MomCares

Lots of great points have already been made, but let me add from the perspective of someone in my 50s who worked in professional theatre that I never worked with anyone who ultimately regretted having gotten a degree from a fabulous university, but have met many people who eventually felt limited by very focused conservatory training. It is far easier to get further training in singing, dance and acting (and most top performers continue to train for life in any case) than to recreate a solid undergrad education.

It is difficult when young not to be focused on preparation for those first post-college auditions, but over the fullness of a life those become relatively inconsequential. In my experience, the "winners" in theatre aren't those who "make it" to Broadway first, but rather those with a broad base on which to build a lifelong career.

glassharmonica

Thoughtful, interesting post, MomCares.

EmmyBet

I appreciate it, too, thank you.

I think a lot of us parents would like these kids to get some reasonable amount of liberal arts, whether they are BA or BFA. And of course no one wants to sacrifice "quality" (a term I prefer to "top", "prestigious" or "highly-ranked") no matter what degree they seek. It's a hard choice, since there are so many variables to measure, on a personal as well as universal level.

I think there are many people who have come through this forum who truly want the hands-on training and don't/wouldn't regret a lack of traditional "education," and many of them are very happy later on as well. There are people in lots of fields who just want to do the work and would forego the liberal arts foundations. I think it can be said that liberal arts learning can take place later in life, just as the professional training can. I also feel that even among "fabulous" schools the definition of a "solid liberal arts education" varies wildly - I don't know if my other D with her supposedly top-ranked BS has a sufficiently broad foundation, but she sure is happy with it and is currently quite successful!

I am very much in MomCares' camp, but like most of us I prepared myself for my kid to eschew academics for experiential arts training. As it happened, she continued to love academics and in the end struggled mightily with the choice between a BA and a BFA. She always preferred an academically rich BFA, with a training rich BA coming a close second. Her application list reflected this, but since every school has downsides (including being uber-selective!) her ultimate acceptances forced her to look at her priorities that much closer.

In the end, with the schools at hand, she pretty much had to toss a coin. Getting the most of liberal arts and experiential arts was definitely the top priority. She saw enough training and performing gaps at the BA schools (that she was accepted to) and plenty of academics at her BFA school (which I would say is pretty high on that spectrum) that she went with the BFA. She also knows that college won't be the end of her education - and now that she's in her second year and sees how short the time is, she feels this even more keenly.

fishbowlfreshman

The most amusing part of the article to me is that some of them seem to believe that professional training is an "orientation into headshots, auditions, agents, etc." when the conservatories themselves usually lack in that area and typically confine it to the last term. Some even mention "training" in quotes as if they don't believe in such a thing. Others seem to think it's all about networking and connections. Ummm ... CRAFT anyone? Like what you use when you actually book the job? Around eighty hours a week of it? Everybody is still going to be a bit "green" at graduation no matter where or what they studied in school, but remember that "green" is derived from military slang denoting inexperienced soldiers. There's green like a foot soldier fresh out of basic training who happens to know a lot about military history and there's green like a newly minted Airborne Ranger. Who would you rather be when the shooting starts?

High intellect and a good general knowledge base are all well and good, but there's a reason Uta Hagen said it could be an impediment for the actor and Sandy Meisner went so far as to say it's the artist's worst enemy. Each actor has to pick his or her timing as to when to take on "training" and there are a lot of variables as to when the right time will be, but learning this craft in any depth is mostly kinesthetic. The intellectual/analytical component is there, but it's only the tip of the iceburg.

I don't have any problem at all with the "trade school" idea, either. The accredited British drama schools that are generally considered to offer the best, most complete training in the world are very clear as to that being exactly what they are. Then it's been oft said on this forum that studying the great playwrights and living those scenes "from the inside" makes for a perfectly good liberal arts education in and of itself. I've seen several conservatory grads get right into law school and good MBA programs without a hitch when they decided they'd had enough of the biz. Hell, my mom makes it a point to show me the law school recruiting brochures she still receives from when I humored her and took the LSAT my final year of school ...

NJTheatreMOM

Could you explain further, Fish? I've seen a lot of posts on CC over the years quoting some professional or another who say they prefer people to get a BA and then do their training on top of that.

From what I have seen of my son's learning in a conservatory type program, I would tend to agree that a lot of the learning seems to be kinesthetic; but then again he happens to be very interested in physical theatre. It would be helpful if you could elaborate on what you said about kinesthetics.

