|
Comment on this article
The
Play's Still the Thing
Yale's
reputation for top-notch theater training rests heavily on such
Drama School alumni as Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, and Wendy Wasserstein.
Less well known is the College theater scene, where squash courts
and loading docks, not to mention classrooms, are used as settings
for the study of pretty much everything from Elizabethan drama to
high-tech lighting.
February
1995
by Peter Hawes
Peter
Hawes is a musician and freelance writer living in Litchfield, Connecticut.
It was
early autumn in New Haven, and the only things brighter than the
leaves on the maple trees lining York Street were
the dayglow fliers that, under a steady fall breeze, flashed like
neon deertails from doorways and information kiosks.
"AUDITION!!";
"DON'T AUDITION, CAST YOURSELF INSTEAD!"; "WANTED:
PRODUCER"; "LOOKING FOR PLAYWRIGHTS," they called
out to passersby.
New Haven has long had
a nationwide reputation for theater, one that is well out of proportion
to the size of the city. It is home to three of the country's best
regional theaters: Long Wharf, the Shubert,
and the Yale Repertory Theatre, which is affiliated with the Yale
School of Drama. But the professional productions put on by
these organizations tend to obscure the extraordinary level of undergraduate
theatrics on campus, to which all those York Street fliers are but
a small testament. As many as 120 amateur productions take place
at Yale each year—the majority produced, directed, designed,
performed, and sometimes written, by students. There are at least
20 student theater groups, among them the Yale Cabaret and the Yale
Dramatic Association—better known as the Dramat, to which should
be added the Dramat's Children's Theater, which teaches playwriting
to more than 1,300 New Haven fifth-graders. Each of the 12 residential
colleges has its own theater group, and there are dozens of small
student-run theater groups like the Heritage Theater Ensemble, Purple
Crayon, and Exit Players. "There's this huge energy that won't
go away and needs expressing in theatrical performance," says
Murray Biggs, adjunct associate professor of English and theater
studies. "No matter what, the students find a way to do it."
Indeed, they do. As
usual this year, the fall semester had only just begun when the
scramble got under way for actors, directors, producers, playwrights,
designers, and technicians for the scores of performances being
planned for stages across the campus. It's the stages that are`in
especially short supply. There are only two fully equipped theaters
on campus, the Rep and the University Theatre, but the Rep stage
is reserved almost entirely for Drama School and professional productions,
and the University Theatre is heavily booked by the Dramat.
As a
result, most student performances take place in residential-college
dining halls and courtyards, in basements and attics—
leading to a remarkably innovative way of doing theater. "I
remember wanting to do Twelfth Night in Pierson," says Rob
de los Reyes '95. "We rehearsed there for three weeks, and
at the last minute they said we couldn't use the space. This was
in the spring when there were 40 other shows going on. I had to
go from college to college, begging to use some space. I finally
got someone to let me use their courtyard, but they said if it rained
it would turn into a mud pit. It did rain, and we had to move the
show inside to the dining hall. But things like that force people
to be creative."
Jefferson Mays '87 is
a professional actor with an Obie award for a New York production
of Orestes to his credit, and he is now used to first-class
facilities. But as a Yale undergraduate Mays performed in two plays
that for lack of a proper stage had to be put on in college squash
courts; another was consigned to the loading dock of the Architecture
School. "We were so strapped for resources that we learned
how to be very shrewd," he recalls. (The main, but limited,
source of student-theater financing is the University's Sudler Fund,
which promotes the arts in the residential colleges.) "I remember
lugging, under cover of darkness, certain props that we needed for
an evening and sneaking them back before they were discovered."
Mays credits such unorthodox
training for a portion of his success as a professional. "Figuring
out how to make a play work in a squash court gives you a great
sense of perspective, not to mention humor," he says. "When
things go wrong I've always been more relaxed than many people who
came out of professional programs."
