Acting in the Academy

The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education

Peter Zazzali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317428350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

There are over 150 BFA and MFA acting programs in the US today, nearly all of which claim to prepare students for theatre careers. Peter Zazzali contends that the curricula of these courses represent an ethos that is as outdated as it is limited, given today's shrinking job market for stage actors.

Acting in the Academy traces the history of actor training in universities to make the case for a move beyond standard courses in voice and speech, movement, or performance, to develop an entrepreneurial model that motivates and encourages students to create their own employment opportunities. This book answers questions such as:

• How has the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs shaped actor training in the US?
• How have training programmes and the acting profession developed in relation to one another?
• What impact have these developments had on American acting as an art form?

Acting in the Academy calls for a reconceptualization of actor training the US, and looks to newly empower students of performance with a fresh, original perspective on their professional development.

1
The challenges facing US stage acting and actor training

I was about to have a big career. They were gonna call me Brush Carter. How dy’a like that?… Well – after I left Hollywood I took a job on a ranch in Nevada.

– William Inge, Picnic¹

Every spring thousands of aspiring actors descend on New York City and Los Angeles to partake in a so-called graduation showcase before industry personnel. Sponsored by their given institutions, these showcases provide students the chance to display their talent before a group of agents, managers, and casting directors in hope of launching their careers. A class of roughly twenty individuals will prepare some combination of a scene, monologue, or possibly a song, to demonstrate their professional viability as facilitated by years of training at an acting conservatory. Students understandably see these showcases as important to beginning their careers, insofar as the event connects their training with the very people who can offer them access to the jobs they seek. It is, after all, presumably what their education has been intended to accomplish.

In recalling his graduation showcase as part of the Juilliard School’s class of 2008, Evan Todd describes a “a tough experience” in which the majority of his class did not end up being represented by an agent:

Of everyone in my class, there were two who did not get much response, and then others ranged from those who got a single response to a few who got multiple offers to meet with an agent. But after experiencing their meetings, the number of agents who actually offered to sign them might be one or zero.²

Bearing in mind that Todd and his classmates were completing one of the most prestigious actor training programs in the world, the situation confronting graduates of America’s acting schools could not be starker. Twentieth Century Fox’s Executive Casting Director, Nancy Foy, confirms this point: “There just are not jobs for all these kids coming out of these programs and I wonder how many of them are going to work. That is just a fact of life.”³ The venerable New York-based casting director, Rich Cole, echoes Foy’s comments, especially as they apply to a stage acting career: “Making a living in the theatre is very difficult… it is possible to make enough money to scrape by, but you have to live cheaply, you cannot have children, and you cannot be married to another actor, but to someone who has a very good job.”⁴ Employment numbers from the US Department of Labor support these assertions in projecting considerably “slower than average [job] growth” for actors between 2010 and 2020.⁵ The situation is particularly desperate for stage performers, with Actors Equity’s employment data indicating that 41.3% of its members worked an average of 16.7 weeks during 2013–14 and earned a mean salary of $7,463.⁶ Given that a theatre actor must work a minimum of twenty weeks a year to receive health insurance, it is clear that the vast majority of Equity’s members not only fail to make their livings onstage, but they must obtain health benefits outside the auspices of the union. Although there are more jobs available for film and television actors, the market is likewise competitive and limited, especially with the growing trend of reality shows displacing traditional television programing, as actors “struggle” for work that pays much less than most professions, yet requires “long and irregular hours.”⁷ Today it is more challenging than ever for an actor to make a living in the US.

The current state of actor training in the academy

Despite the limited employment available to American actors, the training options at our colleges and universities are at a record high. At present, there are more than 150 BFA and MFA acting programs in the US, a figure that does not account for BA-granting programs or those operating as private studios or academies (e.g., American Academy of Dramatic Arts). Assuming that each of these schools graduates about twenty students a year, one can easily estimate that the job market for actors is becoming increasingly glutted, a point emphasized by academics and professionals alike. The University of Michigan’s Leigh Woods, for example, contends that “we are training student actors knowing that most of them will never be able to earn a living.”⁸ As early as 1995, Richard Schechner warned “90% of [university-trained actors] would not make their livings in theatre,” and therefore, a “transformation of theatre departments” was needed.⁹ Rich Cole likewise argues “there are too many training programs in the US,” thereby raising the obvious question: “What are we training people for?”¹⁰ To make matters worse for aspiring actors, a cottage industry of producers preys upon them by peddling costly goods and services such as headshots, scripts, classes, workshops, and other materials. One particularly distasteful example is “Actors Connection,” a New York and Los Angeles-based business that hawks everything from showcases that are promised to be “jam-packed” with industry personnel to workshops led by agents and casting directors, who in turn get a “cut” of the actors’ enrollment fees. Perhaps the most lucrative cash cow for the company is its paid submission service for auditions. Essentially, actors have to register through a portal called Actors Access and then pay a fee to submit their picture and resume to a project’s casting director, a transaction that does not guarantee an audition spot. In fact, the great majority of these self-submissions will be dropped, since most casting directors would prefer to see actors who are represented by agents. Thus, the unrepresented actor is in effect paying to have his materials submitted, an effort that will most likely result in nothing more than wasting his time and money. He does not have any meaningful “access” whatsoever to the job he seeks.¹¹

