NYU Educational Theatre Graduate Student

The theatrosphere has recently lit up with the current state of MFA theater programs. Tom Loughlin, who is on the SUNY Fredonia theater faculty, recently posted about his journey in getting an MFA. He states, “What is fundamentally wrong with the MFA system today is exactly what was wrong with it 27 years ago when I was an MFA candidate. Its only true market value lies in the fact that it is a terminal academic degree. Every college professor who has an MFA knows this in their heart, and yet MFA programs in this country by and large are simply unwilling to admit it. Beyond a handful of very exclusive and well-connected programs, it has very little value in the actual theatrical marketplace. Just ask the thousands of unemployed or underemployed actors out there with the degree.”

David Millstone responds in the comment section stating that he is glad that MFA programs do not focus on producing teachers and that, “an MFA heavy in pedagogy is best for punching out high school drama club leaders, not actors.”

Loughlin responds stating, “I wish more MFAs would concentrate on creating high-quality teachers of acting. The fact that MFA programs do NOT train their students to be good teachers is exactly why there are so many poor and uncommitted teachers in BFA and MFA programs (and I’d like to point out that this situation is not unique to theatre. As a professor I run into a lot of PhDs who are great scholars but lousy teachers). We need better and better-trained teachers of acting who can come up with fresh ideas about how to create a more sustainable theatre in this country. See the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA Program for an example of what I am talking about - it’s the best example I know of truth-in-advertising at the MFA level.”

I would ask the same question, why couldn’t MFA programs produce great actors and great teachers at the same time? Why do these two things have to be separated? What I am learning at NYU is that the two are not distant relatives, but closely connected. Our classes are filled with students who are artists and teachers. The first thing the professor said in our Shakespeare class is that the best way to teach Shakespeare is to experience the work in performance. So our first assignment was to perform twenty-five minutes of a play. The first half of the class was spent on skills an actor needs to perform Shakespeare, while the second part of the class was focused on how to take what we learned and coach students in performing. There was a balance of art and education. Many graduate programs place students in teaching roles without providing them with any training on what it means to be a teacher. The graduate students are prone to copy their own teacher, usually copying their teacher's bad habits. The graduate theater world needs to be honest with the state of the profession; there are more education jobs (and even those are hard to find) than performance jobs. So why not build a program that has a balance of acting skills and theater pedagogy?

All the hard work has finally come to the end. The Giver opens this Friday, February 20th. We have been in tech rehearsal the last couple of days and things are coming together.

Personally I was struggling with the play as it is written more like a movie script. The play is very episodic with some scenes only lasting four lines. This can be difficult for an actor to keep a through line of the character when the scenes are very short and has a lot of exposition. The work lies in how to create an arch of a character with small, short scenes.

The show is also very technical so it was hard to see the whole play in rehearsal. The show has come together due to the actors getting the play where it needed to be in time for tech rehearsal. The scenic and light design of Daryl Embry and sound design of Blake McCarty looks amazing and gave the production the final touch it needed. This group of artists have come together to create a really great show and we hope you enjoy it.

The Giver
Book by Lois Lowry
Adapted by Eric Coble

Jonas: Tyler Grimes
Lily: Nicole Fazio
Mother: Erin Ronder
Father: Dennis Baker
Asher: Drew Peterson
Fiona: Joyce Gendler
Cheif Elder: Monica Weigel
Giver: Ken Hailey
Rosemary: Liane Tomasetti

Directed by Professor David Montgomery
Assistant Director: Jonathan Schmidt
Dramaturgy: Corinne Miller
Production Stage Manager: Dorit Harvey

Dates and times are as follows:
February 20th at 8pm.
Feb. 20th 8pm
Feb. 21st 8pm
Feb. 22nd 3pm
Feb. 26th 8pm
Feb. 27th 8pm
Feb. 28th 8pm
Mar. 1st 3pm

Tickets are $5 for students and $15 general; seating is on a first come first serve basis.
To reserve tickets please call the Steinhardt box office at 212 998 5281

Excerpt from my journal entry to my Applied Theater class.

I recently attended a teaching artist development meeting at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC). The breakout session consisted of the theater teaching artists discussing what has worked in the past and what needs to be approved on in future residencies. This being my first year I did not know a lot about NJPAC’s process. I quickly learned that the theater component was being re-assessed as they were having trouble “selling” it to schools. NJPAC’s current theater offering is an arts for arts sake model. They have teaching artists come into a school for a twenty-week residency with an open house performance at the end for parents, friends and teachers. The goal of the residencies is to introduce students to five areas of acting that include: technique, scene study, character study, scene/script analysis and working on stage. They teaching artists are to pick scenes for the students to use on the merits of its own artistic excellence and not because the students are reading Romeo and Juliet in English class, for example. Lastly the open house is not a forum to present or perform scenes. Rather, the teaching artist should lecture about the various techniques and concepts that were learned and then use short snippets of “action and/or dialogue”, presented by the students, to demonstrate the work done in class.

This initially confused me because it sounds like the students are performing scenes. While it was never made completely clear why it could not be called scene performances, what was made clear was that the schools are questioning the importance of paying for the students to learn acting/theater techniques. This lead into questioning whether NJPAC should offer a more arts integrated program in where the teaching artists go into the classroom and use theater skills to teach subjects in history, science and English classes. There were teaching artists within the group that were adamant that NJPAC should not loose the focus of promoting the idea that theater and acting have inherent value and do not need to be justified through other subjects. Other group members toook the arts integration to the extreme and said we could also go into corporations and use theater to show how to resolve conflict. My thoughts came directly to the ideas of applied theater and I said why couldn’t NJPAC offer both an acting residency and an applied theater residency? While arts integration like using theater skills to teach The Grapes of Wrath in an English class is not exactly applied theater, there are exercises like hot-seating that could be used to better understand the characters in the story.

