Flicking through American Theatre magazine, one’s eye is assaulted with a glossy panoply of advertisements for various theatre degrees. One could mistake them for Vogue fashion spreads: here’s a gorgeous woman in a skimpy dress standing over a man in military uniform in stunning blue purple light, heralding degrees in “Acting, Directing, Stage Management, Design, and Playwriting.” Flip a few more pages to see a couple in an embrace, lips almost grazing as in a Calvin Klein ad, with bold text flaunting an MFA in Design or Acting. These ads cry: “Come create with us,” “Creativity lives here,” “Think wide open,” “Play your part! Make the magic happen,” “Find yourself.”
The emptiness of these slogans seems to demean the diversity and richness of art, but more and more students see university training for a career in the theatre as a necessity. As the next wave of graduates don cap and gown, and emerge onto the increasingly competitive theatre scene, it’s important to ask, how is learning factored into this new business of show business?
In the past 40 years, since the advent of the undergraduate acting degree, there has been a proliferation of MFA and BFA programs specializing in all facets of theatre, from Arts Management, Playwriting, Directing and Acting to Design and Stage Management. There are over 30 graduate directing programs in the country alone.
Liz Diamond, a director herself and chair of directing at the Yale University School of Drama, noted, during a panel of directors sponsored by the Theatre Communications Group (TCG), “You could probably draw a direct line between the gradual withdrawal of government support for the arts and the proliferation of graduate training programs.” William Esper, an actor and professor at Rutgers University, writes in Backstage that the “decentralization of American theatre” has caused the explosion of theatre programs — as regional theatres (such as the Guthrie in Minneapolis) opened, regional universities began to create academic training programs to address the demands of a growing theatre community.
Aristotle once said, “What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.” Herein lies the conundrum of studying for the theatre, a profession that was formerly all about learning by doing — treading the boards, sweeping the stage after rehearsal was over, drumming up donations and ticket sales on the street corner.
Are all these university programs divorced from the actual world of theatre, with its pitfalls, scarcity of jobs, and real-life negotiations? “It depends on the program,” according to Michael Rau, an MFA directing student at Columbia, who says that the connection to the real world remains constant in the courses he is taking because “all of my professors are working professionals.” And indeed, mentoring by those in the industry seems to be essential to the best learning experiences in these programs, which set themselves up as practical models with internships, attachments, and a constant and rigorous schedule of productions for students to cut their teeth on.
One benefit of these programs is that this is all achieved within an incredibly condensed timeframe — “I’ve worked on nearly half the classical canon in two years,” says Rau. Prolific set and costume designer Clint Ramos, who holds an MFA in Design from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, concurs. “I learned a lot. I had professors who were teaching and who were working at the same time” — but he also says the question still remains: “How do you teach art?”
Also problematic is the idea that a degree is the endpoint to learning. Ruben Polendo, a director and writer who graduated with an MFA from UCLA, and who teaches at NYU, feels that artists mistakenly view MFA programs as a place that grants a “magic key that leads to something.” This key could also be described as access to instant employment, or to the sense of having arrived. Indeed, according to the College Art Association guidelines, an MFA is “accepted as an indication that the recipient has reached the end of the formal aspects of his/her education in the making of art.” But, says Polendo, “You see these students go through huge disappointments when they leave.” Rather than seeing a degree as a metaphorical “open sesame” to a career in the arts, he believes that the most “most successful encounters with students in these programs is to train,” — i.e., it’s the journey, not the destination, that is important.
Nonetheless, speaking to various artists, one of the unanimously voted benefits of formal study is the entree to a community and the great contacts it provides, thus instilling the first and final lesson of a theatre degree: the importance of networking. Actors jokingly refer to the “mafia” that is spawned from each university, where the graduates know and help their own. Actor and Julliard BFA graduate Patch Darragh has a positive take on this schmoozing process: “It’s so much about the community — in any business, but particularly in our business. It’s very much a part of what we do, meeting people and networking.” Unfortunately, Darragh points out, “For a lot of people, getting in was secondary to the name Julliard being on their resume.”
And in this increasingly competitive world, an MFA or BFA from a prestigious “name” program can mean more for prospective students than the perceived challenge of learning. As Aubrey Snowden, a director considering going for an MFA, points out: “The question now is not: What do you know? But, who do you know and where did you go to school?”
