[This is the third and final installment of the “Career Prep for the Arts” series on Rick On Theater. Parts 1 and 2 were posted on Thursday. 2 April and Sunday, 5 April, respectively; I invite you to read them if you haven’t already.
[Part 3 consists of two more articles from the teaching issues of American Theatre magazine. The first one, from 2026, is about the changes in the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., since Donald Trump has assumed control, in particular, the effect his leadership has affected the educational and children’s programs at the Center and the consequences of those changes,
[The second article, from 2025, is about the changes occurring in graduate academic programs across the country due to funding issues and shifts in the various administrations’ visions for post-graduate theater training and education.]
“WHAT’S LEFT
STANDING OF
by Daniella Ignacio
[I’ve included the article below, posted on the American Theatre website on 9 February 2026, in mu mini-series on “Career Prep for the Arts” (of which this is the third and final installment) because it reports on aspects of that topic even though it’s not part of either the 2025 “Teaching Issue” of the magazine or the 2026 “Learning Curves” issue.
[Under Roger L. Stevens (1910-98; theatrical producer, arts administrator, and real estate executive), the founding Chairman of both the National Endowment for the Arts (1965-69) and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (1961-88, the Center established a number of projects and offices) concerned with the education of leaders in the arts, including theater and the performing arts, in the United States (see, for example, “Michael Kaiser: Man of the Arts” [21 December 2016]) and “A Master’s List” by Sofía Barrell in “Arts Administration, Article 6” (14 December 2020).]
The Center’s roles as an incubator of new work for young audiences, and as a generous host for the American College Theater Festival, will be hard to fill.
Among my community of D.C. artists, something that has always inspired me is our ability to place art and joy directly next to anger. That is life here. Our latest source of the fire: Come July 4, according to President Trump, the Kennedy Center will be closed for renovations for two years. In a gesture that coincides with America’s semiquincentennial, or 250th birthday, the president announced on Sunday, Feb. 1 via a TruthSocial post his plans to close the Center for about two years for unspecified construction (though it had an expansion and renovation as recently as 2019 [see “The Kennedy Center Expands” (5 December 2014) and “‘With Newly Expanded Campus, Kennedy Center Aims to Make Art an Experience for All’” by Jeffrey Brown (8 September 2019)]). This move comes after cancellations and internal discord since Trump’s takeover of the Center last year, including his rebranding of the building in his name.
[Donald Trump (b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; inaugurated as 47th President in 2025) was elected chair of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees on 12 February 2026, after Trump had dismissed the appointed board members and appointed his own. In May 2026, the board changed its rules regarding eligibility to vote, eliminating the ex officio trustees and permitting only Trump appointees to vote.
[This led the way for a long list of changes (including some that were unintentional, like cancellations of scheduled performances and appearances. On 18 December, the voting trustees authorized the change of the Center’s name to The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. On 1 February 2026, Trump announced that the Center would close on 4 July for two years of renovations.]
If the board approves the closure, it will be a disaster not only for the National Symphony Orchestra, which offers an average of 150 concerts a year at the Center, and for a slate of theatre, dance, and music tours, but also for the Center’s day-to-day staff and programs that employ local and national artists, including Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences (TYA), which has developed and produced more than 120 unique productions since 1986.
Kennedy Center TYA’s staff had already downsized, with all its full-time leaders departing in October 2025, including David Kilpatrick, who’s now at Folger Theatre [founded in 1992; not to be confused with the former Folger Theatre Group, formed in 1970, which eventually became Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company], Maribeth Weatherford, now at Signature Theatre [an Arlington, Virginia, company, founded in 1989, that is unrelated to New York City’s Signature Theatre Company, founded in 1991], and Michelle Kozlak. The remaining staff are part-timers. The Center’s education department relies on Department of Education funding for $7 or $8 million out of its $13 million budget, as well as philanthropic and education grants. With that largesse, they managed to reach two million educators, administrators, and students across the U.S., Puerto Rico, and 12 additional countries in one year alone, according to a 2023 annual report.