There was one lady who was sitting next to me that was very adamant that NJPAC must not “sell out” and loose the desire to teach acting and theater for its own sake. If I was in that meeting two years ago I might have had the some viewpoint. Since attending the educational theater program I have seen aspects of applied theater used and discussed the ideas and concepts. My initial reaction was this seems to be another way of using theater to connect with the community that doe snot take away from the current system of teaching theater and acting.

The reason I am taking the applied theater class is to learn in more detail and become active with the work to examine if working in an applied theater setting is something I would be interested in and want to add to my teaching artist repertoire. As a teaching artist I am looking to be able to teach on many different levels. To continue with the NJPAC example, I have experience and knowledge teaching for the “Arts for Arts sake” model, I don’t have as much knowledge and experience teaching “Arts Integration” especially with the social issues that applied theater seem to work with on a consistent basis. As of right now I see both models being vital to how theater interacts with education.

I received the below information from the Association of Teaching Artists. It is going to be a rough couple of years for Non-profit Arts Organizations and Schools.

From the New York State Alliance for Arts Organizations the Governor's proposed cut for the arts in the current 2008-09 budget stands at $7 million and the total cut to the 2009-10 arts budget is almost $10 million from the start of the 2008-09 fiscal year.

Current Arts Budget 2008 - 2009
The Governor's proposal remains unchanged. He proposes eliminating the NYSCA funds that have not yet been awarded from the October and December cycles totaling $7 million. This means that almost all of the almost 600 organizations in those two cycles will not receive any funding.

This proposed reduction is the second one in this current budget. It will bring the NYSCA budget down to $38.9 million from $48.5 million at the start of the current fiscal year.

2009 - 2010 Arts Budget
The Governor's budget proposes a "$7 million dollar" cut to NYSCA in 2009-10, or $38.9 million for local assistance/grants to the field. However, this is actually almost a $10 million cut or approximately a 20% reduction from the beginning of the current fiscal year when the budget was $48.5 million. This means that there will not be an
additional cut to NYSCA if the Governor's second proposed cut is approved by the Legislature.

LAUSD Also Cutting Arts Budget
Earlier this month, district officials issued a procurement freeze, meaning many contractors and vendors working with the district would no longer be paid. At the time, art programs taught by working artists and musicians who teach LAUSD classes through the Arts Community Partners Network were shut down until further notice.

The Educational Theater program is producing the play The Giver for its spring production. The book written by Lois Lowry is quite popular. The play was adapted by Eric Coble and directed by faculty member David Montgomery. I will be playing the Father. We had our first reading last week before the break. We begin rehearsal when classes resume on January 20th. Performances begin February 20th and runs through March 1st.

Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear of pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the community. When Jonas turns 12 he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back.

Lois Lowry, along with Stan Foote of the Oregon Children's Theatre, had a staged reading of the play Gossamer over the summers at Steinhart's New Plays for Young Audiences. During that time Montgomery had conversations with Lowry and Foote as The Giver premiered at the Children's Theatre.

I currently have Shakespeare on the brain. As explained in the previous post I am directing a couple of the lover's scenes from Midsummer. I need to do some more reading and I am crossing my fingers that my actors are getting their lines memorized. I am hoping we did not bite off more than we could chew.

I too am trying to get my lines down as Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night. The educational theater department has a traveling group called Shakespeare To Go and each year undergraduate and graduate students perform a Shakespeare play to New York City schools. The show is usually double cast and this year Duke Orsino is the only male in the cast. We have a rehearsal and our first performance on Monday. I have not been through a rehearsal off book so this is a must!

For my Shakespeare I class I am currently creating a Shakespeare Handbook that can be a tool used for teachers. It will consist of notes from my coaching sessions with the Youth Ensemble, dramaturgy, play analysis, observations and a weekly journal about my thoughts from class. As I will be taking Shakespeare II next semester I will continue blogging about the class and my work with the youth ensemble.

I am writing a final paper for my Dramatic Criticism class and I figured I might as well use my knowledge of Shakespeare to my advantage. My original paper idea came straight out the the Shakespeare class. In that class we were talking about Two Noble Kinsmen and how the play seemed different than the earlier works of Shakespeare. Our professor pointed out that with Shakespeare's later plays they were also being performed at the indoor Blackfriar's theater as well as the Globe. With the indoor theater the audience mainly consisted of the upper class and the theater was a more intimate setting. Therefore Shakespeare's later plays seem to wrestle with more "heady" topics.

I thought this would be a great topic for my Dramatic Criticism paper. Unfortunately my criticism teacher recommended against it as it deals more with theater history than dramatic criticism. So I adjusted and I will be exploring and comparing the neo-classical structure of unities in Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Volpone. It's not my first choice, but we will see how it goes.

Welcome to a new NYU Educational theatre student blog. I am currently in my second semester in the College and Communities track of the Educational Theatre program. I am a full time student as well as a resident teaching artist in a theater in New Jersey.

We only have a few weeks left in this semester and it has been a rush! My class load includes Methods in Research, Acting/Directing I, Playwriting, Shakespeare I and Dramatic Criticism. I am in much need of the Thanksgiving break as I need to begin all the final papers that are due in a couple of weeks. I also start rehearsal today for a twelve page scene from Midsummer Night's Dream that I will be directing. We will be doing three of the Lover scenes. I have a great group to work with and it should be exciting. The book Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren has provided me with some great insight, "The poetry of the play is dominated by the words moon and water...Moon, water, and wet flowers conspire to extend the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream until it is as large as all imaginable life."