Along with tackling the question of company, I knew that my next big task was to consider the future of the conservatory, in particular, the M.F.A. program, which was called, at the time I arrived, the Advanced Training Program. While Bill Ball’s notion of lifelong learning and of apprenticing young actors to master artists greatly appealed to me in theory, in practice the school had become oddly separated from the producing wing. Even before I arrived, the ATP was going through an identity crisis: In the post-earthquake years, A.C.T. no longer had a full-time company to provide employment for the actors whom it was training or to provide teachers for their education, so it was necessary to ask what the purpose was of having a graduate school under those circumstances. Was it to altruistically prepare young artists for American theater as a whole? Or was it intended to provide talent for A.C.T. in particular? If the answer was the former, could an organization as strapped as A.C.T. continue to provide that service to the field? But if the students training at A.C.T. were not being trained specifically for work at The Geary, what were they being trained to do? What were the priorities, the skill sets, the aesthetic choices that we were attempting to inculcate? Of course, when Ball first conceived of A.C.T.’s conservatory, things had been much clearer: A.C.T. was a classical theater whose repertoire was most noted for works such as Cyrano de Bergerac and The Taming of the Shrew, which required an acting company possessed of an athletic grace, a sense of period behavior, and enormous verbal panache. The A.C.T. training, which supported the company, thus built up physical stamina, taught scansion and speaking in verse, opened up the voice, and built an ensemble. It was the perfect preparation for the work of that particular acting company on the Geary stage. Naturally, as A.C.T.’s mainstage work evolved over time, questions about the nature and purpose of the actor training continued to arise as well. In her thoughtful book Ecologies of Theater, scholar Bonnie Marranca asks, “How can schools hope to train artists, when they give so little thought to the cultivation of artistic values? How can students know against which standards they are to be measured if they lack knowledge of the wonder and variousness of theatrical life? Students might become more passionate about their art, and learn what it means to be part of an artistic heritage, if they could be made to appreciate the great world achievements in theatrical thought of more than two thousand years.”
Of course, there are as many theories about how to teach acting as there are schools to do it. The famous Stanislavsky training of Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, and Lee Strasberg introduced a generation of American actors to their own complex interior landscape, and the actors who succeeded best were those who had access to their emotional lives in a way that was transparent enough for film and natural enough to seem unrehearsed. When Zelda Fichandler began teaching at New York University, her dream was to train actors to join repertory companies, so transformation and a facility with heightened theatrical styles were at the top of her list of priorities. Fichandler’s actors had to have the imagination to enter into a variety of roles, to lose themselves believably in the Spanish Golden Age, in Arthur Miller’s small-town America, or in rural Russia; she sought out actors who could handle everything from William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw to August Wilson and Tennessee Williams and could move from one kind of material to another with facility and appetite. This is not to pit authenticity against transformation—both are critical tools of the flexible actor—but merely to say that the focus of actor training depends upon the context for which actors are being trained. Each acting program has to interrogate its own methods and determine its own measures of success.
When I arrived at A.C.T. in 1992, I tried to understand the values that were guiding its form of actor training. On a fairly regular basis there were large student critiques in which the faculty was invited to judge the work being presented. At the first critique I attended, a young woman was trying to explore Lady Anne’s behavior in the wooing scene in Richard III, and from all corners of the room, commentary was being thrown out in a highly public way, while the student became tearful and tried to make adjustments on the spot. The one thing I could gather from watching this exercise was that A.C.T. prized the ego of the director/teacher and expected its students to be prepared to be thrown into public situations in which they would have to sink or swim.
At the same time, a revival of Cyrano was going on at The Geary in which nearly the entire second-year class was being used as nonspeaking cannon fodder onstage, which didn’t seem to me the best use of their precious tuition dollars and was reportedly causing much unhappiness among the student body. Given that the ATP was only a two-year program, every second counted; by the middle of the second year, the students were already thinking about how to graduate and enter the profession. Overall, the instruction seemed somewhat fraught to me and without a coherent aesthetic. The speech training was based on Edith Skinner’s work, which I had always admired, but many of the students had that strange British inflection characteristic of the mid-Atlantic tonality beloved by Skinner disciples. I realized that as much as I prize good speech, I value the authenticity of an individual voice even more, and I was curious about a form of training that asked students to substitute other sounds for their own native sounds, in a way that often came out sounding formulaic.
