Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education by Peter Zazzali (review)

Peter Zazzali’s Acting in the Academy is an analysis of the history of the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, and of the impact of the League upon the contemporary makeup of BFA and MFA acting programs that exist across the United States today. Central to Zazzali’s argument is that schools are churning out ever higher numbers of similarly educated actors for an ever-decreasing supply of jobs in the theatrical market. Rather than give in to the implied apocalyptics of his observation, however, Zazzali instead calls for a transformational entrepreneurial pedagogy within higher education, refocusing actor training onto what may be better understood as developing “theatre-makers” who engage in self-production (181).

Zazzali’s methodological organization succeeds at being simple, straightforward, and high stakes: Acting in the Academy is a sociocultural analysis of actor training in the United States through a “docudrama” of sorts, tracing the League’s “history and legacy in the context of American acting” (3). In the preface, Zazzali casts himself as a young man in 1986, enrolling in the California Institute of the Arts BFA in Acting program, certain he had a bright career ahead of him, assuring his parents he would gain the skills necessary to make a “good living as a regional theatre actor,” only to be faced, over the next decade, with the “grim reality of being a stage actor in the US . . . and the disillusionment upon entering the regional theatre scene” (xii). Zazzali effectively performs his own methodology; Acting in the Academy should be read as an engaged work of theatre production in and of itself, a theatricalized exploration of the diminishing regional theatre scene, and Zazzali’s peripatetic attempt to understand how and why the history and legacy of the League needs to be examined, toward the aim of generating actors engaged in self-production.

Over six chapters, Zazzali asks vital questions about the ethical dimensions of recruiting students to study performance when there are “too many university-sponsored programs doing the same old thing according to a rationale that has long since passed” (16). Chapter 2 visits that dated rationale, providing an overview of the hegemony afforded to the acting approaches of Meisner, Adler, and Strasberg, which Zazzali posits as filmic rather than theatrical. Chapter 3 examines how “theatre’s professional and pedagogical spheres proved to be a tangled combination of competing interests and misunderstanding between artists and academic administrators,” arguing that the emergence of BFA and MFA programs in playwriting, directing, design, and acting during the 1960s and 1970s proved to be “incongruous with the traditions and functionality of higher education” (61–62). This incongruity meant that “talent trumped intellect” in higher education, undercutting the purpose of a rigorous liberal arts philosophy in the academy and functionally industrializing the study of acting at a time when the profession “cannot accommodate the overwhelming number of aspirants” (67, 72). Zazzali’s point resonates strongly today; BFA and MFA programs maintain a high degree of attractiveness to young theatre artists, and as all programs continue to hustle to justify their existence to college and university administration, in an era of extraordinary cost-cutting, there exists significant concern that reporting program and class sizes to administration trumps selectivity.

Chapter 4 proves to be Zazzali’s most sustained and pivotal section. Everything preceding it sets up his examination of the paradoxical nature of the League in relation to his case studies of Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, and the American Conservatory Theatre: “it marked a significant advancement in the training and development of American actors,” yet the League itself “often compromised how its individual schools operated” (112). Zazzali’s docudrama style is most effective here, and his research is both deeply satisfying and motivating. Zazzali’s call for an entrepreneurial approach to actor training is supported nowhere so well as in his examination of the League’s compromising relationship to...