If the program was already on life support even before the latest announcement, now the question is, what will happen to TYA shows that were scheduled to be developed at the Center during the planned two-year closure? One former staff member who spoke to American Theatre on background confirmed that, based on their knowledge of the contracts, artists might be able to take their shows elsewhere. But where? KCTYA was one of the only TYA companies in the U.S.—and the only one in the D.C. area—that solely produced new works, from commission to premiere to tours to national licensing, and its loss creates “a big void,” said the former staffer, who wondered what other sizable new-work incubator space could possibly take KCTYA’s place.
Of this year’s programming, a Seattle Children’s Theatre co-commission of Keiko Green’s Young Dragon already withdrew its Center run to focus on its Seattle premiere [12-29 March 2026]. Fishing for Stars, a theatre for the very young production by a collective that includes Megan Alrutz, Claire Derriennic, S. Elliot, Renita James, and Xinyue Zhang, comes up as a 404 on the website; another former staffer confirmed that the show, originally announced for a March run, won’t be happening at Kennedy Center. The same goes for a previously scheduled repeat tour of Sesame Street the Musical, which played the Center in summer 2025, as well as Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock. According to an interviewee on background, no budget is currently allotted for next season in TYA, and next year’s season “doesn’t exist.” A former staffer guessed that the focus would have been on bringing in groups or pre-existing scripts, prior to the closure announcement.
There is one more TYA show scheduled to go up before the July closure, which one former Center staffer called “one of the most creative scripts I have read in a long time”: the world premiere of The Sea Beyond the Ocean by playwright Doug Robinson, who was raised in northern Virginia and is now based between D.C. and New York. Set to run Feb. 28-March 15 [2026; it did], it follows a boy who searches for the missing ending to his favorite unfinished book. Featuring an all-Black cast, it is a Black fantasy in a register akin to Octavia Butler [1947-2006; African-American science fiction and speculative fiction writer] that “allows for the possibility of something different” and “invites people to imagine a better world,” said dramaturg Gabrielle Hoyt.
Robinson said he wanted to write a play for his father, who read books to him over the phone when he went on business trips. It’s “a play for kids who like to read, who find that reading is the safest place for them to be,” Robinson said. “Working through imagination is a way to build the end of the story you want to have. Imagination is the key to seeing a future that has never wanted you there, right? So it’s a play that says a child’s imagination can create a whole world where the characters come out, they tell stories, they learn, and they move forward. They’re not static. They’re not like, ‘We had an adventure, and now we’re going home.’ The world is changed by the imagination. That matters.”
Robinson first pitched Ocean when former staffer Sean-Maurice Lynch introduced him to the KCTYA team. Since being commissioned in late 2023, Ocean received two Kennedy Center workshops: one with Ashleigh King, and another with KenYatta Rogers, who directs the world premiere. Over the years, what has deepened and grown the most is Robinson’s understanding of what endings mean to a child. As Hoyt put it, “It’s become a really moving discussion of how to talk to kids about endings.”
One real-life ending: the exit of Kennedy Center TYA staff. When Michelle Kozlak departed, Robinson said, she called him personally; his play was what kept her there for as long as she could stay. Conversations about who would take over her work were had. “Not gonna lie, it was scary to have that transition,” said Robinson. “But I have never felt those fears come to reality. I have never, for one second, felt a lack of intentionality or support from Kennedy Center TYA.”
For now, the company is in rehearsals, and the room has been an “intentionally and actively joyous” place, Robinson said. For the actors, staying focused on the art is important. Many were reluctant to speak for this article prior to opening out of fear that the administration would retaliate against the show. Said Robinson, “Simply put: the Kennedy Center commissioned me to write a play, and they’ve paid me all my money before the first rehearsal. I can pull the play and I’m not missing a dollar. It’s not about that. It’s about what we as a group want to do.”
He recalled a conversation with the company on the first day in which they spoke about their feelings and why they were choosing to stay. “That was heartbreaking, hearing the individual inner life that people had to contend with,” Robinson said. “But they all still came to the conclusion that telling this story in what is historically known as Chocolate City, to kids, in a time where people think representation is only in service of some DEI language . . . How could we not?”