I was also surprised that the movement training included ballet and period dance but little in the way of physical characterization or clown work. While I adore ballet, and studied it myself for years, it’s not clear that its formal alignment and tight muscle requirements are very helpful in releasing the actor physically. It seemed to me that the school had taken on the tension of the rest of the organization in those years, which posed a formidable challenge: actor training is based on trust and on the freedom to fail, and these seemed to be in short supply in the early nineties at A.C.T.
While it seemed to make sense that the majority of classes in the ATP curriculum were taught by actors and directors working with the theater at the time, I was concerned that when vocal coach Judy Moreland was cast as the lead in Miss Evers’ Boys, the result was that the students lost their regular voice class. The question of the faculty’s relationship to the producing wing of the organization seemed crucial to address, but it was dangerous territory; I felt that I was challenging doctrine every time I asked a question or visited a class.
On my very first day on the job, a large WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) accreditation team arrived to assess A.C.T.’s training program and determine whether to continue providing accreditation. WASC had indicated grave concerns both about the institution’s financial ability to run a graduate school and about the lack of transparency and commonly held goals among faculty and students. It was a tense visit. The students were allowed to communicate with the WASC team by posting remarks on an anonymous open forum at the end of the formal study; a number of their comments were damaging and despairing. Clearly, if A.C.T. was going to continue in the business of actor education, major changes would have to be made in how we ran the ATP, but the anxious atmosphere that prevailed made serious change hard to imagine. The fact that Richard Seyd had joined the artistic team and had his own distinctive philosophy of teaching acting made things even more complicated.
We had big issues to solve if we were going to keep the graduate school alive. We had to understand what teaching acting actually meant in the late twentieth century. What profession were we preparing these actors for? Was the kind of verbal dexterity necessary to perform Stoppard in a thousand-seat house really going to be useful for most American actors, who might never have that opportunity? In a culture in which so many theaters had begun to use microphones on a regular basis, was vocal strength still an asset? Was the collaborative effort of blending into a larger ensemble and becoming one with a family of other actors valuable in a culture that prizes celebrity and individual personality above all else? Was fulfilling a director’s vision the most central goal, when the dwindling amount of work available meant that actors were increasingly required to become their own producers and creators? With so many actors of color among the student body, was the dramatic literature we were exposing them to broad and culturally diverse enough?
That first year, A.C.T. Alexander Technique instructor Frank Ottiwell handed me a quote to hang over my desk: “The only thing harder than moving a cemetery is changing a curriculum.” And even harder than changing a curriculum is paying for it. Actor training is expensive, complicated, and ever changing. It requires a great deal of space, a problem exacerbated at A.C.T. by the fact that the Bay Area is among the most expensive real estate markets in America. Furthermore, because it is experiential, actor training requires small classes taught by a dedicated faculty. A.C.T.’s top competitors (Yale, Juilliard, UC San Diego, and NYU) fund their elite graduate education by having large undergraduate programs to support them. At some universities, graduate students teach undergraduates in exchange for scholarship support, and the faculty is supported by both undergraduate and graduate teaching and by university endowments. Free-standing M.F.A. programs like A.C.T.’s, without undergraduate schools to support them, are rapidly disappearing from this country; in 2012, the Denver Center Theatre Company abruptly terminated its M.F.A. program, deeming it too expensive to sustain. We often say that “conservatory is our middle name,” but it was clear that if the organization was going to continue to invest time and resources in that endeavor, we had to define how the M.F.A. Program served the mission of the larger institution.
