language of Aristophanes, the play- wright. To this stage against the hill-side came Bern- hardt when she learned that the well-loved and adoring city was in ashes her people in mourn- ing. " They need me," she cried. " They must not sit grieving. I will go to them. I will play as never I have played, to distract them from their calamities." And a few days after the unforget- able April eighteenth she came from across the continent and gave before an audience of 8000 many of them homeless and fortuneless an inter- pretation of PTiedre of which only such a woman at such a moment was capable. Many great ones have since acted and sung on the Berkeley logeion, but Bernhardt was the first one of so excellent a fame to tread its sky-lit stage. On every pleasant Sunday between August 15th and December 1st, and March 1st and May 15th