a poor player

Dunkirk, NY – Over the Labor Day weekend I spent a lot of time doing two things. One was bringing my son back to NIU, where he will spend two weeks preparing for his upcoming semester studying at the Moscow Art Theatre school. The other was arranging with Scott Walters over at Theatre Ideas for a series of parallel postings discussing the state of theatre education. Both of us had talked in each of our blogs about our desire to write about the state of theatre education, but neither of us had gotten around to it. So after trading some emails, we’ve arranged on a very loose structure for these series of posts. Scott has already posted his first entry, so I am following up with my entry on how theatre education has gotten to the point that it has.

Rather than taking an objective historical perspective, though, I thought I would take a more introspective approach and tell my own story within theatre education and try to parallel that with Scott’s historical perspective. I am hoping this will provide readers with both an objective and subjective look at the same issue.

When I began my undergraduate studies in 1970, the theatre program was located in the Department of Communications. This was a pretty traditional arrangement at the time. Many theatre programs did not offer degree programs, and they were often housed within another department, typically English or Communications. If the college produced plays, it was generally done as an extracurricular activity. Most colleges and universities produced “the school play” as something which was the equivalent of being on the debate team or in the French Club. But at least in New York State, the baby boom produced the first dramatic increase in young people attending college. For the SUNY system, Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican governor, began to throw money at the SUNY system for construction projects which would accommodate the children of the WW2 generation. Many of these projects included fine arts centers with brand-spanking new theatres. At SUNY Oswego, my alma mater, the new fine arts complex eventually produced a separation of theatre from Speech Communications to form a new department. This same pattern was followed at many smaller colleges as a parallel to the phenomena that was occurring at the larger institutions.

The philosophy which guided my undergraduate instruction was that of the artist/scholar. This was the predominant philosophy of the time in educational circles, and it ran concurrent with the fledgling regional theatres getting their start around the country. As an undergraduate, nobody specialized in anything. It was just expected that you would become, if not accomplished, at least competent in every aspect of theatre. We competed for “A”s in theatre history as much as we did in acting classes. The grade I was most proud of was the “A” I received in a course called Stage Electronics and Mechanics, which was essentially Stagecraft 2 concentrating in things like soldering, wiring, etc. I was, at that time, the only actor ever to receive an A in that class. The point is, we learned as much about every aspect of theatre that we could, understanding that our mission as artist/scholars was to work to produce a theatre across the country that would have a significant impact on society.

Being a native New Yorker, upon graduation I went back home and began to try my hand in professional theatre. I was determined to find a theatre company that practiced these principles of artist/scholar, but I also began to get a dim awareness that there was an aspect of commercial theatre I knew nothing about. Interestingly enough, theatres such as Circle in the Square and La Mama were both prominent but beginning to fall into disrepute for creating theatre that was too esoteric. After trying for three years and being unsuccessful in trying to find an ensemble that was actually producing theatre for an audience rather that perpetually rehearsing, I discovered the existence of the MFA degree.

I auditioned for and was accepted at New York University. Now, in 1977, NYU had an MFA program which was slightly unusual in that it was not strictly pre-professional as we understand it today, but rather had a streak of performance studies attached to it. But many well-known names were on the faculty at that time and just starting out: Kristin Linklater, Hovey Burgess (circus technique), Omar Shapli (improvisation via Violin Spolin and Paul Sills), Robert MacBeth (artistic director of the New Lafayette Theatre, a prominent theatre in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s) and Richard Schechner. But the program was trying to team up with the Public Theatre, which did not happen while I was there.

But the atmosphere was quite different. No sense of the artist/scholar here. The actor training was based on the “breakdown/build-up” philosophy, where the goal was to psychologically destroy an actor’s sense of self so as to build them up in some sort of ideal image. What that image was I never knew. What I did know was that the atmosphere among students there was extraordinarily tense. The so-called “sophomore slaughter” was in effect at the time, where everyone in the first year knew they might not be invited back for year 2. I ran very much afoul of this mentality, and under very controversial circumstances I was dismissed from the program halfway through my second semester, basically for challenging the philosophy of the program and the authority of the master acting teacher, Peter Kass. Although I did not know it at the time, this was my first inkling that something was wrong with theatre education if you can’t challenge the program as a student and ask questions. I has been taught both in college and in high school that challenging issues so as to better understand them and thus be able to create something new was the norm. NYU was the first educational experience I had where asking questions and challenging professors was an offense worthy of excommunication.

I spent a few years looking at the possibility of giving up theatre altogether and going back to what I had originally gone to college to become: a high school English teacher. But I did have the opportunity to return to Oswego as an adjunct professor, and discovered that college teaching might be a good career move for me. But I also realized that, to pursue that career, I had to return and get that MFA degree, which by now had become the terminal degree for professors in fine arts teaching. I also had the opportunity of moving out to Seattle, and probably could have gotten into the ground floor of theatres such as Seattle Rep or the Intiman. It was the late 70s and the regional theatre as Scott described it was beginning to take off, although not in the direction that everyone expected. I chose the MFA route.