Gwen Fairfax

Love it, Fishbowl.

MomCares

I have lots of respect for many BFA and conservatory programs and didn't intend to dis them, but in light of the OP article just wanted to share my experience of finding very few 50-year-olds regretting their degrees from Yale or similar programs.

gibby

Having attended a conservatory BFA acting program years ago (Boston University CFA, class of 1977), I had liberal-arts-lite. I think we had to take one non-acting course per semester to graduate. My mother would have preferred if I had gone to a more academic program, so I would have something to fall back on. I remember her telling me about Edgar Buchanan, of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres fame, who supported his acting career through dentistry.

I've been extremely fortunate, but there have been many times in the past thirty-five years that I've thought of giving up my acting career and doing something else. If I had been an English or Physics major, I probably would have left the business years ago. Instead, I stuck it out -- partly because I didn't have anything else to fall back on, and partly because there wasn't anything that I loved to do as much.

After watching me ride the roller-coaster of an acting career her entire life, my daughter still wants to go into the biz. Although she could have gone to a conservatory, I stressed the importance to her of a liberal arts education -- and she's getting one at an institution that doesn't grant a degree in theater. I guess I've become my mother.

stagemum

Alas, Yale is not an option for the overwhelming majority of students. Most kids will have to decide among less prestigious schools, and hope that their choice proves to be the right one. In my son's case, it boiled down to a BA at our very good, but enormous, state university, or a BFA from a smaller, urban school that offered him a significant enough talent scholarship to make it almost competitive in terms of price. I worried about his lack of motivation within the huge university community, although my husband and I felt that it was academically superior. My son seems to be thriving where he is.

EmmyBet

I'm fascinated that there's a college that doesn't even have a BA in theatre - that is unusual! I'm sure with you as an inspiration, gibby, your daughter will do just fine.

My D ended up with only a somewhat broader group of choices than stagemum's S, and if you factor in cost, she had and made the identical choice. So I guess they are pretty similar kids!

As for "craft" - I would say from listening to my D that her goal of having significant, kinesthetic, experiential learning is absolutely being met by her BFA curriculum, beyond what most of the BA programs available to her could have offered (not to say that it wasn't available elsewhere). I think she would agree that she is learning theatre "from the inside."

On the other hand, because she is in a more academically "available" school, she is spending time exploring other subjects as well, for better or for worse as far as her theatre training is concerned (apologies to Uta!). In fact, this week she told me she is planning to minor in Anthropology - as much because she loves it as because she thinks it would be a fascinating subject to combine with theatre. We'll see if - unlike gibby - she does someday decide to follow these interests instead of, or along with, theatre. Anything could happen, as we middle-aged parents definitely know. I'm glad she doesn't feel limited, or stifled, either within theatre or without, at the school she chose.

fishbowlfreshman

NJTheatreMOM, that would take quite a marginally on-topic book! LOL Maybe read Hagen's Respect for Acting along with Meisner's On Acting to get it straight from the horses' mouths although Miss Uta was indeed all about educating oneself as an artist experientially. Also check out writings by M. Chekhov, Lecoq and Meyerhold plus some books by voice teachers like Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater for some ideas as to how acting is primarily a psycho-physical endeavor that is learned kinesthetically. And yes you need to understand the play and its context, but that doesn't require an Ivy League education if you're anything approaching Ivy League material in the first place. And this idea that one needs to spend seven years in school to become a good actor smacks of balderdash in the face of the British "trade schools" consistently turning out better prepared actors than the American Ivory Towers do in three.

I actually spent a semester taking liberal arts classes at my home state's flagship university after I left my first liberal arts oriented BFA where I had mainly taken academic classes anyway. Was it interesting to study Macroeconomics with an in-your-face socialist and take a course in World Cultures taught by a xenophobic neocon? Sort of. Did I generally enjoy the courses in Introductory Philosophy and East Asian Civilization? Yep. Was the Anthropology of Gender, Culture and Behavior absolutely fascinating? You betcha. Did any of them have anything to do with my growth as an actor? Doubtful. Those are just the ones I remember having taken off the top of my head, but did any of them impart enough information for me to do anything but hang myself in conversation with an expert on any one of those subjects? That's about it. Would I have wanted to hang myself had I stayed at my first school or probably ended up in alcohol rehab had I majored in theatre at the second? Yuh huh. Will I find not having not spent four years studying liberal arts an inhibitor if I eventually decide to move onto something else for whatever reason? Doubtful.

