Yul Brynner, the King in the '50s Broadway hit musical "The King and I," had a stock response to his uppity schoolteacher's ideas for progress in Siam: "Is a puzzlement."

After a lifetime of being transported -- mostly positively -- by performances in Duke University's Page Auditorium, where the American Dance Festival ends its 30th season in Durham tonight, I'm left with puzzlement of another sort: "How can this be?"

Page Auditorium is Duke's major marketplace for performance art and the exchange of ideas. It is also a dump.

The angle of the floor in the orchestra is so flat that people must bob and weave for a view of the stage. Cramped seats in the balcony induce paralysis for anyone approaching six feet tall. On stage, dancers fear crashing into a backdrop if they go full out. The basement dressing rooms are Depression-era.

Women visiting the ladies' room at intermission are thoughtfully provided seven toilets in a building seating 1,232. They can wait 10 minutes in a line that snakes out of the door into the orchestra's sardine-can holding space.

The entrance "foyer" from the Chapel lawn? It's so spacious the American Dance Festival has taken to dispensing tickets outside on the lawn. Most people navigate the very steep stairs from the "foyer" downstairs to the orchestra without pitching forward. Most of them.

As for the poor souls permitted to find their seats in the balcony after a show starts, I offer this warning: The steps from the upper balcony onto the walkway behind the mezzanine jut into the walkway a full step and one half. They aren't lighted. Good luck. Wear your crash helmet.

So, "How could this be?"

We are talking about Duke University, which consistently ranks among the nation's top universities and trumpets those rankings. Millions have gone into constructing a Valhalla to scientific research in the woods off Science Drive behind the Chapel. The Medical Center is always throwing something new up in the air.

Campus spiritual life -- the real spiritual life -- just got another bounce of the basketball with the completion of the $15.2 million Michael W. Krzyzewski Center. Several years earlier the $20 million Goh Football Complex popped up beside Wallace Wade Stadium. An additional $7 million has been pumped into athletics, and now the new athletic director is talking about wholesale renovations at Wallace Wade. (And they don't even play football at Duke yet.)

Again. "How could this be?"

I got on the horn and began to swing through Duke's phone tree. Give Duke credit for accountability. I landed at the top of the dog pile talking with Provost Peter Lang.

"We are expecting to do substantial upgrades in the next couple of years. I don't have all the details," Lang said. He was aware of the problems. There are studies and various configurations of upgrade from spending millions to many millions.

But in the end, as befits life atop the bureaucratic birdcage: "We're thinking about it and are definitely getting it lined up. But we can't get it all done at once," he said.

The problems were painfully obvious 30 years ago when the American Dance Festival arrived and ADF Director Charles Reinhart made a point of seating then Duke President Terry Sanford in the balcony so he got a non-blast of the non-air conditioning. The air conditioning was better the next year.

Even I, working for a Greensboro newspaper at the time, picked up on Page's problems and with great insight suggested that the building be bulldozed for a clean start.

Duke's arts community is painfully aware of the longstanding problems, which are now highlighted by the folks in Chapel Hill beefing up their performance hall and schedule. The Durham Center for the Performing Arts opens this fall.

But with the competition for the arts dollar heating up, Page remains its dowdy self.

Ol' Yul played the King 4,616 times and uttered "Is a puzzlement" several times each outing. Multiply that number by 30 years and you might approach the magnitude of the mystery of why Page remains Page.

Truly, "Is a puzzlement."

Or is it that the arts at Duke simply don't have enough traction to make Page respectable?

(David Newton is a Durham native, a Durham resident and a frequent contributor to The Durham News.)