While aspiring undergraduate
actors may indulge their theatrical instincts in extracurricular
ways, those with a more academic bent are likely to focus on the
Theater Studies Program. A Special Divisional Major that is celebrating
its 20th anniversary this spring, the program now accepts up to
30 students a year. They must take a minimum of 18 courses, making
the major one of the most rigorous in the College. Many of the faculty
are shared with other departments, especially English, and many
also have professional stage lives of their own.
The course load and
prospect of a financially tenuous adult life as an artist can make
a student's decision to major in theater studies a difficult one.
Accordingly, most choose to combine the program with a related liberal
arts major, to develop another skill, "just in case,"
as many put it. "It's a scary choice to major in theater studies,
or in any art," says Elizabeth Himelfarb '97, who plans a combined
major in theater and religion. "There's a feeling that maybe
you're sacrificing some other part of your brain that your parents
are spending $26,000 a year to nurture. Maybe we should also have
a course in how to carry a tray."
Since its inception,
the Theater Studies Program has been cast as an exploration of the
theater in the context of the liberal arts. It has always had strong
requirements in literature, theory, and languages, with the intent
that theater be understood, as the catalog says, "as a part
of the intellectual life of the culture it interprets and reflects."
In fact, some students have criticized the program for being too
theoretical. "We learn how to do shows, but we don't actually
do them," Himelfarb says. To compensate, many such students
also look to extracurricular theater, or, eventually, graduate school
to develop specific acting, directing, writing, or technical skills.
The tension
between theory and practice periodically causes the Theater Studies
Program some self-examination.
This winter, three separate reviews of the program are under way.
One is a regular evaluation by Yale College; the second is being
conducted by Theater Studies faculty and administrators; and the
third is being done by an outside panel of theater academics and
professionals selected by the program's executive committee.
Meanwhile, James DePaul,
Theater Studies' full-time director, and his department colleague
Marc Robinson, have also been addressing the program's short-term
needs, as well as its longer-term direction. Over the past year,
they have secured a slightly larger budget for the program, and
begun an experimental collaboration with the Drama School. They
have also increased the number of guest artists who visit campus,
formed a partnership with the Long Wharf Theater, and added six
courses to the curriculum.
All of which seems to
be playing well to their most important audience, the students.
"Before DePaul arrived, you walked into the building, did your
business, and went out," says Sara Wolverson '96, who is majoring
in English and theater. "Now there's a sense of a department
that embraces its students. It's more alive and more vigorous."
The current Theater
Studies Program coalesced out of a cluster of drama courses offered
at Yale in the early 1970s, the most popular and enduring of which
was a directing class taught by the late Nikos Psacharopolous. In
an effort to create a more solid undergraduate program, Yale in
1975 formalized the major, hired Bart Teush as an assistant professor
of acting, and also made him director. Teush assembled a major revolving
around six required courses, three of which were offered by the
new program itself; the rest were conducted by other Yale College
departments or the Drama School.
At the time, the dean
of the Drama School was Robert Brustein, an innovative director
who was known for his stage successes, but became embroiled in some
highly public disputes with then-President A. Bartlett Giamatti
over policy matters, including the degree to which the Drama School
was willing to support the undergraduate program. "It was essentially
being supervised and tutored by Drama School students," recalls
Brustein. "Much as I loved my students, I didn't think they
were qualified to be teaching undergraduates." (Brustein left
Yale in 1979 to become head of the American Repertory Theater in
Cambridge.)
Michael Earley replaced
Teush in 1982, by which time the program had grown to include two
production seminars and an acting class. Earley added the program's
first playwrighting course, strengthened performance classes, and
created new courses in acting and scene study, British drama, and
contemporary American theater. He and Psacharopolous did nearly
all of the teaching, with help from part-time faculty members, most
of whom were theater professionals who came in from New York one
day a week.
By the end of 1985,
Earley was teaching four classes in addition to running the program.
Overwhelmed and angered by what he felt was a lack of administrative
support, he quit, leaving behind a scathing letter that questioned
the seriousness of Yale's commitment to undergraduate theater. David
DeRose, an academic with a diverse background in dramatic literature,
criticism, stage directing, and play development, succeeded Earley
in 1985 and devoted himself over the next eight years to fortifying
the program.