My second attempt at earning the MFA was successful but not without some angst. I was once again reminded that questioning your training in MFA programs was unacceptable, but by now I was old enough to have two realizations. The first was that my training had almost no scholarly content; it was all about the acquisition of skills. I was not being asked to read or think; I was simply being asked to imitate. This was really hard for me, and because of this I actually took a class from the Religious Studies department in the Gnostic Gospels and early Christian texts to fill my need for some sort of intellectual work (my fellow students thought I was nuts). I probably would have gotten thrown out of this program as well had it not been for the existence of my newborn daughter, so it was one of times I also learned to keep my mouth shut. The second was that I was being taught, not by professional theatre practitioners, but by career academics. I did not mind this so much, as I really had nothing against career academics as such and in fact was planning to become one. The most revealing thing about this, however, was when I announced one day that my career goal was to become a professor of theatre and teach acting. I was quickly informed in no uncertain terms that the program I was in was not for the training of teachers, but for the training of professional actors, and that this should be my proper goal. I did notice immediately the hypocrisy of this statement as I looked at my professors and realized they all had MFAs and were teaching in college programs with little professional background, but by then my daughter had taught me to keep my mouth shut. I said nothing more about teaching the rest of my time there until it came down to trying to find my first job, at which point I had to ask for letters of recommendation (which were lukewarm). All this despite the fact that I was the only MFA actor that year to complete my 200+ page thesis project on time and get nominated for an Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant award.

So it’s now 1982, and the BFA/MFA world had been created. My MFA training had been standard pre-professional, with the model of gaining skills in acting, voice and movement, using systems such as Feldenkrais, Linklater, Lessac, et.al. While I had bought into the idea that such training was beneficial in some ways, I had not fully let go of my artist/scholar concept, but as I applied for teaching jobs it became self-evident that the artist/scholar model in education was pretty much dead (if you want to know the state of theatre education today you need only read the employment ads in ArtSearch). Nevertheless, I tried very hard to adhere to that scholar/artist model by continuing to build my professional résumé while pursuing work in academia. I was determined not to become the teacher who “can’t do” so he teaches. I also felt I could still take the artist/scholar approach and work it into the pre-professional system.

It took six years for me to land my current position at SUNY Fredonia, which is an undergraduate BA/BFA program. It was my first contact with the BFA, which began to pop up at the undergraduate level in the mid-1980s. The degree became popular immediately, and as I began my teaching career it took me maybe three years to figure out that the most significant difference that had occurred in the intervening years was student expectations. Totally absent from student thinking was artist/scholar; in its place was pure professional practice. You were expected to teach about “the business,” not about anything that had to do with scholarship beyond a surface level. Specialization was the order of the day, and I experienced actors who spoke with disdain about things technical. All these changes, of course, were in keeping with the changes in the art form itself. Regional theatres, faced with rising costs and cuts in their budgets thanks to the Reagan years (as well as a rising conservative tide politically) retreated to a Broadway commercial format in order to survive. Broadway produced less and less drama and more and more musicals with the onslaught of the Lloyd-Webber spectacle approach. At every level of college education, the expectation that college would prepare you for a job and a successful career permeated every area of study, and theatre was no exception. With their success now determined by enrollment numbers, theatre departments went with the flow and catered to the expectations of their incoming students. By about 1995 it became clear to me that the artist/scholar concept was essentially dead, being kept alive only by dinosaurs like me. Because of this I wrote this article which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April 1997.

So where are we now, and where am I in all this? There is undoubtedly a generation gap growing in theatre between faculty and students. Indeed, this generation gap sometimes makes itself manifest in the theatrosphere (who invented that word?), as I think Scott and I are probably the oldest theatre bloggers out there (and I think I’m older than Scott, so I get the title!), and the only two active theatre professors who blog. When we get into controversy with our younger colleagues, it’s almost invariably due to this gap, and I think due to a latent hostility which I personally find about theatre professors in the professional world of theatre (regardless of how “successful” that theatre professional happens to be. So long as they are out there “doing it” they seem to think that’s more honorable than sitting back in a university and teaching it). For me, it’s gotten to the point that whatever thin connection there ever was between theatre training and the likelihood of succeeding with a career in theatre is so slim as to be effectively non-existent. It seems that, if theatre training is to remain significant in any form, it has to find new paths, new opportunities, and offer students other options besides the pre-professional viewpoint. I doubt there is any other art form in existence which insists that every student be trained in exactly the same manner. If there are maybe 2,000 degree-granting institutions in this country that have theatre programs, you can bet that every program looks almost exactly like every other one with almost little variation. This is what needs to change, and hopefully Scott and I will be throwing some ideas out there for consideration.

Both of us are well aware – and perhaps more aware than most – of the problems facing theatre departments. The major problem, of course, is denial: problems? what problems? There are politics involved, with literally thousands of programs invested in the status quo. There are major insecurities which must be addressed. My journey has been one of experiencing higher education as it went through its historical growth and at almost every turn finding it lacking. But there is so much potential there, because of all the types of theatrical producing opportunities available, we in education have the greatest amount of riches in terms of resources. That we squander those riches by not educating living, breathing, thinking, questioning artists who can stand artistically and intellectually on their own feet with their own ideas and not be merely clones of our pre-determined programs is a crime against the art form. This MUST change. Period. -twl