One day in a theatre class, my college’s technical director projected some bleak employment stats from Actors’ Equity on the wall and explained that life in the business would be tough.
This was about it, in terms of professional preparation, for me and my classmates earning a theatre degree at my undergraduate institution. It was eerily reminiscent of the religion teacher’s STD slideshow at my Catholic girls’ school. In both cases the message was clear: Fair warning, enter at your own risk, our hands are clean.
Thankfully, things seem to be changing. The strong consensus from several current and former educators and recently graduated students I spoke to for this article was that undergraduate theatre training programs have a moral imperative to prepare students for the profession, not simply teach them to be good at what they do. (Only one, my own 82-year-old former professor, disagreed; if you’re reading this, Nancy, I love you, but the times, they are a-changin’.)
To be fair, the business used to be much simpler. R. Michael Gros, theatre multihyphenate and professor emeritus at Santa Barbara City College, remembers that, despite learning virtually nothing about the industry as a student at UCLA and UC Irvine in the ’70s and ’80s, he was able to score a technical director gig at the now celebrated Shakespeare Santa Cruz shortly after graduation when he noticed a newspaper item about a new theatre company while visiting a friend in Santa Cruz—then slipped a note under the artistic director’s door.
In 2024, this reads as fantasy. In the ’80s, of course, no one had to know how to shoot a self-tape or build a website. Meanwhile, the real-world pitfalls of postgrad life have multiplied since then: In 2016, ProPublica profiled an apartment building on New York City’s Lower East Side whose rents had increased nearly ninefold since 1994, an outcome which was apparently not unusual. And student loans have skyrocketed in the past few decades, up 42 percent just in the last 10 years.
It’s not only students who find themselves in an ever more precarious financial position. Sonya Cooke, assistant professor of acting at Louisiana State in Baton Rouge, sees career prep as an existential necessity for her department.
“Higher education is at risk,” Cooke said. “Our legitimacy is being questioned and threatened by state budgets, and if we do not show that we help people get into the workforce, we make it easy for state institutions to reduce the funding.” Recognizing the current landscape, Gros made the decision to include, formally or informally, industry prep for his own students. “The idea of not training students to go out in the world is terrible,” Gros said. “I have seen significant change. I think that the environment has changed for the positive over many years.”
The professors I spoke with are part of this sea change; they recognize the need and have the desire to help students go out into the world. On the question of how best to do this, I found broad agreement: Join the 21st century, connect students to decision-makers, and offer career prep and a robust production season as part of the curriculum. How to achieve these ends, given the institutional, cultural, and financial hurdles? These answers are much less evident.
21st-Century Tools
Many of our departments are labeled “Theatre,” which hides the ball a bit. In fact, we are largely training people not to do theatre but to do things—act, direct, write, stage manage, design, run a shop, hang lights—that can be done inside or outside a theatre space. Increasingly, today’s artists are using 21st-century tools like self-tapes and digital portfolios to secure employment in film, TV, new media, immersive events, and the corporate world, alongside theatre work. Yet many departments don’t have any classes geared specifically for working on camera, and, among universities that have both film and theatre majors, there is often no interaction between the two departments.
Even when schools do offer camera-based classes, they aren’t always up to date. Matt Koenig, now assistant professor of acting at Baldwin Wallace in Columbus, Ohio, recalled a “camera class” he took: “We got a handwritten call sheet and were told, ‘That is what you’re going to receive every time you go on set.’ I had just done my first movie, and I went, ‘Handwritten? What? No.’”
There are signs of change. At the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA), which only offers performance-based degrees, all students leave with a reel and professional headshots. Louisiana State recently implemented a BFA in film and an optional camera track for its acting degree, both housed within the theatre department, and they produce two to four “departmental films” every year, alongside a season of plays. Tyler Kieffer, assistant professor of sound design at LSU, uses the multiplicity of his profession as the cornerstone of his teaching philosophy. The uncertainty in the industry, he said, is forcing students to look at other career avenues “that might not be in a building with four walls with stage lights.” His takeaway: “I’m trying to prepare students for how to be better listeners and recognize where they can use the power of sound in whatever avenue they’re trying to pursue.”
