<p>At some BA programs, such as Yale and Harvard, there is absolutely no oversight from the theater faculty on undergraduate student productions. Consequently, when a student director, set designer, actor or playwright makes a bad decision, egregious errors are made and whole productions suffer. </p>
<p>I’ll give you a real-world example: My daughter is at Harvard and is very involved with the theater community there. She recently appeared in the play “Bug.” The production was produced and directed by students working on their own with zero faculty input. The play was presented at the Loeb Experimental Black Box which measures about 150 X 50 feet. The student director made a pre-production choice and created a proscenium stage that went the long way (100 ft). </p>
<p>Now, “Bug” takes place in an SRO (single-room-occupancy) hotel and one of the themes of the play is claustrophobia – people living on top of one another. But the director’s bad spacial-choice created a hotel room larger than anything I’ve ever stayed in, including the presidential suite at the Waldorf Astoria! As a result, one of themes of the play went out the window. Meryl Streep could not have recovered from that kind of bad directorial choice. If there had been oversight from the theater faculty – such as there is at a conservatory – this kind of situation would never have occurred. </p>
<p>So, the whole BA vs. BFA vs. conservatory is a trade-off from my perspective. BA’s (and some BFA’s) get a more well-rounded liberal arts education, but have less overall guidance from theater faculty about whether they are making “good” choices. This lack of oversight can send many acting students in the absolute wrong direction and have a detrimental effect on an acting career, if a student chooses to purse an acting career immediately after graduation. In certain situations, depending upon their colleagues capabilities, it’s almost setting the student up for abject failure upon graduation if they go into the biz.</p>