[Readers of Rick On Theater will know by now that theater and arts education are of particular interest to me. I’ve posted on various matters of the teaching of theater and art in both high schools and colleges often on this blog. Recently, several articles that cover this subject came to my attention, and I’ve decided to return to it on ROT in a short series.
[The Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre magazine annually devotes one issue to articles about the teaching, training, and education of theater artists, both those preparing for a life in the theater and those already in the business of show and doing some additional work on their art. Since AT became a quarterly, that issue has been the Winter one.]
“UNFINISHED
BUSINESS”
by Rosie
Brownlow-Calkin
[This article and the next one were published in American Theatre 41.2 (Winter 2025), posted on the AT website as “Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching” on 11 March 2025. (I will be posting one more piece from “The Teaching Issue” of 2025, and then some articles from “Learning Curves,” the Winter Issue of 2026.)]
Theatre students, taught to do the job, deserve to learn more about how to get the job.
One day in a theatre class, my college’s technical director projected some bleak employment stats from Actors’ Equity on the wall and explained that life in the business would be tough.
This was about it, in terms of professional preparation, for me and my classmates earning a theatre degree at my undergraduate institution. It was eerily reminiscent of the religion teacher’s STD slideshow at my Catholic girls’ school. In both cases the message was clear: Fair warning, enter at your own risk, our hands are clean.
Thankfully, things seem to be changing. The strong consensus from several current and former educators and recently graduated students I spoke to for this article was that undergraduate theatre training programs have a moral imperative to prepare students for the profession, not simply teach them to be good at what they do. (Only one, my own 82-year-old former professor, disagreed; if you’re reading this, Nancy, I love you, but the times, they are a-changin’.)
To be fair, the business used to be much simpler. R. Michael Gros [member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the union representing professional theatrical directors and choreographers, director of productions of college and professional productions], theatre multihyphenate and professor emeritus at Santa Barbara City College [California], remembers that, despite learning virtually nothing about the industry as a student at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] and UC Irvine [University of California, Irvine] in the ’70s and ’80s, he was able to score a technical director gig at the now celebrated Shakespeare Santa Cruz [formerly housed at and subsidized by the University of California, Santa Cruz; now Santa Cruz Shakespeare (SCS), an independent theater company in Santa Cruz] shortly after graduation when he noticed a newspaper item about a new theatre company while visiting a friend in Santa Cruz—then slipped a note under the artistic director’s door.
In 2024, this reads as fantasy. In the ’80s, of course, no one had to know how to shoot a self-tape [a pre-recorded video audition for film, television, and theater in lieu of an in-person audition] or build a website. Meanwhile, the real-world pitfalls of postgrad life have multiplied since then: In 2016, ProPublica profiled an apartment building on New York City’s Lower East Side whose rents had increased nearly ninefold since 1994, an outcome which was apparently not unusual. And student loans have skyrocketed [in amount of debt] in the past few decades, up 42 percent just in the last 10 years.
It’s not only students who find themselves in an ever more precarious financial position. Sonya Cooke, assistant professor of acting at Louisiana State [University; LSU] in Baton Rouge, sees career prep as an existential necessity for her department.
“Higher education is at risk,” Cooke said. “Our legitimacy is being questioned and threatened by state budgets, and if we do not show that we help people get into the workforce, we make it easy for state institutions to reduce the funding.” Recognizing the current landscape, Gros made the decision to include, formally or informally, industry prep for his own students. “The idea of not training students to go out in the world is terrible,” Gros said. “I have seen significant change. I think that the environment has changed for the positive over many years.”
The professors I spoke with are part of this sea change; they recognize the need and have the desire to help students go out into the world. On the question of how best to do this, I found broad agreement: Join the 21st century, connect students to decision-makers, and offer career prep and a robust production season as part of the curriculum. How to achieve these ends, given the institutional, cultural, and financial hurdles? These answers are much less evident.