Actor training can likewise be seen as an industry taking advantage of wide-eyed aspirants, especially at the level of US higher education. Schechner goes as far to call it a “fraud perpetrated on young, hopeful, and vulnerable students” in that theatre departments cannot in fact offer “students a good chance of landing remunerative employment.”¹² While his terminology may be polemical, Schechner’s point is worthy of consideration. To echo Rich Cole, what are we developing young actors to do? Whom do these 150-plus programs ultimately serve? Ostensibly, the answer would seem to be the students. Is this really the case, or is it the faculty, a group that owes its very employment to these students? Or perhaps the universities are best served, insofar as offering BFAs and MFAs provides them the cultural capital to burnish their reputations. Certainly most acting programs are not specifically intended to serve the general public, an irony in that performance/theatre is historically a social practice. To the extent that acting programs do not serve their students, how can they justify taking three to four years of a person’s life at a significant financial cost without being forthright about her career prospects or how they will prepare her to meet her professional goals? While it is impossible to precisely predict what a student’s career will be, some combination of the aforesaid questions goes unaddressed by many theatre departments today. Whether this mishap is due to willful negligence or an innocent resignation to the state of the profession, the fact remains that, as Bruce Weber indicates in his New York Times article, “more colleges are producing more actors than ever, and the job market is stagnating.”¹³

Despite the shrinking marketplace for professional actors, an unprecedented number of students are seeking training at the university level. There was an attempt to examine this issue at the National Congress of Actors and Acting Teachers in the summer of 2008, when a goodly number of the leading actor trainers from US higher education convened in New York City. There was general agreement among the panelists that an undue proliferation of programs existed, thereby causing concerns regarding pedagogical ethics, artistic standards, and the future of the American theatre. With respect to the first concern, there was much discussion about the over-arching purpose of actor training, a conversation that ran the gamut from producing working actors to enabling students to become “good citizens of the world” as they get “to know themselves.”¹⁴ Does a student really go to acting school to learn to become a better person? While there is surely some ancillary benefit to building one’s individual character and self-awareness, the notion that someone is spending tens of thousands of dollars and three to four years of her life to improve her personhood seems as unlikely as it is unreasonable. These explanations have a defensive ring to them in what appears to be an attempt for trainers to justify their work, as evidenced by Purdue University’s Kristine Holtvedt, who admits to the proliferation of acting programs that “none of us want to get rid of,” yet she seems to capture the zeitgeist of the industry in dismissively stating that “It is all up to the individual to deal with these problems, grappling with the profession, and the sacrifices, and the costs, and everything we are talking about.”¹⁵ To be sure, some of the conference participants had the conscientiousness to responsibly address the financial and temporal costs of enrolling in a BFA or MFA program, thereby acknowledging the ethics of actor training, and thus considering how to give students a reasonable return on their investment. The Yale School of Drama’s Ron Van Lieu, for example, advocated putting his actors into a flexible learning environment with other theatre artists, namely directors and dramatists, towards encouraging an entrepreneurial ethos that could pay artistic and financial dividends after graduating. A worthy suggestion, entrepreneurialism and professional acting comprise the subject of this book’s final chapter and will be explored accordingly. For his part, Fordham University’s Mathew Macguire contributed to the conference by emphasizing the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education while earning an undergraduate degree in acting. One of the more telling exchanges came from Macguire and Juilliard’s Richard Feldman, both of whom put the ethics of US actor training into an enlightening context:

FELDMAN: And there are thousands and thousands of dollars in education, and time being spent that I feel in a lot of cases is wasted.

MACGUIRE: I grant you that. That’s an ethical sham absolutely.

FELDMAN: And I think that is what we are talking about. I do not know how you remedy that until people wake up, or things get dire.…¹⁶

Despite the ethical awareness of trainers like Feldman and Macguire, most programs welcome as many applicants as possible towards meeting their recruitment quota, before competing with their peer institutions to attract the most promising students. Henson Keys of the University of Illinois, which has both an MFA and BFA program, asserted that there are no fewer than eight schools offering MFAs in acting within a 200-mile radius of Champaign-Urbana.¹⁷ Keys raises an important point that exemplifies the training industry at large in that there are simply more programs – and by extension graduates – than the profession can support. Perhaps the ubiquity of MFA programs in his institution’s surrounding area would be justified if they were demonstrably different, but judging from their departmental websites, they are attempting to achieve the same results through strikingly similar means. Indiana University and Purdue, for example, like their neighboring counterparts at Illinois, Northern Illinois University, and DePaul University, all boast programs comprised of “working professionals” preparing students for a career in theatre, which generally speaking, pertains to the so-called regional theatre. From the backgrounds of their faculties to their alumni updates, these programs are attempting to train students for work at not-for-profit stages that range from Boston and Baltimore to Chicago and San Diego. Moreover, their respective curricula consist of a psychophysical training regimen designed to develop a student’s vocal and corporeal instrument in conjunction with her imagination, emotional expressivity, and ability to “live truthfully” onstage.¹⁸ In short, they are basically applying the same pedagogical model in attempting to achieve the same learning outcomes.

While training stage actors is unquestionably important, the US regional theatre does not have an employment demand commensurate with the large number of graduates coming out of these schools every spring. Furthermore, for those fortunate enough to land jobs, most often these positions are temporary – lasting an average of six to eight weeks – and the salary is barely above the poverty level. Equity’s contract agreement with the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), a consortium comprising America’s most lucrative not-for-profit theatres, is ranked from A to D, with the former representing the highest pay scale, a figure that nets an actor $882 per week. While this may seem a reasonable salary, there are only a handful of LORT A houses nationwide; the vast majority of the consortium’s members pay between $566 to $765 per week (this is before taxes, union dues, and agents’ fees).¹⁹ Moreover, when considering that this employment is temporary, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The challenges facing US stage acting and actor training
• 2 Twentieth-century US acting and actor training: From Stanislavsky to the League
• 3 Putting the League in sociohistorical context
• 4 The League’s “uneasy dichotomy” with higher education: Introducing the case studies
• 5 The “new breed” of American actors and the League’s dissolution
• 6 Empowering actors: An entrepreneurial approach
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Index