For many students and faculty, 21st-century industry training also means modeling new ways of working rather than reinforcing archaic and harmful practices. The past 10 years have seen the advent of #MeToo, intimacy coordination, social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, and a labor-based awakening in the industry demanding living wages and a healthy work-life balance, not to mention diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Addie Barnhart, assistant professor of theatre of Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, noted that training in intimacy coordination can be undertaken online, so professors everywhere have no excuse for dismissing it.
“These practices are the way of the future, because it’s consent-based work, and those tools are integral in this industry regardless of what your role is,” she said. The training she mentions is not free, but Sonya Cooke of LSU proposed that one way to “fix the problem is for administrations to fund additional education.” While there is a general sense among students and faculty that programs lag behind the industry in preparing students to work in camera-based mediums, the academy seems to be ahead on practices around gender, race, class, and consent. A colleague who recently returned from a national Equity tour told me that, perhaps because of activism-minded Gen Z students, undergraduate programs are generally more attuned to 21st-century social and labor issues than the industry is.
Work Begets Work
Programs should also help to introduce students to decision-makers. This can mean bringing in guest artists for master classes or for stints in a school’s production season, running an actor showcase, or arranging on-campus auditions and interviews. Stage manager Sloane Fischer’s lived experience is proof. “I don’t get jobs through Playbill or submitting a résumé. It’s all been through connections—through someone that knew someone that knew someone,” she said.
Pace University in Pleasantville, New York, where Fischer graduated in 2022 with a BFA in stage management, hired outside directors. One director she worked with during her junior year, she said, helped her get jobs after graduation, and “actually led me to a lot of connections to the people I work with now.” On the opposite coast, Cal Poly Pomona’s guest artist program yielded similar dividends for Ariana Michel, a 2022 grad with a BA in theatre design and technical production, who said, “The first show that I was a PSM for, that director really helped me launch my career in L.A.”
At LSU, Cooke has instituted an actor showcase in New Orleans, a market small enough for local casting directors and agents to take notice of her crop of graduates. “My goal is a 100 percent success rate for students to get meetings,” she said. “At every showcase I’ve done, we’ve met that goal.” Indeed, many professors lamented the “New York or bust” mentality pervasive among many college students and some faculty, because artists can obtain (and sometimes work) big-city jobs from anywhere thanks to Zoom, and because New York, L.A., and Chicago are over-saturated with recent grads hoping for their big break.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that this is an industry with abysmal employment outcomes, and schools are graduating far more BAs and BFAs in theatre than there are good jobs, especially for performers, directors, designers, and playwrights. As one AMDA adjunct put it bluntly, “Am I pimping their dreams? I’m doing everything I can to be really supportive and give them all the tools, and nurture their dreams, but also it feels like I’m sending them out to be eaten by wolves.”
Hands-On Know-How
Okay, I take back what I said at the top: My undergrad program did have an ace in the hole. We produced an 8- to 10-play mainstage season, with plenty of opportunities for student-produced work (the season has recently drastically downsized, much to alums’ chagrin). I can say with confidence that the 12 college plays on my résumé made me attractive to internship and graduate programs and made me a far more capable and well-rounded performer.
Cade Sikora, assistant teaching professor in scenic design at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, agreed with this emphasis. “From a design and tech perspective,” Sikora said, “it is so important that students have that practical, hands-on experience of actually doing the thing, designing or building or what have you, in a shop with professionals.”
At Creighton, professors see the production season as a bridge between the classroom and the profession. “We teach the theory and then they get a chance to practice in the classroom, and then they get basically a sandbox or a lab through our four productions to take these lessons and put them into real time,” said Lora Kaup, who’s on the school’s full-time costume design faculty.