21st-Century Tools
Many of our departments are labeled “Theatre,” which hides the ball a bit. In fact, we are largely training people not to do theatre but to do things—act, direct, write, stage manage, design, run a shop, hang lights—that can be done inside or outside a theatre space. Increasingly, today’s artists are using 21st-century tools like self-tapes and digital portfolios [also known as an electronic portfolio or e-portfolio; an electronic collection of an artist’s best work, accomplishments, and creative process, usually but not only online] to secure employment in film, TV, new media, immersive events, and the corporate world, alongside theatre work. Yet many departments don’t have any classes geared specifically for working on camera, and, among universities that have both film and theatre majors, there is often no interaction between the two departments.
Even when schools do offer camera-based classes, they aren’t always up to date. Matt Koenig, now assistant professor of acting at Baldwin Wallace [University] in Berea, Ohio, recalled a “camera class” he took: “We got a handwritten call sheet and were told, ‘That is what you’re going to receive every time you go on set.’ I had just done my first movie, and I went, ‘Handwritten? What? No.’”
There are signs of change. At the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA [a conservatory for the performing arts in New York City and Los Angeles]), which only offers performance-based degrees [master’s, bachelor’s, and associate degrees, and certificates in professional performance], all students leave with a reel and professional headshots. Louisiana State recently implemented a BFA in film and an optional camera track for its acting degree, both housed within the theatre department, and they produce two to four “departmental films” every year, alongside a season of plays. Tyler Kieffer, assistant professor of sound design at LSU, uses the multiplicity of his profession as the cornerstone of his teaching philosophy. The uncertainty in the industry, he said, is forcing students to look at other career avenues “that might not be in a building with four walls with stage lights.” His takeaway: “I’m trying to prepare students for how to be better listeners and recognize where they can use the power of sound in whatever avenue they’re trying to pursue.”
For many students and faculty, 21st-century industry training also means modeling new ways of working rather than reinforcing archaic and harmful practices. The past 10 years have seen the advent of #MeToo, intimacy coordination [see “Theatrical Intimacy Designer” (26 May 2019), “More On Theatrical Intimacy” (29 August 2019), and “‘How intimacy coordinators ensure safety on theater and film sets’” (17 June 2023; by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport)] social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, and a labor-based awakening in the industry demanding living wages and a healthy work-life balance, not to mention diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives [not so much DEI since Executive Orders 14151 (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”) on 20 January 2025 and 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) on 21 January]. Addie Barnhart, assistant professor of theatre of Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, noted that training in intimacy coordination can be undertaken online, so professors everywhere have no excuse for dismissing it.
“These practices are the way of the future, because it’s consent-based work, and those tools are integral in this industry regardless of what your role is,” she said. The training she mentions is not free, but Sonya Cooke of LSU proposed that one way to “fix the problem is for administrations to fund additional education.” While there is a general sense among students and faculty that programs lag behind the industry in preparing students to work in camera-based mediums, the academy seems to be ahead on practices around gender, race, class, and consent. A colleague who recently returned from a national Equity [Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing actors and stage managers in live theatrical performances] tour told me that, perhaps because of activism-minded Gen Z students, undergraduate programs are generally more attuned to 21st-century social and labor issues than the industry is.
Work Begets Work
Programs should also help to introduce students to decision-makers. This can mean bringing in guest artists for master classes or for stints in a school’s production season, running an actor showcase, or arranging on-campus auditions and interviews. Stage manager Sloane Fischer’s lived experience is proof. “I don’t get jobs through Playbill or submitting a résumé. It’s all been through connections—through someone that knew someone that knew someone,” she said.
Pace University in New York City, where Fischer graduated in 2022 with a BFA in stage management, hired outside directors. One director she worked with during her junior year, she said, helped her get jobs after graduation, and “actually led me to a lot of connections to the people I work with now.” On the opposite coast, Cal Poly Pomona’s [California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; a campus of California State University (not to be confused with the University of California)] guest artist program yielded similar dividends for Ariana Michel, a 2022 grad with a BA in theatre design and technical production, who said, “The first show that I was a PSM [production stage manager] for, that director really helped me launch my career in L.A.”
