Any institution whose actors have included the likes of Ben Franklin, Noam Chomsky, Ezra Pound, Leon Higginbotham, Zane Grey, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, William Carlos Williams, Alan Kors, Thomas Evans, Martin Seligman, and Robert Strausz-Hupé—to name just a few—has the potential for pretty amazing theater. The lives and times of these and other outsized characters are explored in this rich collection of essays, which first appeared in The Pennsylvania Gazette, the University of Pennsylvania’s alumni magazine.