Logic would indicate that the value of training young actors within the bosom of a producing theater is that they can perform the young roles in that theater’s repertoire. But not at A.C.T. One of our many challenges has always been our LORT (League of Resident Theatres) designation: Because of our large house and historic position in the American theater, we are, for collective bargaining purposes, a LORT A theater, a category we share with only four other theaters in the country. We are the only LORT A theater with an accredited school, and our LORT A status puts us at an enormous competitive disadvantage because, under the terms of our union contract, we are forbidden to use nonprofessionals onstage without putting them on a paid Actors’ Equity Association contract. Of course, this makes it difficult to compete with, say, Yale School of Drama, which can put its students into its mainstage shows at Yale Rep (a LORT B theater) with greater frequency. I have wrestled with this problem since the day I arrived at A.C.T., because the conditions seemed so palpably unfair to me; here we were losing nearly a million dollars a year on our graduate school, yet we were forbidden to take advantage of the fact that we had talented young actors in our midst by including them in our shows without Equity-level pay. After years of discussion, Equity finally gave us a concession by which five young actors a year were allowed on the Geary stage without being put on a paid contract.
The issue of young actors collaborating on mainstage work is obviously crucial, because one of the joys and benefits of an in-house education is that we can develop a young company of artists whom we have selected and trained in a shared way of working. This ancient tradition goes back to theaters like the Comédie Française or more recently to Ingmar Bergman’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, which regularly replenishes its acting pool with young talent trained from within. At its best, I knew that the A.C.T. training could yield a seamless company of young and mature actors who would be capable of working in perfect unison. But figuring out a mechanism for getting our students on our stage has been a challenging part of our ongoing agenda.
In 1994, with the departure of John Sullivan, A.C.T.’s conservatory went through a period of transition. Conservatory Director Susan Stauter, at the urging of A.C.T. trustee and arts education champion Ruth Asawa, moved on to do groundbreaking work in San Francisco’s public schools, helping to establish the district’s first Arts Education Master Plan. We began a year-long national search for a new conservatory director, using that opportunity to study best practices in the field by inviting a handful of exceptional teachers to come lead a series of master classes for the rest of us to observe and learn from. The person who impressed us the most was a Yale-trained actress who had been running the theater program at Princeton and seemed to have a remarkable mix of erudition and experimentation in her blood. This was Melissa Smith, whom we hired in 1995 and who has run A.C.T.’s M.F.A. Program ever since. I knew that Melissa was as enamored of Mac Wellman as of Macbeth, and would help our students learn to tackle contemporary dramaturgy with the same gusto they had used for Shakespeare. Her love of Sanford Meisner’s teachings meant she prized immediacy and interaction over rhetoric and analysis, which was exactly the jolt the school needed. It was clear that she was flexible and fearless enough to be open to creating an entirely new program for A.C.T.
As soon as Melissa arrived at A.C.T., she said that we should aspire to be one of the top five acting programs in the country. Then she set about making it happen. Her courage and tough-mindedness astounded me; in the quest for professionalism, she let anyone go who seemed amateur or unable to rise to the challenge. She set very high standards, hired a remarkable core faculty, championed the use of company actors to inspire and mentor the students, and insisted upon public performances so that her young actors understood their relationship to an audience from the get-go. We didn’t even have a small theater for the students to perform in for the public, a ridiculous situation for an acting school, so we began to rent spaces all over town to accommodate student productions. Interestingly, this was the beginning of a very fertile cross-pollination between A.C.T. and the local theater community. Our students performed at the Magic Theatre, New Langton Arts, New College, and ultimately The Theater at the Children’s Creativity Museum (previously known as Zeum). Slowly, the community began to realize that a group of incredibly talented young artists was growing and evolving right in their midst, and that for about ten dollars audiences could attend their shows and watch them work. One result of this is that more and more of our best graduates have chosen to stay in San Francisco after graduation, because there are now multiple theaters that will hire them.