Of course, a lack of money sometimes gets in the way. One professor of playwriting at a research university in the rural South, who asked to remain anonymous, reported that the total production budget for next season has been set at $8,000 for four titles. “How do you train people how to build a set for a musical or sing in a musical if you can’t afford to do a musical?” she wondered.
In addition to strong production calendars, career-oriented classes are seen by students and faculty as essential curricular features for programs that take industry prep seriously. “If I hadn’t had my Working Artist class in undergrad with 14 of us, I wouldn’t have known how to make a résumé to get me out of west central Wisconsin,” said Sikora.
A single course on this subject, though, can seem like a crash course, with so much information thrown at students that it’s difficult to take any of it in. “It would have been nice to explore those concepts more fully,” said Joseph Antonio, a 2024 acting grad of PCPA Pacific Conservatory Theater in Santa Maria, California, and a current emerging professional resident at Milwaukee Rep. “It’s challenging to get a lot of information from a single class period, especially if we go off the rails chatting about something else, and then we’ve lost our hour and a half.”
"Friends in other programs feel they’re being trained to be a product."
Ariana Michel, the stage management grad from Cal Poly, offered a solution echoed by several others: “Maybe it’s like an introductory and an advanced—something you’re introduced to very early on, then a circle-back moment.”
Professors I spoke to liked this idea, but predictably mentioned barriers to offering additional classes. Sikora said he knows of several colleagues at other institutions who have seen career prep classes cut entirely or rendered so general as to be useless, because they weren’t enrolling enough students or because the classes are “perceived by the college, the school or the university or the state or whatever, as over-specialization.”
Professors sometimes offer to close the knowledge gap by adding individualized tutorials to their teaching loads. The rural playwriting professor did this, but felt conflicted about it: “Then you end up teaching an independent study to two students who want some very specific skills, but not getting paid for that extra work.”
Some caution that too much emphasis on career only furthers the commodification of performers. Said Molly Dobbs, a resident artist and faculty member at PCPA, “Friends in other programs feel they’re being trained to be a product,” referring to some programs’ hyper-focus on branding, typing, and the conservatory-to-Broadway pipeline as the only worthwhile path through the industry. Dobbs, who attended undergraduate and masters programs in the U.K., thinks this may be a uniquely American conundrum. “Everything becomes a little bit corporate, a little bit, ‘How can I package this know that it will give back to us?’”
Creighton’s Kaup agrees to an extent but views branding as a 21st-century necessity that can be used for good if taught in the right way. “Why are we uncomfortable with branding?” she wondered. “Is it really the branding itself, or is it the language around it and the way in which branding is being used? Where is this preconceived notion of it that we don’t see it as a tool?”
Personnel Best
Again and again, I heard students and faculty say we need more working professionals in the classroom.
“I think you have to have faculty that are actively athletic,” said Linda Bisesti, the recently retired head of acting at Cal Poly Pomona. “If an acting teacher isn’t auditioning, it’s hard for me to believe that they have that muscle really alive in their body.” Matt Koenig at Baldwin Wallace said that his busy performance schedule leads to industry connections he can convert into jobs for his students. “If I know an artistic director very well and they really like me,” he said, “it’s more likely that they are going to trust my word to say, ‘Hey, you should come and audition my students.’”
Hiring a slate of faculty who are active professionals is easier said than done. One difficulty is the nationwide gutting of university arts programs since the recession, and even more drastically since the pandemic. “We’ve all been downsized as programs,” said Creighton’s Addie Barnhart. “I’m seeing so many positions being terminated and not replaced, or things going from tenure track to instructor level.”
Several complained of faculty who stay complacent and stay put when they shouldn’t, exacerbating this personnel crisis by preventing new hires. “We are still seeing a lot of people in jobs who have atrophied in their practice,” said Barnhart. “They have become really comfortable in their classrooms and are holding onto their jobs because retirement is hard, and job security is really useful.”