The joy they’re finding, Robinson said, is also in direct relationship to a kind of resilient protest. “Do we stand up for our home? Do we stand up for a place that I went to as a child wearing ill-fitting dress shoes with my mother?” Robinson said, recalling his first visits to the Kennedy Center. “If, and I hope this is not true, if the last new work produced by Kennedy Center TYA is The Sea Beyond the Ocean, I am grateful that the last group on that stage is a group of homegrown actors, homegrown designers, and homegrown storytellers. Because, the Kennedy Center is, yes, a symbol, but it’s also a local theatre.”
On the day that it was announced that Center would be closing for two years, Hoyt said, the staff spent the day making sure that the company was getting paid in a timely fashion. “They were responding to emails of mine within 5-10 minutes, about my direct deposit details, when they didn’t know if they had jobs anymore,” Hoyt said. “What they were doing was making sure that the contractors and artists in their building were being, like, financially, taken care of and safe. It was wild. I do not know if I would have had the fortitude to do that that day, but they did.”
“It really has become an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Robinson said. “Everyone is stepping up in ways that both I appreciate and also wish that they didn’t have to. It is a both-and situation, right? It is brilliance in the face of difficulty—not that difficulty has made the place weaker, if that makes sense. The building is the people. The storm can rage around them and they’re saying, how do we keep as many people safe as possible? How do we ensure that this is not a place of more chaos, but the eye of the storm? That this place can be calm and still, and we are going to make it through?”
Hoyt agreed: “The D.C. arts community has lost a lot of funding. Institutions have closed. Institutions are going to keep closing. For me, I did not want to cause more loss, just because I would feel a certain way going into a certain building. Doug’s play is beautiful, and kids and families should get to see it if they feel that they can go there.”
Another KC program for young people had already left the building: Last Dec. 22, American College Theater Festival (ACTF) suspended its affiliation with the Kennedy Center after 58 years of partnership with the Kennedy Center. KCACTF was the oldest program at the Kennedy Center (indeed it predates the Center’s official opening, in 1971). In a Facebook post, ACTF shared that “our affiliation with the Kennedy Center is no longer viable . . . We want to assure you that this change does not mark an end—but a new chapter . . . ACTF will continue to serve as a ghostlight—a beacon of joy, a sanctuary for all, and a place where every artist feels seen, safe, welcomed, celebrated, and beloved.”
[For those who’re not of the theater and don’t know what a “ghost light” (or “ghostlight”) is, see “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020).]
According to Kelsey Mesa, who has managed the national program with Gregg Henry for nearly a decade, ACTF held an emergency meeting the day after the “Trump Kennedy Center” name change announcement at which the national board voted overwhelmingly to separate immediately because “there was no way to move forward.” They had already cut Kennedy Center-run intensives for 2025 and 2026, after being told to cut $1 million with four months to go in the Education department’s fiscal year, and the intensives were the only budgeted item left.
[The Kennedy Center offered various training intensives for young artists, though recent reports indicate potential significant changes or closures to these programs for the 2025-2026 seasons. Historically, these intensives have provided specialized, high-caliber training across a number of artistic disciplines.
[Intensives are high-speed, immersive training programs designed to make significant progress in a short amount of time. Unlike a standard weekly class or a one-off workshop, an intensive typically involves all-day training over the course of several days or weeks.
[The instruction by established professionals is usually highly specialized to hone technical skills and artistry, offering networking and mentorship opportunities. Many intensives require students to live on-site to fully immerse themselves in the professional lifestyle.
[At the Kennedy Center, these programs acted as career-development tracks for young artists, moving them beyond basic classroom learning into the essence of their chosen field. They were geared toward pre-professional students or emerging artists looking for a "gateway" into professional companies.]
One silver lining: The KCACTF National Committee and its regional conferences have operated under a separate nonprofit organization, ACTF Management, Ltd., so ACTF can continue in a different form outside of the Kennedy Center. Its regional conferences, run entirely by volunteers who work at universities and have their own artistic careers, continue to thrive, with four for 2026 already under their belt.