Melissa also took up the ongoing battle to make the ATP (a two-year training program with an additional independent study project) a three-year M.F.A. program. Up to this point, students could only earn an M.F.A. degree at A.C.T. by doing a post-graduation thesis project that involved performing at A.C.T. or another institution or creating their own performance project, and then writing an extended essay about the experience. This meant that A.C.T. had no control over the quality of the endeavor and also that we were judging young actors in no small part by their ability to write a thesis, a skill they would most likely rarely use again in their careers. So, by the turn of the millennium, an entirely new structure was created, and we admitted our first three-year class, with a comprehensive curriculum that used the entire three years of training to achieve specific goals.
As the renamed A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program became more tightly stitched with the producing wing of the organization, we developed a metric called “Geary readiness,” by which all training had to be measured. By their third year of training, every M.F.A. student was expected to have the kinesthetic, vocal, verbal, imaginative, and professional skills to succeed on the Geary stage. This, of course, implied that our actor training program was intended first and foremost to serve A.C.T.’s own producing needs, the only goal that made sense to me given the overall needs of the organization. With the recalcitrance of Equity to permit our students to work on our stage except on a paid contract, we have tried a variety of creative solutions to the student-actor problem, including guaranteeing each student two paid contracts in exchange for tuition. Such are the gymnastics we have gone through to employ our own young artists. But the goal of Geary readiness was key to defining our training and our expectations.
Aiming for The Geary is like preparing for the World Series—its scale is daunting, and many actors are defeated by the skills it necessitates. We came to realize that, because of the Geary-readiness standard, there was no point accepting students or putting them through a training process if they couldn’t ultimately succeed on our own mainstage. This has meant, over the years, that we have forgone the chance to accept some extremely talented actors whose instruments were not compatible with the Geary stage. But that was the barometer. Step by step, we itemized those skills most central to success at The Geary and began recruiting actors who had the appetite and potential to achieve those goals. We made the class size smaller and smaller until we had a fighting chance of including the majority of students in our mainstage work.
We introduced the students to the process of new-play development and began to use them as our company when listening to new work or collaborating with writers. And, most important, we began to teach our students how to be total theater animals. In this economy, it is no longer enough to graduate with an excellent degree from a good school, get an agent, and wait for the phone to ring. Survival as an actor today means being able to find or generate one’s own work, and often that includes devising and/or producing it oneself.
The current curriculum at A.C.T. thus blends rigorous movement and physical improvisation, language and text work, acting class and script analysis, the rehearsal process, and collaboration on new plays, along with the tools to create work from scratch, to use social media to promote the work and find an audience, to perform in non-traditional spaces, and to understand theater budgets and producing protocols. With the arrival of our head of movement, Stephen Buescher, we began to start every teaching year with The Leap, a two-day exploration in which faculty, students, staff, guest artists, and anyone else we can rope in join together to make collective work throughout the building, and to share it with each other in a celebratory way. Each January we host the Sky Festival, born out of whatever work the students have the greatest passion for, produced, directed, and performed predominantly by them. In these ways, over time, the M.F.A. Program has again become the artistic engine of the organization, establishing expectations for the creative process that are followed throughout the institution.
The questions about what field we are training actors for have not disappeared. But from an institutional point of view, the presence of talented, hungry young artists at the heart of A.C.T. means we can rarely get smug or complacent about what we’re doing, because a twenty-something is always on hand to question the choices we make. Our school mitigates against allegiance to the status quo. This can be exhilarating or harrowing, depending upon the occasion.
One of the most traumatic events in my A.C.T. tenure occurred in 1998 when an African American female student, who had brought pepper spray into a project rehearsal as a character prop, used it on a white male fellow cast member in a moment of tension in a scene. The incident caused enormous upset among the student body and she was suspended, whereupon she contacted the press and a number of A.C.T.’s donors, accusing us of racism. This incident forced us to articulate much more clearly our standards of safety within both the classroom and the rehearsal room, and also reopened many of the fault lines about race and gender that had been exposed during my first season at A.C.T.
Graduate school tends to be a tinderbox, as the search for self and identity is made all the more fraught by the vulnerability of being young and in a radically new environment. Issues of sexual preference, body image, race, gender, and personal voice cause ongoing debate, sometimes healthy and sometimes less so. Whenever there has been an incident or conflict, we have tried to learn how to keep the dialogue open while encouraging our students see the bigger picture and the long history of the organization of which they have become a part.
