> ERWIN:Could you perhaps tell about bringing back A Broader View with its sequel, the new sequel? Because I think that’s very interesting. CLARK:Well, that was fun to do. The play readers group in 1987 decided to renew the play-reading party, which was one of the great traditions of the fifties and early sixties. And Bob Oliver asked me if I’d dust of f A Broader View. Well, I looked at it and I thought of updating it. But the shift in the twenty years had been so much that updating was impossible; it’s just a period piece or nothing. So we had to do it unchanged. And then I felt honor bound to write a sequel to it, which is called Troll’s Progress. The theme of it is that the essential Caltech never changes. It’s firmly founded on terror. [Laughter] And no froufrou can disguise that fact. And people who play together pray together, twitch together, stay together. Anyway, that theme allowed for a number of wisecracks, and I like to think the dialogue is rather funny. The kids who did it were tremendous. The undergraduates, of course, we know are stars.
> ERWIN:What was the origin of the troll?
> CLARK:Well, that goes back into Caltech history. And it’s probably Caltech’s only contribution to American culture. [Laughter] If you have to ask the meaning of the word, you’ll never understand what it means. But to put you sort of in the framework—that’s discussed, incidentally, in the dialogue of Beautiful Beckman there’s a segment on that. But a troll is a very high-voltage nerd. It used to be he lived “under DuBridge.” The kid that never sees the light of day, really, he’s so busy with his books. There are apprentice trolls at other schools, but ours are an order of magnitude more trollish. People who are compulsive and pathological students are much more so here. > ERWIN:Somewhere you referred to this as a “random troll.”
> CLARK:Oh, that’s the worst thing you can be called. You see, it means you’re just like a number; you have no personality. You might as well be a computer—nothing to distinguish. Oh, man, when you’re a random troll, you’re beyond the pale. [Laughter]
> ERWIN:In A Broader View, you called the Caltech undergrad “intellectually brilliant, emotionally immature, culturally deprived, and socially gauche.” And then, immediately afterward, I believe you gave the Caltech professor the identical description. That brings us to the point of what the shows were for underneath it all.
Source: http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/95/1/OH_Clark_K.pdf