'On 12 May 1960, writes John Clark, 'Robert Quentin's remarkable production of Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures put NIDA on the theatrical map'. It was, indeed, NIDA's first public performance - the commonly cited Our Town was performed in-house in 1959, and the well-regarded repertory season of Hay Fever and Love's Labour's Lost made up the first graduation shows in October 1960, Despite the importance that Clark ascribes to it in his 2003 history of NIDA (quoted above), The Green Pastures is conspicuously absent from almost all institutional histories, and even for Clark it merits only this one sentence.' (Abstract introduction)