But overall, I agree that you have to consider where the kid is at 17 in deciding which route is best. There is no one recipe, but I sometimes feel when I'm reading here that some of the parents are trying to force square pegs into round holes which is exactly what you do if you make a kid who's wants a conservatory and is indeed suited for that kind of education go somewhere to study liberal arts. The only thing worse you could do is make her study something "practical" imho. This I know because it happened to me although it was really more my mom insisting that I take a full scholarship if I was going to study acting as anything else and the only full scholarships out there were for academics. It was like I was penalized for being an A student and a NMF. I've seen it happen to others, too, and it usually turns out messy.

NJTheatreMOM

Thanks, Fish. I guess your answer reinforces my impression that the only way to start to understand the training of an actor is either to do some training oneself, or to read very intensively from various sources such as those you have mentioned.

My son has tried explaining certain things to me, and I have felt some glimmmers of comprehension, but then when I try to share what I feel I know, I realize I don't really understand it very well at all!

I am much, much better than I used to be at telling excellent acting from so-so acting, but I'm still pretty lousy at figuring out whether a play was well directed or just barely adequately directed!!

soozievt

I agree with many of the posts already posted. And anyone who enters Yale as an undergrad for theater studies has to know it is not going to be the same sort of training as one gets in a BFA program. However, I will say that Yale has a ton of performance opportunities and students create lots of theater there. The complaint in the article about not enough teaching the students about the business or networking seems odd as that is a small part of a BFA education anyway.

In any case, graduates of Yale (and other BA schools of its kind) who major in theater can do well when entering the professional theater world. Off the top of my head, my D has friends who are recent grads of Yale in theater and I know one is a lead on a national tour of a musical and another is in a national tour of a well known musical too.

MomCares

This summer I watched two very talented performers from our area return from their respective schools and IMHO the Yale grad left the grad of a tippy-top BFA program in the dust, though in the past I'd considered both equally talented and had assumed the BFA grad would have made better performance progress as a result of his focused training.

This is of course a meaningless sample size, but clearly demonstrated to me that different roads can lead to success.

fishbowlfreshman

^ The BFA student was probably in one of the middle bardos of the four phases of learning. A lot of the American conservatory-based programs take everything from students and rebuild their skillsets from the ground up sometimes leaving what appears to be a regression in skill the first year or two and it could well seem that someone who just got out and used what they had in public performance has made more progress. It's also part of why some don't present their students in public performance until third year.

One criticism of this conservatory approach is that the occasional student remains stuck in the middle of the process all the way through and never reaches "unconscious competence" for a variety of reasons. Another valid criticism is that some actors - especially the truly gifted - are occasionally ruined by this approach and it would have been much better for them to have been trained off the skillsets with which they presented with some adjustments made along the way. This is why you hear some actors like Viola Davis describe their experience at the old school Juilliard program as having been "somewhere between a blessing and a curse." Also know that there are some really great actors and artists of all kinds whose dispositions leave them with little or no tolerance for any form of institutionalized learning and really are best left to their own devices with maybe a bit of mentorship from a respected elder although those people who actually have the needed tolerances to to be successful in the business are maybe a small handful in a generation.

This is third hand info since I wasn't there, but I've talked to a BU BFA grad who did the junior year semester at LAMDA. She said that they started all the BA and BFA students off together but eventually had to separate most of the BA students from various schools off into a separate class after it became obvious that they didn't have the basic skillsets to keep up. I have no idea as to whether that's a yearly occurrence or not.

Then, some of the legendary British actors like Sirs Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen never did a "trade school" but instead did a lot of EC theatre while at Cambridge followed by a number of years apprenticing with the outlying UK repertory companies. Sir Ian spent ten years doing that before he made the move to the West End. He also ended up blowing out his voice because he'd never been taught how to properly use that amazing instrument and spent a lot of time and money rehabilitating and relearning under the tutelage of Patsy Rodenburg. "Wizard, you shall not pass!" wouldn't have had the same effect were it not for her. There's also a really funny video out wherein he describes his "method" although he glosses over how the considerable acting skills he applied were acquired.