At LSU, Cooke has instituted an actor showcase in New Orleans, a market small enough for local casting directors and agents to take notice of her crop of graduates. “My goal is a 100 percent success rate for students to get meetings,” she said. “At every showcase I’ve done, we’ve met that goal.” Indeed, many professors lamented the “New York or bust” mentality pervasive among many college students and some faculty, because artists can obtain (and sometimes work) big-city jobs from anywhere thanks to Zoom, and because New York, L.A., and Chicago are over-saturated with recent grads hoping for their big break.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that this is an industry with abysmal employment outcomes, and schools are graduating far more BAs and BFAs in theatre than there are good jobs, especially for performers, directors, designers, and playwrights. As one AMDA adjunct put it bluntly, “Am I pimping their dreams? I’m doing everything I can to be really supportive and give them all the tools, and nurture their dreams, but also it feels like I’m sending them out to be eaten by wolves.”
Hands-On Know-How
Okay, I take back what I said at the top: My undergrad program did have an ace in the hole. We produced an 8- to 10-play mainstage season, with plenty of opportunities for student-produced work (the season has recently drastically downsized, much to alums’ chagrin). I can say with confidence that the 12 college plays on my résumé made me attractive to internship and graduate programs and made me a far more capable and well-rounded performer.
Cade Sikora, assistant teaching professor in scenic design at Ball State [University] in Muncie, Indiana, agreed with this emphasis. “From a design and tech perspective,” Sikora said, “it is so important that students have that practical, hands-on experience of actually doing the thing, designing or building or what have you, in a shop with professionals.”
At Creighton, professors see the production season as a bridge between the classroom and the profession. “We teach the theory and then they get a chance to practice in the classroom, and then they get basically a sandbox or a lab through our four productions to take these lessons and put them into real time,” said Lora Kaup, who’s on the school’s full-time costume design faculty.
Of course, a lack of money sometimes gets in the way. One professor of playwriting at a research university in the rural South, who asked to remain anonymous, reported that the total production budget for next season has been set at $8,000 for four titles. “How do you train people how to build a set for a musical or sing in a musical if you can’t afford to do a musical?” she wondered.
In addition to strong production calendars, career-oriented classes are seen by students and faculty as essential curricular features for programs that take industry prep seriously. “If I hadn’t had my Working Artist class in undergrad with 14 of us, I wouldn’t have known how to make a résumé to get me out of west central Wisconsin,” said Sikora.
A single course on this subject, though, can seem like a crash course, with so much information thrown at students that it’s difficult to take any of it in. “It would have been nice to explore those concepts more fully,” said Joseph Antonio, a 2024 acting grad of PCPA Pacific Conservatory Theater in Santa Maria, California, and a current emerging professional resident at Milwaukee Rep. “It’s challenging to get a lot of information from a single class period, especially if we go off the rails chatting about something else, and then we’ve lost our hour and a half.”
Ariana Michel, the stage management grad from Cal Poly, offered a solution echoed by several others: “Maybe it’s like an introductory and an advanced—something you’re introduced to very early on, then a circle-back moment.”
Professors I spoke to liked this idea, but predictably mentioned barriers to offering additional classes. Sikora said he knows of several colleagues at other institutions who have seen career prep classes cut entirely or rendered so general as to be useless, because they weren’t enrolling enough students or because the classes are “perceived by the college, the school or the university or the state or whatever, as over-specialization.”
Professors sometimes offer to close the knowledge gap by adding individualized tutorials to their teaching loads. The rural playwriting professor did this, but felt conflicted about it: “Then you end up teaching an independent study to two students who want some very specific skills, but not getting paid for that extra work.”