The national festival presents a steeper challenge. Finding a space isn’t the issue; the biggest costs are travel, accommodations, and continued learning opportunities, which were covered by the Kennedy Center. ACTF had already planned to hold the national festival in Minneapolis, with Twin Cities theatres like Children’s Theatre Company, the Guthrie, Mixed Blood, and the Playwrights Center offering space, keynote artists, hotel recommendations, and more. But their split from the Kennedy Center means that the ACTF nonprofit doesn’t have enough funds and so will not host a national festival this year. (The decision was made before the recent ICE takeover of Minneapolis.) Also at risk in the shuffle: an ACTF fellowship that allowed budding theatre journalists to attend the O’Neill Critics Institute.
[The National Critics Institute (frequently referred to as the O’Neill Critics Institute) is a two-week intensive workshop for arts writers and critics held at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It’s designed as a “boot camp” in which mid-career professionals and emerging voices hone their skills through rigorous writing assignments, mentorship from veteran critics, and immersion in the O’Neill’s National Playwrights and Music Theater conferences. Through the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, top student critics from across the U.S. have been able till now to win a fully funded spot at the summer institute.]
In the future, said Mesa, we may see “a version of ACTF that omits the national festival but gives young people opportunities to bridge their careers.” It also may be possible to partner with other organizations to host the festival, but the price of putting it all together can run to half a million dollars, a big cost that is not always evident to potential hosts, Mesa explained.
Students are still showing up for local ACTF gatherings. In attending Region 1 and 2 this past January, Mesa said that one play that particularly touched her, during the National Playwriting Program’s 10-minute play event, was Plums by Sarah Galante, an MFA candidate at NYU. Mesa called it an “intense, grey-area, loving” conversation between two lesbian mothers whose 6-year-old daughter comes home with bruises on her arm, spurring questions about harm and protection. It was a quintessential ACTF moment: A Region 1 co-chair of the National Playwriting Program, Cassie Seinuk, had won the national 10-minute play award at KCACTF in 2015 with her play Occupy Hallmark, which was also Mesa’s first experience with KCACTF, in a reading she directed for the National Festival.
As ACTF still hopes to provide opportunities for community colleges, small arts colleges, and MFAs alike, they are actively accepting donations to stay afloat and sustain national opportunities. “This work is for students who do not come with privilege, and gives them the chance to be theatre artists,” Mesa said. “I want the field to step up for it.”
Calls to action within the D.C. theatre community have been swift. In a statement, TheatreWashington executive director Amy Austin said the Center’s closure “will have widespread ramifications for the D.C.-area performing arts community and everyone who benefits from a culturally vibrant region.” The service organization urged folks to donate to its Taking Care Fund, which supports D.C. arts workers through tough times, and encouraged displaced arts workers to use the fund.
Last Tuesday, Kennedy Center Arts Workers United, representing Actors[’] Equity, SDC [Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the union that represents theatrical directors and choreographers], IATSE [International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the union that represents stagehands, technicians, artisans, and craftspeople in TV, film, and stage], and more, spoke out. “A pause in Kennedy Center operations without due regard for those who work there would be harmful for the arts and creative workers in America,” the union said in a statement. “Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law. We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause.”
Hoyt, who lived in D.C. for five years as literary manager for Round House Theatre [Bethesda, Maryland], reiterated the respect that she has “for every artist who was supposed to come through Kennedy Center this year, who did come through Kennedy Center this year, or who did not come through Kennedy Center this year. Saying no is an act of profound bravery, and it’s really necessary. That we made a different choice, I think, does not negate theirs, and does not imply that theirs was wrong, or invalid, or created harm of any kind. The theatre community has to have solidarity right now. We have such respect for a lot of amazing artists who are faced with terrible choices. There are no good choices. This is a bad situation.”
It’s also true, she noted, that the DMV area [a local appellation for the “District (of Columbia), Maryland, Virginia.”] “is a great place to be a kid who loves theatre,” citing education programs and productions at Imagination Stage [Bethesda], Round House Theatre, Adventure Theatre MTC [DC], Theatre Lab [DC], Educational Theatre Company [Arlington], Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, and many more. “It is hard for me to imagine that the Kennedy Center’s ability to serve young people is going to end this year,” Hoyt said. “I just, I don’t—that cannot be, under my personal cosmology.”
[Daniella Ignacio, a writer, theater artist, and musician based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing editor of American Theatre magazine.
