<p>One hopes unalove will notice this and post, since I know she is very involved with the University Theater, and may even have a TAPS (Theater and Performance Studies) major or minor.</p>
<p>My information is definitely third-hand, but not terrible. Both of my kids have been involved with University Theater. Neither was a TAPS major, but both have friends who were/are.</p>
<p>My impression is that there are probably something like 8-12 TAPS majors per year, some of whom are double-majors. I have no idea how many minors there are; from what I remember picking up the minor would be pretty easy if you cared to do that. </p>
<p>You should recognize that an important implication of the relatively small number of TAPS majors is that the University’s theater groups are heavily dependent on non-majors. Theater majors are important to the theater community at Chicago, but they don’t necessarily dominate it at all, and you don’t have to be a theater major to be very involved in theater at any level and in any capacity.</p>
<p>In the context of the University of Chicago undergraduate student body, I think the TAPS majors are mostly bohemian outliers, part of a thin hipster fringe. In the context of the world at large, however, they are very much University of Chicago students – intellectual, driven, hardworking, broad interests in a number of fields. Except for the few who unexpectedly fell in love with theater in college, most of them chose Chicago over places like Northwestern with more professionally-oriented, practical theater programs because they affirmatively valued Chicago’s approach to general education and the intellectual community at the University of Chicago. (Which is not to say that they don’t grouse frequently about the econ majors and pre-somethings in their class.) They run the gamut from people whose main interest is writing plays and screenplays, to actors, to people who are principally interested in theater tech. So there aren’t a lot of people in any category in the major at any particular time.</p>
<p>My daughter took at TAPS history of theater class with some TAPS friends. For their midterm, they were given a choice between writing an academic paper and collaborating to produce a 10-minute scene from one of the plays they were reading. My daughter did the scene with four friends, and afterwards swore that she would never do something like that again, since the amount of work involved – all of her collaborators turned out to be highly motivated perfectionists about every aspect of what they were doing: sets, costumes, lighting, sound AND literary interpretation – had been several times what it would have taken to write a paper herself.</p>
<p>Chicago is a great place for theater, behind only New York and maybe Los Angeles. Most of the TAPS majors are actively engaged in theater outside the walls of the University, furiously trying to network their way into some kind of sustainable theater career. There are lots of ways to do that, both formal internships with big-brand companies like Steppenwolf, and pitching in on one-off, let’s-put-on-a-show experimental projects in empty warehouse space. Most TAPS classes are not necessarily difficult by comparison with other classes, but the TAPS majors are often working themselves to the bone – on their classes, on UT productions, on productions outside the University, and of course on little things like jobs to earn money. The BA projects required of TAPS majors are a big deal, too, especially since they almost always require more than a little help from one’s friends to pull off.</p>
<p>The UChicago theater alumni network is nowhere near as extensive as Northwestern’s, or Carnegie-Mellon’s, or Michigan’s, or NYU’s, or even Yale’s, but it definitely exists, especially around Chicago.</p>