Some caution that too much emphasis on career only furthers the commodification of performers. Said Molly Dobbs, a resident artist and faculty member at PCPA, “Friends in other programs feel they’re being trained to be a product,” referring to some programs’ hyper-focus on branding, typing, and the conservatory-to-Broadway pipeline as the only worthwhile path through the industry. Dobbs, who attended undergraduate and master[’]s programs in the U.K., thinks this may be a uniquely American conundrum. “Everything becomes a little bit corporate, a little bit, ‘How can I package this [and] know that it will give back to us?’”
Creighton’s Kaup agrees to an extent but views branding as a 21st-century necessity that can be used for good if taught in the right way. “Why are we uncomfortable with branding?” she wondered. “Is it really the branding itself, or is it the language around it and the way in which branding is being used? Where is this preconceived notion of it that we don’t see it as a tool?”
Personnel Best
Again and again, I heard students and faculty say we need more working professionals in the classroom.
“I think you have to have faculty that are actively athletic,” said Linda Bisesti, the recently retired head of acting at Cal Poly Pomona. “If an acting teacher isn’t auditioning, it’s hard for me to believe that they have that muscle really alive in their body.” Matt Koenig at Baldwin Wallace said that his busy performance schedule leads to industry connections he can convert into jobs for his students. “If I know an artistic director very well and they really like me,” he said, “it’s more likely that they are going to trust my word to say, ‘Hey, you should come and audition my students.’”
Hiring a slate of faculty who are active professionals is easier said than done. One difficulty is the nationwide gutting of university arts programs since the recession [2007-09], and even more drastically since the pandemic [2020-23]. “We’ve all been downsized as programs,” said Creighton’s Addie Barnhart. “I’m seeing so many positions being terminated and not replaced, or things going from tenure track to instructor level.”
Several complained of faculty who stay complacent and stay put when they shouldn’t, exacerbating this personnel crisis by preventing new hires. “We are still seeing a lot of people in jobs who have atrophied in their practice,” said Barnhart. “They have become really comfortable in their classrooms and are holding onto their jobs because retirement is hard, and job security is really useful.”
Wage pressures have also thinned out technical teaching staffs. As Ball State’s Cade Sikora put it, “Since 2020, a lot of skilled technicians have gone to adjacent fields—interior design, construction, drafting—and stayed there” for the higher pay. The rural playwriting professor recalled that a technical director candidate “turned down a position because he said he wanted to make more than a high school teacher, and we don’t pay more than a high school teacher.”
Many teaching positions exist within theatre deserts—places where professional opportunities are scarce—or don’t include creative activity in the job description, either because the institution is focused exclusively on teaching or because more full-time faculty are being hired outside of the tenure system. These hires are generally expected to teach more classes, and there is no expectation or compensation for engaging in the profession.
One possible solution to the faculty-as-working-professionals problem? Adjunctify your department. Professors who are only teaching one or two classes in large markets have ample opportunity to work professionally, after all, and institutions like AMDA and Pace use this as a selling point for their programs. As a student, though, Sloane Fischer has mixed feelings about the model. “It was a very cool experience to have working industry folks be our professors,” she recalled, “but sometimes they couldn’t give their all because their attention was split, which we understood, but it’s also, like, we’re paying $70,000 a year.”
An AMDA adjunct I spoke with was similarly ambivalent: “The downside is that because there are so many adjunct faculty members, the education is really hit or miss. I think it’s whatever the students make of it, and it’s also whatever teachers they happen to get,” adding that students at large state schools perhaps unwittingly sign up for something similar, as they are usually taught by grad students for their first year or two.
One Pace adjunct I spoke to was adamant about giving their all to their students, but saw a downside. “Maybe I am operating like a full-time faculty, but I suppose I’m not paid that way,” they said. (Tellingly, both adjunct faculty members I spoke to for this article chose to remain anonymous.)