“It was a very cool experience to have working industry folks be our professors, but sometimes they couldn’t give their all because their attention was split."
Wage pressures have also thinned out technical teaching staffs. As Ball State’s Cade Sikora put it, “Since 2020, a lot of skilled technicians have gone to adjacent fields—interior design, construction, drafting—and stayed there” for the higher pay. The rural playwriting professor recalled that a technical director candidate “turned down a position because he said he wanted to make more than a high school teacher, and we don’t pay more than a high school teacher.”
Many teaching positions exist within theatre deserts—places where professional opportunities are scarce—or don’t include creative activity in the job description, either because the institution is focused exclusively on teaching or because more full-time faculty are being hired outside of the tenure system. These hires are generally expected to teach more classes, and there is no expectation or compensation for engaging in the profession.
One possible solution to the faculty-as-working-professionals problem? Adjunctify your department. Professors who are only teaching one or two classes in large markets have ample opportunity to work professionally, after all, and institutions like AMDA and Pace use this as a selling point for their programs. As a student, though, Sloane Fischer has mixed feelings about the model. “It was a very cool experience to have working industry folks be our professors,” she recalled, “but sometimes they couldn’t give their all because their attention was split, which we understood, but it’s also, like, we’re paying $70,000 a year.”
An AMDA adjunct I spoke with was similarly ambivalent: “The downside is that because there are so many adjunct faculty members, the education is really hit or miss. I think it’s whatever the students make of it, and it’s also whatever teachers they happen to get,” adding that students at large state schools perhaps unwittingly sign up for something similar, as they are usually taught by grad students for their first year or two.
One Pace adjunct I spoke to was adamant about giving their all to their students, but saw a downside. “Maybe I am operating like a full-time faculty, but I suppose I’m not paid that way,” they said. (Tellingly, both adjunct faculty members I spoke to for this article chose to remain anonymous.)
Continuing Education
The professors I spoke with genuinely care about their students and are keenly aware of the industry’s challenges. Addie Barnhart expressed a view I share deeply: that a professor should continue to make themselves available to mentor students after graduation. In a way, students need us most after they have flown the nest, when they are actually living the life they’ve been preparing for. Should I work for this company? Is what my boss just did normal? Help—I don’t know if I want to do this anymore! These are matters we can’t advise on in the classroom.
So many talented people who graduate with big dreams flame out fast, in some cases before going to a single audition or interview. I’m convinced that a lot of this heartbreak would be avoided if students felt like they could text their college mentors without burdening them.
“If you can come back to me and I can support you, then you’re also feeling empowered by your degree,” said Barnhart. “I love that my students stay in touch with me and still utilize me as a sounding board, because it demonstrates to me that I’m doing something right. Shutting that down just perpetuates gatekeeping to me. That’s what we’re trying to work away from in this industry. So why not provide an open door?”
I had a gnawing feeling something was missing from this article—an answer I was scared to ask for, but that I knew was needed. So I called up Alyssa, a 2023 graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno, where I teach, who had been my Nina in Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s riff on The Seagull. On the phone with Alyssa, I thought about Nina: at first wildly naïve, optimistic, and in love with theatre, then utterly broken by life, by the business, and by an adult she trusted. I thought about Nina’s line, from the Chekhov original, that she “would live in a garret” to be an actor, a line I wholeheartedly latched onto as an undergraduate despite not knowing the meaning of the word “garret.”
How had I done? I wanted to know. Had I prepared her for life outside the academic cocoon?
Alyssa took a beat. “You guys did what you could with the time that you had. I feel like, could it have gone further? Sure. But I still feel like I got what I needed from that time.”
I’ll take it, for now.
Rosie Brownlow-Calkin enjoyed every second of her training at Whitman College, LAMDA, and UC Irvine, and has taught brilliant students at Stella Adler, PCPA, Stephen F. Austin State University, and the University of Nevada. This article is for them.