[Ignacio’s report on the effects on the D.C. area of the changes being wrought at the Kennedy Center is very personal to me. I was born in Washington and have often admitted to being something of a Washington chauvinist. Even though I haven’t lived there since I went away for high school in 1961, my parents lived there almost their entire married lives (the exception being a five-year period when my dad was a Foreign Service Officer abroad).
[I returned to D.C. frequently for the rest of their lives and, since they were theater-lovers, one of our frequent activities was going to the Kennedy Center, the National Theatre, Arena Stage, and many of the small houses that arose in the area after 1980. I watched Washington grow from an almost theater desert in the ’50s and ’60s into a thriving and vibrant theater town. (I wrote a little about this in “‘Stages in DC’ (Summer 1985)” [25 December 2011] and “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction” [26 November 2011].)
[The Kennedy Center wasn’t even there until 1971 (I was out of the country in the army when it opened and didn’t get back to Washington until 1974), but the change it effected on the D.C. area’s theater was remarkable. Within 10 years, our own little “Off-Broadway” burgeoned. My parents and I were in hog-heaven. To see it in jeopardy now because somebody’s sticking a monkey wrench into the works disheartens me—and makes me angry.]
* *
* *
“DEGREES IN THE
SHADE?”
by KJ Sanchez
[This article appeared in American Theatre’s annual training issue, “Learning Curves” (Winter 2026 – volume 42, number 3); it was posted on the AT website on 16 February 2026.]
With some MFA theatre programs closing and others opening, an educator talks to colleagues about the state of the academy.
I never thought I would be a professor. And I never imagined I would live in Texas. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and—well, we New Mexicans had some opinions about the Texans who came to ski our mountains.
For 25 years I lived in New York. I ran American Records (my theatre company), wrote plays, and directed across the country. In 2015 I was invited to Austin to be a guest respondent for student productions at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The works were part of the Cohen New Works Festival, a biannual week-long festival where audiences can see up to 40 productions, tucked into every nook and cranny of the Theatre and Dance building, featuring work created, curated, and produced by students. On my first visit to UT Austin, I moved from show to show, gob-smacked—how had I never known about this magical land where the students were on fire and the teachers seemed to truly like each other?
Playwriting professors Steven Dietz and Kirk Lynn took me for a cup of coffee and asked if I’d be interested in spending a semester in Austin as a guest instructor. That semester turned into a teaching gig—and now here I am a professor, and I lead the school’s MFA in Directing program.
Yesterday was a fairly typical day for me: My first class was at 9 a.m. It’s called Spectacle as a Political Tool. Two graduate directors and I teach 60 undergraduates (most in their first year) from colleges across the UT campus about how spectacle has historically informed self-governance. After that, I had meetings with grad students to talk about the classes they’ll take next semester: One will take a sound design class, another is excited about a choreography course offered by our dance program.
In the afternoon I joined the graduate designers in their studio class to discuss the art of iteration. That evening I sat in on techs: a three-person all-femme adaptation of Macbeth [27 October-2 November 2025] and an all-the-bells-and-whistles-we-can-muster staging of Cabaret [30 October-9 November 2025].
A long day. But a wonderful day. Because I am feeling extremely grateful to have this job. Even though I never thought I would be what Kirk Lynn calls an “indoor cat,” every day I understand more deeply what the academy can offer . . . and every day I worry about what might happen to any one of similar graduate programs across the country.
I don’t think I’m alone in that when I hear of another MFA program closing or pausing, I fear a trend. Social media postings give us anecdotal information about these closures, but I am cautious about generalizations without comprehensive data about how many programs have closed versus how many have been created within a certain time frame. Perhaps this “wait until complete data is in” approach is simply an attempt to remain stubbornly optimistic. (Quite likely.)
That said, I reached out recently to two educators in the midst of great change: Luis Alfaro [b. 1961; Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist], associate professor of Dramatic Writing and director of the MFA in Dramatic Writing program at the University of Southern California (USC [Los Angeles]), and Seth Gordon, professor of Directing and Theatre Management at the University of Oklahoma (OU [Norman]). Maestro Alfaro posted recently that his beloved MFA program, which has been in existence for more than 30 years, will be “sunsetted” after this school year is done. Meanwhile, Gordon plans to reopen an MFA in Directing program at OU, which shuttered about 20 years ago.