Recently we underwent a terribly difficult controversy when I asked the students to join me in revisiting Mac Wellman and David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, the music-theater piece we had commissioned for Kronos Quartet and eleven performers, and had produced to great acclaim in 2002 at Theater Artaud. I was eager to return to the piece precisely because we had such a large African American contingent in the school and I was looking for exciting material for them to work on. But in examining the piece, this group of students was deeply resentful of being asked to play slaves, in part because some felt their casting up to this point had not given them broad enough opportunities. Despite my argument that the slaves in Difficulty had knowledge and justice on their side and were the agents of change in the piece, and despite the fact that Difficulty was based on a short story by abolitionist Ambrose Bierce, whose career had been committed to the end of slavery, many students remained adamantly opposed to the project. When we convened a schoolwide meeting to discuss the situation, it erupted into tearful name-calling and harsh words, reminding all of us how hard it is to have an objective conversation about representation. Once again, it took months to move past the recriminations. Once again, we had to keep reminding ourselves that if we didn’t all love this organization, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard to make it better. It was excruciating to be the target of rage and accusation, since I felt I had devoted so much energy to trying to create a more inclusive and open theater. But I also know that by trying to create an environment in which students feel free to express themselves, we have become a more supple and vigorous institution. No matter what, our constant aspiration is to truly become one artistic community.
The financial side of the M.F.A. equation continues to present endless challenges, which leads me back to my initial quandary. Can an individual producing organization afford to invest so significantly in the future of the art form? Perhaps not. But if not us, then who? Teaching acting is like teaching medicine; it is a hands-on activity in which professionals and students work side by side to grow. Actors learn best in the bosom of a theater, just as doctors learn in the bosom of a hospital; otherwise the work risks becoming academic and obsolete. But while the last decade has seen an explosion in the funding opportunities for new plays, it has seen virtually no support for training new actors. Major foundations routinely support the commissioning and development of scripts, but I have been unable to interest any of them in the development of actors, nor have I have interested them in the support of a core company, and this has made the choice to sustain a graduate school at A.C.T. an ongoing struggle. It seems we are loath to invest in the long-term training of an artistic labor force in America, perhaps because we fail to value the contribution that performing artists make to our society as a whole. Actor training is considered elitist and not worth funding, while we spend millions training young athletes. To my mind, this represents a decidedly shortsighted lack of investment in our own cultural future.
In the absence of discrete funding for the M.F.A. Program, new ideas have begun percolating. In 2010, A.C.T. completed a strategic plan that helped us pick our heads up and make a commitment to aspects of our work we had previously taken for granted. Although A.C.T. had one of the oldest student matinee programs in America (which we call SMATs), we had never made a major investment in arts education in the schools, assuming that that lay outside our own mission as creators of the work. But with educational funding drying up and pedagogical priorities shifting from learning to testing, the presence of an arts curriculum in the public schools has become severely endangered. Time after time, studies have shown that children who participate in the arts at school display better concentration, greater empathy, richer imaginations, and less truancy than their peers, yet in many public schools today, the arts are all but absent. And without arts education, there are no future audiences, since without a gateway experience to teach them the pleasures and benefits of interacting with the dramatic arts, young people aren’t likely to seek out theater on their own later in life.
Several years ago, A.C.T. decided it was time to leap into this void; we began hiring teaching artists to develop curricula and collaborate with public schools, reviving a summer learning program called Back to the Source (initiated in a different form by Craig Slaight in the nineties) that focuses on the teachers themselves, collaborating with the school district to create ongoing arts-rich professional development opportunities for principals as well as teachers, and sponsoring two programs for students of continuation high schools serving socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. This has radically shifted our relationship to our own neighborhood and to our broader city, but it has also presented new avenues for our M.F.A. students, whom we are training to become “citizen artists.” Many of them have instinctively gravitated toward our education programs, volunteering to work in after-school programs, in senior centers, and in schools. This has complemented the mentorship our M.F.A. students have received from our Young Conservatory for years, as they learn to become proficient teachers and pass on what they know to children and teenagers. All of these efforts have led us to create a broader curriculum encompassing teaching and community building, with the goal of leveraging actor training not only in the service of performance but in the service of mentorship, educational outreach, and deep engagement with the community in which they practice their craft.