Continuing Education
The professors I spoke with genuinely care about their students and are keenly aware of the industry’s challenges. Addie Barnhart expressed a view I share deeply: that a professor should continue to make themselves available to mentor students after graduation. In a way, students need us most after they have flown the nest, when they are actually living the life they’ve been preparing for. Should I work for this company? Is what my boss just did normal? Help—I don’t know if I want to do this anymore! These are matters we can’t advise on in the classroom.
So many talented people who graduate with big dreams flame out fast, in some cases before going to a single audition or interview. I’m convinced that a lot of this heartbreak would be avoided if students felt like they could text their college mentors without burdening them.
“If you can come back to me and I can support you, then you’re also feeling empowered by your degree,” said Barnhart. “I love that my students stay in touch with me and still utilize me as a sounding board, because it demonstrates to me that I’m doing something right. Shutting that down just perpetuates gatekeeping to me. That’s what we’re trying to work away from in this industry. So why not provide an open door?”
I had a gnawing feeling something was missing from this article—an answer I was scared to ask for, but that I knew was needed. So I called up Alyssa, a 2023 graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno, where I teach, who had been my Nina in Stupid Fucking Bird [2013; UNR: 31 March-9 April 2023], Aaron Posner’s riff on The Seagull. On the phone with Alyssa, I thought about Nina: at first wildly naïve, optimistic, and in love with theatre, then utterly broken by life, by the business, and by an adult she trusted. I thought about Nina’s line, from the Chekhov original, that she “would live in a garret” to be an actor, a line I wholeheartedly latched onto as an undergraduate despite not knowing the meaning of the word “garret.”
How had I done? I wanted to know. Had I prepared her for life outside the academic cocoon?
Alyssa took a beat. “You guys did what you could with the time that you had. I feel like, could it have gone further? Sure. But I still feel like I got what I needed from that time.”
I’ll take it, for now.
[Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, an Equity actor and educator who’s worked as an actor at regional theatres across the country, received training at Whitman College (Walla Walla, Washington), the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and UC, Irvine, and has taught at Stella Adler, Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA; Santa Maria, California), Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, Texas), and the University of Nevada (Reno, Nevada).]
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“TAKEN TO SCHOOL”
by David John Chávez
[This article was also part of “The Teaching Issue” of American Theatre (41.2 – Winter 2025), posted on the AT website as “Schooled: Where Young People Are Catching the Theatre Bug” on 11 March 2025.]
At high school theatre programs big and small, well funded and not, educators are stoking excitement and building a future, both for their students and for the art form.
The second show I ever directed as a high school drama teacher was The Diary of Anne Frank [Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, 1955]. It was a bold choice, though born more of ignorance than audacity. The material would challenge even a veteran drama teacher; in spring 1998, I was a first-year public educator. [Chávez has master’s degree in directing from the Chicago College of Performing Arts.]
Fortunately, I had a gifted actor for Anne. But I cast this show when my “educating through a crisis” filing cabinet was quite bare. While the girl playing Anne’s sister, Margot, was a kind, soft-spoken junior whom I will call Sarah, I was shaken when one of Sarah’s teachers approached me after hearing she had been cast, exclaiming, “I was so happy for her. I wonder how auditions went for her, since she can’t read?”
Hmm. I somehow missed that tiny detail.
My panic level reached stratospheric heights. What now? How much time would I need to prepare Sarah, apart from the rest of the cast, and would this split focus affect the show? Did I just set her up to fail? Did I have other bankable skills in case of a necessary career shift?
As time went on, I learned this was a huge deal—but not for me. Sarah struggled through rehearsals and remained a bit aloof from her peers. But she just needed time to warm. As days passed, Sarah’s confidence level steadied, then soared, until she finally nailed down the few lines she had. Her ability to settle into the more easily forgotten Frank sister had a muted brilliance.