The first takeaway I gleaned from conversations with both Alfaro and Gordon is that none of the three of us think graduate school is the only way to advance a playwriting or directing practice, nor do we think graduate school is for everyone. A perfect example is Alfaro himself, a MacArthur Fellow who is in a very special group of educators who have received tenure due to extraordinary commensurate experience. Not only did Alfaro never get an MFA himself—he never went to college.
“I went straight into the field in the ’80s,” he recalled. After studying with playwright María Irene Fornés [Cuban-born American; 1930-2018], Alfaro worked as a poet and performance artist. “The weird thing about being at USC,” Alfaro told me, “is I was raised in abject poverty in one of the poorest, most violent neighborhoods of L.A., which is where USC is.”
How did he get from there to here? “I’m a child of the apprenticeships, the internships, the fellowships, all of that,” he said. “I wrote a ton of letters to people, and said, ‘Hey, I love your work and I would love to meet you.’”
One of those meetings was with Mark Russell [b. 1955], who ran New York City’s P.S. 122 (and would later run the Under the Radar Festival), and who steered Alfaro to such spaces as DiverseWorks in Houston, Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York, and Guadalupe Arts in San Antonio, Texas. “I went everywhere, right?” Alfaro recalled. “Instead of going to New York, I got to go around the country. And that circuit was full of amazing people.”
One of Alfaro’s favorite spaces was Boston’s The Theater Offensive, where artistic director Abe Rybeck [b. ca. 1956] would “pair me up on these double bills with these veteran artists that were extraordinary.”
As I listened to Alfaro describe his on-the-job training and apprenticeships, it dawned on me: The days of a broke emerging artist being able to afford to travel the country and learn from veteran artists are gone. The cost of living has made it essentially impossible. This is where some graduate programs are taking up the slack. Yes, graduate schools are cost-prohibitive for far too many, but where an artist like Alfaro once moved from city to city seeking mentorship, we now bring the elders and leaders of the field to our graduate programs to meet our students, to offer workshops, feedback, and mentorships. An additional benefit of this new model is that our guest mentors see the work of and also interact with our undergraduate student body. What once served one emerging artist at a time is now serving many.
Alfaro and his colleagues were told by USC leadership that the reason the MFA program was closing was due to a pivot to a “revenue-based model.” This news was particularly surprising, given that USC made their Acting and Dramatic Writing programs tuition-free starting in the 2024-25 school year. I asked Gordon about this: How would he respond if OU mandated that he create a program centered on revenue?
“We are a Research 1 University, as are you,” Gordon said. “So the fact that we will have the kind of impact on the field that I hope we’ll have is what we’re all about. I am assuming that if I am ever told we are switching to a revenue-based model, the subtext of that is, ‘We’re not an R1.’” The philosophy that guides both of our programs, as Gordon put it, is about “how we are going to contribute to our field: by providing it with the people that the field needs to lead it responsibly into its next chapter.”
Alfaro has trained many such leaders, with students going on to become the next generation of writers in live performance, TV, and film. He said he tailors each student’s program of study to best prepare them to lead in their own unique way. “I can see what each one means in the field,” he said.
Because USC has been accepting two writers on average per year, Alfaro explained, “You can diagnose and build a program for them. ‘What do you need?’ What we’re doing is spending time to figure out how to find them the right mentors, to connect with the right people. Then every year, there’s one that’s sort of extraordinary, and you have to build something special for that one student. That’s what graduate school can do.”
That may sound shocking. In fact, one rationale Alfaro was given for the program’s end was that this model—of many instructors hired to serve a very small number of students’ needs—is financially untenable. The fuller picture, though, is that Alfaro and his colleagues teach and mentor all across campus.
“I teach undergraduate courses, I teach in acting, I teach in critical studies,” he said. “Right now, I’m teaching a Latinx course—packed—and I’m teaching the Playwriting 1 undergrad. So I’m teaching courses that are not in my MFA program, but that bring a lot of money into the program.”