As I’ve noted, most M.F.A. programs in America are housed within the confines of universities and have little relationship to their surrounding communities: the students are transient and usually invest scant time and energy in the cities in which they study. A.C.T. is different, embedded as it is in the center of San Francisco and adjacent to the Tenderloin and Central Market districts, where issues of poverty, class, and race loom large. If the American theater could figure out a way to link the best young actors to the best in their communities, think of the energy that could be released. The rationale for an acting program inside a producing organization becomes clearer when we realize that we are training our citizen artists specifically to engage with audiences who might otherwise never encounter the art form.
No matter how complicated, the presence of a school at the heartbeat of A.C.T. has kept me artistically energized. It is often true that you find out what you know and what you value by teaching it, and this has certainly been the case for me. With each newly matriculated class, I have tried to understand more deeply what I value in actors and how to help nurture that. Even before we had a formal company, I came across students whom I knew I would work with as professionals once they finished their training; I could feel an affinity and a mutual excitement that held the promise of successful collaboration in the future.
Interestingly, some of our most exciting students have pursued areas tangential to acting: Ryan Rilette became a director and producing/executive/artistic director, first at New York’s Rude Mechanicals Theatre Company, then at Southern Rep in New Orleans, at Marin Theatre Company (where we collaborated very happily with him), and now at Round House Theatre in Maryland. Hal Brooks developed a talent for new-play development and now helms the Cape Cod Theatre Project. Others, such as Daniel Cantor and Ray Dooley carry the teaching torch and help run acting programs across the country; Peter Friedrich established a revolutionary theater department at The American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. And some have become very visible as actors.
Of the latter group, one of my favorite alums is Anika Noni Rose, who, among many distinguished credits, went on to earn a Tony Award and to voice the first animated African American princess in Disney film history. I had taught a scene study class to Anika during her first year at A.C.T., but I really got to know her the day she marched into my office after performing the title role in a student production of Hedda Gabler. She sat down beside my desk and said, “Well that was bad, wasn’t it?!” While her work was anything but bad, her candid and openhearted question deserved an answer in kind. We spent hours that afternoon talking about Hedda and about how an actress such as Anika might approach that elusive role. In watching the production, Anika felt constrained to me, as if she were playing some idea of correct “Ibsen behavior” rather than bringing all of her feisty, complicated, African American self to the role. The merging of self with character is one of the greatest challenges an actor can face, especially when the character is seemingly so far away from the performer’s own experience, ethnicity, or class background. But Anika hadn’t gone to graduate school to bury her own history and persona in a cliché. She had to learn to find the historic authenticity of repressed nineteenth-century middle-class Norway and at the same time tap into the rebellious impulses of a contemporary black woman. The fact that she dared to walk into my office and ask the right questions was so much more important than whether she had conquered the role. From that day forward, Anika and I sought out every opportunity to work together.
Anika came to epitomize much of what we strive to accomplish in A.C.T.’s M.F.A. Program: she is a consummate self-starter who has the skills and imagination to transform into a wide variety of roles, the discipline to keep working and learning, and the breadth to seek out opportunities and create her own projects when necessary. She helped develop The Difficulty of Crossing a Field and played a leading role in its premiere. She created a hilarious Dorine in Charles Randolph-Wright’s all-black Tartuffe at The Geary, and then returned in triumph to sing Polly Peachum in my production of The Threepenny Opera. On that occasion, a well-known actor involved with the production insisted on taking the final bow in that show despite the fact that young Anika was carrying the largest role. I remember reassuring Anika that she herself was going to be a big star one day and could easily sacrifice this bow. She behaved with incredible grace and took the lesser bow, and my prediction about her glorious future eventually turned out to be true.