Opening night finally arrived. A special present that took eight weeks to wrap was now ready to be opened. If we had done our job, shock and tears awaited parents who may have wondered why the hell their kids had to be at the theatre so much. For her part, Sarah accomplished the thing that had never been guaranteed. When the performance ended and the company dashed to the lobby to meet their adoring public, Sarah sought out her mom first. They both raced toward each other, embracing firmly, then sobbing uncontrollably.
Over the years, I’ve acquired many similar anecdotes (horror stories as well). Overcoming adversity early taught me that achieving “success” in a high school theatre program is a varied phenomenon, often based on location and socioeconomics. Affluent communities and private schools offer pathways into college and professional training programs that public schools struggle to provide. Yet many thriving public school programs are staffed by incredible teachers who’ve bucked those trends, often in communities that give higher priority to their sports programs.
The International Thespian Society, the only honor society for middle and high school drama students, is all about ensuring that theatre kids remain an equally high priority. Thespian, or ITS, troupes are represented at schools across the country, boasting more than 2.4 million inductions since 1929. Every year, these teens bounce to state festivals to engage in drama-paloozas, with smaller regional satellite gatherings offered elsewhere throughout the year. Performances, plays, keynote speakers, and competitions are all held under the banner of the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA), the parent organization for the ITS, with the Super Bowl of high school drama, the International Thespian Festival, held annually in the summer at Indiana University in Bloomington.
“We define a successful program as one that is fully sustainable,” said Jennifer Katona, executive director of EdTA, “meaning it has been embedded into the school culture, so the administration provides the space and the resources and the budget that is needed.”
Katona was part of her high school thespian troupe, taught middle school theatre in Brooklyn, and worked as a teaching artist for many organizations, including the New Victory Theater, a company on 42nd Street in New York City that focuses on young audiences. For Katona, there is no back seat for the theatre program.
“The school play’s announcements are made alongside the football game announcements,” Katona said. “It equals everything else at a school, embedded in the culture of the school and of the community. Anything above and beyond that is spectacular.”
On a national level, major awards programs have become the North Star for serious high school drama kids. One of the most prestigious, the Jimmy Awards [see my report on this blog, “Jimmy Awards” (2 September 2024)], has been given out since 2009, with household theatre names like Eva Noblezada (Miss Saigon, Hadestown), Reneé Rapp (Mean Girls), and Justin Cooley (Kimberly Akimbo) having gone far in the process. The most recent winners, Texas native Damson Chola Jr. and Michigander Gretchen Shope, could walk onto a Broadway stage right now and get nightly standing ovations. (Want proof? Both of their hair-raising performances are available on YouTube.)
Meanwhile, on a local level, Stephanie Black Daniels aims for a different kind of star. She has taught high school drama for 32 years, changing lives through theatre at Rock Hill High School in South Carolina for the past 21. According to U.S. News and World Report, her school’s minority enrollment is 57 percent, with 55 percent of the students considered economically disadvantaged. The bright stage lights in her theatre are no competition for Friday night lights, the American South being a bastion of gridiron glory. Many of her students did not grow up with live theatre in their lives until they met Daniels, who exudes Southern charm and gentle charisma.
Daniels has spent many years making sure special experiences are what her students have in her corner of the campus. It’s work that isn’t always met with a great box office return, which can be frustrating. Still, her troupe is a regular presence at statewide competitions, taking home top honors multiple times.
Daniels works tirelessly to ensure her troupes represent the demographics of the school itself. One of the great highlights of her career in reflecting that commitment came in 2001, when she took 15 students from her previous school in Greenwood, South Carolina, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.
“I had kids that had never been outside the state of South Carolina,” said Daniels, whose voice trembled and softened at the memory. “I had kids who had never been on a plane, never seen any other part of the world, and it was important to me to provide that experience.”
Closer to home, her aim is to do the best shows possible. This means ensuring that students in the area, who are often witnessing their first theatre production, have a quality experience.
