| Is an MFA necessary?
Some time ago, Catherdingmom asked about the necessity of the MFA for students who'd completed a BFA. Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to the thread.
Cat, I suspect that what lurks behind your question is thinking about seven years of tuition as opposed to four. Do students <really> need the additional three years of training if they've been through an intensive BFA program?
I wish I could give you a more definitive answer, but in truth, it all depends on the individual actor. In my experience, the BFAs with the most immediate success are the MTs because musicals by their very nature have larger casts. There is work for recent BFAs in MT, especially in national tours. The ACTs, on the other hand, often struggle for a while before they start getting work, because they're competing for a much more limited number of ingnue roles in straight? plays. That's why many of them gravitate to cities with an active theatre scene where they can work in smaller theatres (Chicago, Seattle, etc.) or they head to LA to try to find work in film and television, or they create their own companies. None of these are necessarily bad routes to take, especially when you're young. They may, after a few years, decide they want the MFA and, as Alwaysamom correctly notes, head back to school after gaining some life and theatre experience.
On the other hand, my good friend John David Lutz at Evansville believes that since baby BFAs are not likely to get much work for two or three years anyway, they might as well be in graduate school where they can get more training, playing time, and end up with a terminal degree which would eventually allow them to teach at the college level. He and I don't disagree about this, except in his feeling that it applies to all BFAs.
The <training> value of the MFA, for a student who's been through an intensive BFA program, lies in three things: continued work on the voice, continued work on the body, and work in the classical repertoire. No one in Music would ever suggest that someone with a Bachelor of Music degree in Voice (or any other instrument) was finished with his or her training. Four years is not enough time to master an instrument, or to have learned enough classical repertoire. The parallel in the theatre world applies to actors who want to perform Shakespeare and Chekhov at major regional theatres. They need that additional training, at some point in their lives. But it isn't necessary for everyone.
Hope this helps. |