Toward Revising Undergraduate Theatre Education

Higher education lies in the midst of a changing paradigm. Politically conservative and market-driven pressures are now holding universities accountable for delivering a more cost-efficient education that provides students an adequate return on their investment (Schejbal). This paradigm shift calls for a systemic review of theatre education. As researchers engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning, our purpose in this essay is to review alternative learning strategies already evident in our field, yet lacking in widespread applied practice. First, we address several interdependent challenges facing undergraduate theatre training and the changing characteristics of today’s students. We then offer initiatives for revising an undergraduate theatre curriculum.

Challenges Facing Departments of Theatre in the Twenty-first Century

While a college education in and through theatre theoretically provides valuable interdisciplinary depth and breadth across the liberal and performing arts, theatre academics have debated challenges in undergraduate pedagogy since the founding of theatre departments in the mid-1920s. As Anne Berkeley explicates, pragmatic “arguments for production-based curricula” gave birth to “the so-called craft or culture debate about the mission of educational theatre that escalated in the 1930s and 1940s” (13; emphasis in original). Since then, theatre departments have demonstrated theory versus practice divides between scholars and artists whereby conventional approaches to theatrical production and praxis-based courses autonomously coexist with academic studies courses in dramatic literature, theatre history, and critical theory. Despite Jill Dolan’s “exhortation to dismantle the borders too often drawn in our field” (2), little progress has been made pedagogically and institutionally over the past four decades. Bonnie Marranca agrees that “[o]ver the last thirty or forty years, the basic framework of undergraduate theatre programs . . . has changed little” (1) since the field’s extensive growth and instructional specializations during the 1970s (Hobgood 5). This self-perpetuating pedagogy has not substantially changed since the last snapshot of the curriculum in 2004, when Anne Fliotsos and Gail Medford addressed the interchangeable relationship between theory and practice. Today, theatre professors seem to merely recycle what they were taught, albeit with new infusions of technology.

One of the primary challenges we face in revising theatre curricula is rethinking how to identify successful learning outcomes for our students, in part by surveying our alumni after graduation (Lena). If we define success in the context of future careers, then we should consider the prospects for graduates who aspire to work in the entertainment industry and professional theatre, where a surplus of job-seekers exponentially outweighs employment opportunities. Actors’ Equity, for example, reports that roughly 43 percent of its members average sixteen weeks of annual employment for a median salary of $7,100—a figure that has decreased over the past five years (DiPaola). For designers and writers (collapsed among various industries), the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates respective median salaries between $44,000 and $55,940, in comparison to the national average of $57,616 for those holding bachelor’s degrees. A TCG survey of nearly 1,600 self-described “theatre artists” reports a median income of $39,600, a figure ranging from $50,200 for college educators to less than $29,000 for “multi-disciplinary” artists (Shugoll). On average, 42 percent of these incomes derive from theatre work, as many respondents augment their earnings through non-arts-related jobs. At best, the data indicate that one needs to supplement one’s income earned from doing theatre with other resources. This information, of course, raises an ethical question regarding theatre training in higher education, as Marvin Carlson (120) queries: How can we continue sending nearly 15,000 graduates annually into an oversaturated market with little hope of having a career in their purported professions?

Despite these grim statistics, approximately 900 undergraduate programs mimic an estimated 1,773 regional theatres for which they are presumably training students for employment (Bial; Voss and Voss). As such, a planning committee is typically charged with finding plays to fill slots for a given season’s program, thereby leaving little opportunity for innovation through “a shared sense of purpose” among actors, designers, dramaturges, and directors (Shalwitz). Nonetheless, no faculty member...