“We invite every elementary school to come and see our children’s show,” Daniels said. “I announce it on a Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon, I’m usually sold out. When we bring them in, my kids love it; they feel like rock stars. When I have a student come up to me and say they saw Alice in Wonderland in the fifth grade, and they couldn’t wait to get to high school to take drama—I mean, that’s why you do what you do, for that right there.”
While Daniels aims high, she is under no illusion that she’s sending students off to collect their Tony Awards. Some programs, backed by higher funding and boasting successful alumni, do have students daring to dream of the neon lights on Broadway. Isabella Villasis, 18, spent much of her young career in lead roles at Children’s Musical Theater San Jose (CMTSJ), a big-budget community theatre whose boards have been trod by the likes of Alex Brightman (School of Rock, Beetlejuice), Will Brill (Tony winner for Stereophonic), and Isabella Esler (the recent Beetlejuice tour). While everyone who auditions is cast in a CMTSJ show, the true battle is over the lead roles, which come with lavalier microphones, program bios, and clout.
Villasis spent her freshman year at a public high school doing more basic plays. What she craved was a chance to experience a high school version of CMTSJ. So, with her parents’ blessing, Villasis left public school for the rigors of Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, which offers intensive drama and academic programs.
“Mitty puts a spotlight on the performing arts, and not just theatre,” Villasis said. “The choir and dance teams are so present. Being surrounded by all that is a great chance to get more recognition and have the opportunity for awards.”
Mitty’s drama teacher is the even-keeled, soft-spoken Doug Santana, who has helmed the program for 22 years. Teaching drama at Mitty means multiple musicals, improv, sketch comedy, fundraising, and galas, as well as preparing kids for the pipeline into advanced training programs at the college level. The impressive alumni page includes performers with Broadway and film credits.
“Our program, and our shows, are competitive,” said Santana, relaxing in his office the morning of opening night of Mitty’s latest musical, The Drowsy Chaperone [Lisa Lambert, Greg Morrison, Bob Martin, Don McKellar; 1998; Broadway: 2006], last October. “Most kids who come here to do theatre know what they’re getting into, and there’s a lot of them doing that by choice. I think that makes them better, because they’re able to really be pushed.”
Mitty even offers an advanced class specifically designed to prepare students for college and professional theatre. Santana also maintained that at Mitty, previous stage experience is a plus, but not a guarantee.
“I think one misconception about us is that if you come in with 20 shows under your belt you have some sort of advantage,” he said. “It’s something you can build on, but we’ve also had many students who have found the arts later in their lives.”
Discovering theatre later is often the case for folks of color, who have historically been overlooked for leadership positions, marketing, and season selections at theatres, let alone for educational opportunities. After the murder of George Floyd [25 May 2020] and the We See You, White American Theater [June 2020] movement, these disparities received renewed attention.
In the 2021-22 school year, the Next Narrative Monologue Competition kicked off, aimed at centering Black professional playwrights and uplifting young theatre students of color. Inspired in part by the long-standing August Wilson Monologue Competition, Next Narrative is the brainchild of Jamil Jude, artistic director of True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta [Georgia], which hosted the Wilson competition since it was founded there, by then-artistic director Kenny Leon, in 2007. Next Narrative pairs working playwrights with high school performers, who are then mentored in their regions. Participating regions send their top two finalists to New York City, with all expenses paid. The finalists participate in workshops with theatre professionals, see a Broadway show, and perform at Harlem’s historic Apollo Theatre. The top three winners also receive cash prizes.
[I’ve seen eight of Wilsons 10 Pittsburgh Cycle plays; I’ve missed Joe Turner’s Coma and Gone and Radio Golf. (But I’ve seen Seven Guitars and Two Trains Running twice. I also saw The Piano Lesson twice, but once was the TV rendering.) My reports on the performances of those I wrote up are: “The Piano Lesson” (14 December 2012), “Seven Guitars” (2006) (18 January 2013), “Jitney” (24 February 2017), “From My August Wilson Archive, Part 1” (16 March 2017; King Hedley II]), and “From My August Wilson Archive, Part 2” (19 March 2017; Two Trains Running and Gem of the Ocean. I also saw “How ILearned What I Learned” (30 December 2013), a monologue Wilson wrote shortly before his death and was supposed to deliver himself. He died before he could perform it, and it was postponed and delivered by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.]