DeRose's
most important task, as he saw it, was boosting the image and credibility
of Theater Studies among students, faculty, and administrators.
"When I got
there the program consisted of some courses and a few outstanding
teachers," DeRose says. "Nikos was the star. The students
in the program were predominantly people who wanted to study with
him and who wanted to study acting."
By 1989 DeRose had built
a program that offered 13 courses, including an expanded schedule
of production seminars and strong classes in directing, playwrighting,
dramatic literature, and history. Current faculty members credit
DeRose for turning Theater Studies around. "DeRose put the
program on the map," says Murray Biggs. Adds Thomas Whitaker,
a professor of English and theater studies: "For the first
time we had somebody who had major training and interest in both
history and dramatic literature, and performance."
DeRose himself left
in 1993. "The position was designed to burn people out every
four years, and it was clear that to Yale seeing the program grow
was not a priority," he says. Ironically, the Theater Studies
Program's executive committee soon made a decision to split DeRose's
former job into two positions.
The search for people
to fill the new slots turned up DePaul, an aggressive young acting
and directing teacher from Southern Methodist University, and Robinson,
who had been a visiting professor of theater at Amherst College,
an editor at American Theater magazine, and a drama critic with
New York's Village Voice. Robinson also had been a student in the
Drama School and a teaching assistant to DeRose in the undergraduate
program.
DePaul, as director
of Undergraduate Theater Studies, now works full-time in the program,
teaching three classes, administering the major, advising students,
and overseeing senior projects. Robinson, as director of Theater
Studies, splits his time equally between the Drama School and the
undergraduate program, concentrating on the curriculum, long-range
planning, budgeting, and hiring faculty. He also teaches two undergraduate
courses.
In addition to his teaching
and administrative work, DePaul audits the first- and third-year
acting classes in the Drama School and keeps up a busy professional
life outside the school. Last year alone he taught acting classes
at the Southern Repertory Theater in New Orleans and the American
Conservatory Theater in San Francisco; conducted workshops at the
National Theater of Prague, the Sorbonne in Paris and the National
School of Theater in Amsterdam; and directed a full-length play
in New Orleans and four one-act plays in San Francisco. "In
a college setting, it's too easy to be in the bubble," he says.
"This is what I bring back to the students—doing my craft and
coming back all charged up about what I love to do."
Robinson, too, continues
his outside work in theater criticism and dramaturgy, and recently
published a book about 20th-century playwrights.
To DePaul and Robinson,
theater education is much more than training in technique or exposure
to history and theory. It's about the power of the theater to force
society to look at and transform itself. "Theater is not just
about commercial success," says DePaul. "It's about a
process of communication. It's about giving someone on the stage
and in the audience access to a form of self-expression that can
change their lives."
Among
the new classes DePaul and Robinson have developed are one in voice
and speech, and another that takes a performance-oriented approach
to script analysis. "Theater
Now" addresses concepts and trends in contemporary theater;
and "Performance Studio" gives student actors, directors,
and writers a chance to stage complete productions workshop-style
in a classroom setting.
This kind of project
is a high priority for DePaul and Robinson, who hope to create a
bridge between students' classroom learning and their prolific extracurricular
work. "Very little work outside the classroom is talked about
afterwards with the faculty," said Robinson. "We'd love
to have a way for the faculty to critique student work more, to
function as a sounding board in a laboratory situation. The extracurricular
work and the classroom work can feed each other."
Another top priority
of the new directors is to address the program's lack of a dedicated
theater space, which for years has frustrated administrators and
students, especially because, in combination with other budgetary
constraints, it restricts the number of production courses that
can be offered.
"We're a program
without the main laboratory," said Robinson. "It's like
trying to teach a chemistry major to do experiments without a laboratory,
or like offering an art major without a studio." Or, he might
add, producing Shakespeare in a squash court. But the lack of facilities
hardly seems to daunt him. "James and I have a good kind of
ignorance of the way things are done at Yale," says Robinson.
"We have a fresh eye and a willingness to say, "'What
do you mean that's the way it's always been?'" |
|