Not only are we faculty teaching across degrees and areas of specialization, so are our graduate students, who teach many of the introductory courses that bring in large numbers of students. Another common part of our work as graduate faculty is to bring our research into STEM spaces. Here at UT Austin, I watch in awe as my colleague, associate professor Kathryn Dawson, area head of the Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities program, has been leading a cohort of theatre and dance faculty and graduate students who have been collaborating with UT Austin STEM researchers on a multi-year grand challenge involving over 100 Principle Investigators (project leads) across 40 departments, as they study various aspects of climate change and resiliency.
I asked Seth Gordon why he decided to lead the charge in restarting a long-dormant graduate program. “I don’t think we really understood at the time the degree to which we were filling a void that appears to be developing,” he admitted. “We just figured there’s a need in this part of the country.”
Gordon received a grant to study graduate programs in his region—which is larger than you might think. “Oklahoma, the states that touch Oklahoma, and the states that touch the states that touch Oklahoma—that right there is about 10 or 15 states,” he said. Even within that larger region, Gordon found only two comparable theatre directing MFA programs: UT Austin, where I teach, and the University of Arkansas.
His ambitions aren’t just that OU’s MFA students work in the theatre field. “I’m hoping that this program will allow people to find themselves as leaders as much as directors,” Gordon said. “My hope is to expose them to the field of directing, but also to the field of nonprofit leadership.”
Part of Gordon’s mission with this new MFA program is to nurture new companies that form among student cohorts, having already seen some success along these lines with former undergraduates, who have formed a theatre company called Co.Arts Theater Co. (formerly Collective Arts Productions). That company has also welcomed current students into its ranks, so that they’re “forging that first level of connections.”
Another gap in the field that the academy has taken up: providing space and resources to work and bridges to cultivate relationships. When I moved to New York in the early ’90s, not only was I able work in theatre for next to nothing because my rent (in Chelsea, no less!) was $250 per month, but I and my colleagues could work in grungy but cherished hole-in-the-wall venues like Todo con Nada on Ludlow Street, because those venues were affordable to self-produce in. Emerging artists today are often priced out of similar opportunities to build their oeuvre and hone their craft. They may instead get that chance in graduate school. As Alfaro notes, at a well-funded university, those resources can be extraordinary.
“Last year, I had all the second-year stage managers, mostly women and people of color,” said Alfaro. In a single year they got to work on “a big, fat musical, and then Angels in America [1991; Tony Kushner; 18-27 April 2025], and Marat/Sade [The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade; 1963; Peter Weiss (German); 18-27 October 2024], and a site-specific space. Where are they going to get that training and that capacity, on that level, in the way that they’re doing on campus?”
[nb: USC staged only Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches in this season.]
Don’t get me wrong: Graduate programs are not perfect. I often reflect on the times I have not been the ideal mentor that a student deserved. And I am fully aware of how expensive graduate programs can be, even when tuition is waived and students get paid to teach or work as research assistants. With the cost of living, it’s still a massive investment.
But one thing I know to be true: Graduate programs are contributing to our field’s future in so many ways. Our biggest challenge at the moment is to make those contributions visible.
Though his MFA program will no longer be accepting new graduate students, Alfaro is not going anywhere. First he has his current graduate students to serve—and I’d lay down good money that these current students are going to get some of the best teaching of Alfaro’s career. He’s working every day, building new collaborations and devising new systems to keep serving all his students, now and into a new, if uncertain future.
What we all understand is that we have no theatre if we have no new plays. And Luis Alfaro—hands down one of our greatest living playwrights—has always been a mentor by nature. His dedication to passing the torch is true, and is sure to carry on in whatever form comes next.
“I feel like a drug dealer,” he quipped. “I’m gonna make you love writing a play. You won’t even realize we’re gonna write a whole play, but we’re writing a whole play.”
As Kimberly Belflower, a UT Austin playwriting MFA from 2017, put it, “What starts here changes the world.”
[KJ Sanchez is a director,
playwright, and author of The
Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre (Routledge,
2025). She founded American Records and
leads the MFA Directing program at the University of Texas, Austin.]