For Jude, who grew up on the work of August Wilson and his contemporaries, Next Narrative is a way to continue that legacy by lifting up new voices to expand the American theatre canon, all while feeding a teen pipeline that will fill college programs, professional stages, and audiences well into the future.
“There are a hundred contemporary writers and only one Mr. Wilson, right?” asked Jude. “I think that’s the Trojan horse: getting kids in high school speaking the language of these contemporary writers they will ultimately go out and audition for and give them a leg up, we hope. Getting that training in high school programs, and not leaving it up to the universities that unfortunately have been slow to incorporate more contemporary work in their offerings, is important.”
Next Narrative makes intuitive sense, said Meg O’Brien, director of education at Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, which has been heavily involved with both monologue competitions. “These are writers in the American theatre currently, so they’re also writing about what it means to be Black in America today. We are able to provide students with arts learning that provides a brave space for them just to explore who they are and how to express themselves, while also providing them the text to analyze, dig into, and improve literacy.”
O’Brien started off at Huntington Theatre Company as education manager in 2008, before moving into her current role in 2017. In 2023, the Boston region saw its entrant, Sakura Rosenthal, win the national Next Narrative championship, and a $3,000 scholarship, with a piece titled Happiness by Rachel Lynett. In addition to highlighting and advancing young talent, the aim of NNMC is to maintain the freshness and contemporary sensibilities of today’s dramatic writers, all the better to make theatre relevant to today’s students.
“We have a lot of love for Shakespeare, obviously, but he’s old, he’s dead, he’s white, he’s British,” O’Brien said. “For teenagers today, there’s a really hard sell to get them to understand the universality of that text, just by starting out with basic history of who he was and where he lived.” The other thing that excites O’Brien about NNMC is when “our students choose to pursue the arts post-high school . . . It’s a dream and a joy.”
Even competitors who don’t choose the arts as a career are more likely to be lifelong theatregoers, which bodes well for the ecosystem as a whole. Writers, actors, and patrons of color are needed now more than ever, with perilous attrition in every corner of the industry. And a greater preponderance of stories by and about people of color means that trained and skilled writers and actors are needed to tell and interpret those stories.
These competitions may be audience builders in themselves. As Jude put it, “A lot of people who come to our high school monologue competition regional finals in Atlanta—that’s the first time they’re seeing a True Colors event. So now we can say, ‘Hey, remember that monologue you liked? It’s actually written by this person and their whole play will now be onstage.’”
Every high school theatre educator invites their students to examine the world in a new way through this ancient art form, in a pursuit that requires self-interrogation, maturity, and courage. The words can come from classic or contemporary text, but the skills required remain the same. Put another way: Late in The Diary of Anne Frank, Margot rebuffs Anne’s offer to join her and Peter for company, saying no for a simple reason. “I have a book,” Margot explains.
It is hard not to look back and think about that line, delivered by a kid who struggled to master the task of reading. Sarah, offering that line with delicious irony, didn’t throw away an opportunity to pen her own chapter as a teenage thespian. As so many teens have learned firsthand by stepping onto a worn-down high school stage, sometimes just a few words delivered to an audience can change a life in magical ways.
[David John Chávez (he/him)
is a regular theatre contributor to the San Jose Mercury News (California), San Francisco Chronicle (California),
American Theatre magazine, and KQED (San Francisco, California; National
Public Radio [NPR]/Public Broadcasting Service [PBS] affiliate), among other
publications. He is the current chair of
the executive committee of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA).]
