Teaching Theater as a Profession

Just as they graduate accountants, doctors, mathematicians and lawyers, U.S. universities are now turning out working professionals for the theater.

In the process, they are providing the plant resources, talent, and even the theatergoing community to sustain a revived regional repertory theater. In turn, the multiplying regional theaters -- 25 at last count -- are creating an expanding job market for drama school graduates.

Except for Yale and Carnegie Tech, universities until a decade or so ago left the training of theater professionals to such hard-knocks schools as Broadway or summer stock. Drama was mostly taught through extracurricular "little theaters" and courses scissored into English departments. Sometimes, as at Northwestern, the training was conducted with style and produced an abundant number of graduates who became actors.

Interns Onstage. The new trend got its takeoff boost in 1959 when U.C.L.A. hired a professional troupe of actors and set up a theater on campus. Chancellor Franklin Murphy, a physician, explains the motivation: "What a nearby hospital means to a medical man, a theater means to a drama student." So good has this theater group become that next year it will move to Los Angeles' downtown Music Center as its permanent repertory company (and U.C.L.A. will start another group). Comparable umbilical links with professional theaters were established in succeeding years by the University of Minnesota and San Antonio's Trinity College. Michigan, Barnard, Brandeis, Stanford, Purdue, Denver and several others now have professional schools staffed by in-residence acting companies.

The newest school is the intensive theater program started this fall by New York University with a $750,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant. Taking his cue from European drama conservatories, Director Theodore Hoffman refuses to let his 222 students act until they have been through a year of drilling in the fundamentals of the theater--voice, mime, satire, circus stunts. Only then are they permitted to perfect their art by performing 15 hours a week (v. three to six at most schools). "Perform or perish," says Hoffman.

License to Fail. The new stress in teaching theater has produced a spate of stunning new playhouses. The University of Illinois' entry is the $20 million Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, including three theaters. Tiny Shinier College (enrollment: 514) in Mount Carroll, Ill., has a 300-seat arena-type theater. The University of Michigan is building a $3,000,000 playhouse with 1,426 seats to serve the university and the off-campus Ann Arbor theater crowd. With $1,500,000 donated by Conrad Hilton, St. Louis' Webster College has put up its new Loretto-Hilton Center.

N.Y.U.'s Hoffman believes that the job of drama schools is to supply trained talent for Broadway and the regional theater. Others, like Yale's Drama Dean Robert Brustein, who until last year was theater critic for the New Republic, hold that the campus theater must be a hub of experimentation and creativity, which, as Brustein sees it, have been forsaken by Broadway in its pursuit of commercial success. So far, Brustein's most visible product is a protest play called Viet Rock, which moved to an off-Broadway theater in Manhattan and was panned for its stacked-cards plotting. But Yale's Associate Drama Dean Gordon Rogoff finds value in critical flops. The university theater's function, he says, is to be "the one remaining place where one can afford to fail."

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