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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Jan. 9, 1963
Campus No Help to Stage
(This is the second article in a four-part series.)
Rv Tom Winston
It is no secret that it is hard for a graduate in the theater from KU or any other university to make his way onto the professional stage.
The demands now being made on professional actors are greater now than ever. Lehman Engel, veteran Broadway music director, has said it is not enough to be able to act, sing or dance. Today one is expected to do all three.
Some professional directors have said they have trouble finding actors competent to fill the roles in their shows. The lack is not in the number of persons who audition. It is in actor versatility. Also many who audition are simply not "professional" enough.
THE PROCESS is further complicated by the professional stage's demand for experienced actors and by the unions. One must have a job to join the union, and to get a job one must be a union member, says Gordon Beck, a KU instructor of speech and drama.
A third difficulty is that one may go to college and get a degree in speech and drama, but there is no intermediate step between college and the professional theater.
The gap between the college theater and the professional theater is a hard reality, though many would-be actors fail to realize it, according to W. McNeil Lowry, director of the Ford Foundation program in the arts and humanities.
In the May 1962 issue of "Educational Theatre Journal," Mr. Lowry ascribes a large measure of the blame for the delusion to the university theater departments:
"The drama is quite legitimately an important vehicle for liberal education, and this is what university administrators say when forced to defend the existence of both the theatre and the theatre department."
UNIVERSITIES SAY their function is to train historians of the drama, theatre and stagecraft, but not to train professional actors and directors. Lowry says.
But, he adds, university catalogs list course requirements in acting, directing, technical direction, costuming, and even theater management, along with theater history and dramatic literature. Hence the universities compete, through accreditation if not tuition, with the few remaining independent drama schools for the student who thinks he wants to make the theater a career.
The student seeking a career in theater is expected to take subjects in many fields in a university which he would have no time for if he were apprenticing as an actor in a resident company, and which he would not be required to take in a professional drama school.
"But if his university work is the only training as an actor the young person either expects or knows how to obtain, then for him this is his professional training. It goes on, generally, in a well-equipped theater, but also generally with amateur directors and amateur acting ensembles, and if criticized at all, criticized again by amateurs," Lowry says.
"In any event, the young actor is normally led to believe that there is nothing in the American theater between academic theater and Broadway," Lowry says. "The fact that he still has not had a professional apprenticeship, and that this all is he is ready for, is ignored."
LOWRY CITES remarks by James H. Clancey, a professor of theater at Stanford University, to the effect that there are two kinds of men in
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The researchers concern themselves mostly with theoretical problems and dreaming of "big things." The practical men, sensing the artistic unlikelihood of big things, "remove themselves scornfully from such 'ivory tower' considerations."
university theater departments; the researchers and the "practicals."
F. Cowles Strickland, a visiting professor of speech and drama at KU and a former Stanford theater professor, agrees with his former colleague.
"The theater in colleges is not 'educational' or 'academic' but vocational," he said in a recent interview. "It's the semantics of the situation. For example, the other departments in the university are not turning out chemists and engineers,they're turning out plumbers and electricians — and highly paid ones at that.
Prof. Clancey put it this way: "The educational theater is fast developing a large group of extremely competent men who are 'practical' about the major matters of unimportance."
"IN THE KU theater department, for example, there are graduate students paid $2,000 a year to be sort of high class janitors. Not one of them is paid to act or direct. The system isn't good," Prof. Strickland said."
7 a.m.-11 p.m.
Denis Johnson, of the faculty of Holyoke College, analyzed the problem in the August 1960 "Theatre Arts":
"In a world where the professional stage is giving fewer opportunities for practical experience, the colleges are fast becoming the last refuge of the students, the apprentices, and perhaps, above all, the coming dramatists." The universities must not take this function lightly, Prof. Johnson says.
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- "A radical shift to more intensive and specialized treatment for students considered potential artists."
Concluded that the trend in university training of actors is irreversible. Lowry says that the future of professional artistic training depends upon two things:
The university has the right to preserve the past only when it constantly interprets in light of the present, he says. It should maintain the past by showing the validity of tradition.
- "Provision of postgraduate opportunities for professional apprenticeship, removed from an academic environment."
Some 80 per cent of the students now majoring in the creative arts are majoring in arts education, "insuring their ability to have a second vocation if the first fails," Lowry says.
Forget these and concentrate instead on the 20 per cent who are "distorted" or, as Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times put it, "hopefully crazy" in the direction of the theater, music or other arts, Lowry advises.
As for Lowry's second point, postgraduate opportunities, he says the universities and professional artistic institutions can co-operate if the universities will consider the arts important and give financial support to "co-operative mechanisms" as they are established.
THE RESIDENT professional theater is one such "co-operative mechanism." Hence, university graduate schools have a responsibility to support forms of co-operation between the university and the professional institutions for the arts, no matter how small or financially pressed those professional institutions may be.
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