The Search for a Middle Ground

At Harvard--specifically in the Loeb Drama Center--an attempt is being made to find a middle ground between the theater school, professional or collegiate, and laissez-faire amateurism.

For the students who intends the theater as his career, the logical place is a professional school. (I leave aside the question as to whether there is a first class, or even a competent professional theater school anywhere in the U.S.) This remark will probably put me in difficulties with those who maintain that even theater people should have a liberal arts training. Personally I don't believe it is necessary, but it may be helpful--for all but actors; and for them it can be actively disabling, because any subject taught to a serious acting student which is approached from an academic, scientific or any other point of view but that of the theater--voice, movement, character, style, freedom and personal reality--may endanger his slow and arduous artistic development.

You will notice that I regard a trained professional actor with as much respect and seriousness as the world regards a surgeon, a tax lawyer or a bishop. If we are to a have really capable professional actors (there are only a few on display in this country at present), their training will have to be as disciplined, as rigorous and exclusive as that of other professions. This is why In believe the liberal arts curriculum can be dangerous for committed young actors: such programs are necessarily general, diffuse, non-vocational, directed more to the mind than to the special kind of imagination which the actor needs to develop as carefully as he develops his body and his voice. Genuine acting is a vocation. It needs to be studied in a special and carefully planned way.

Now for the other side of my case. Between Boston and Los Angeles over 1500 colleges and universities offer courses for academic credit in theater work. Acting courses, directors' laboratories, design courses, seminars in scene-painting and stage lighting, in children's theater, programming, business management; courses in playwriting, stage managing, dramatic criticism and theater history, as well as physical expression or dance, voice, and dozens of related subjects--all these are attracting an unprecedented number of undergraduates and graduate students. "Dramatic Art" or "Theater" or "Speech and Drama" (theater is often subordinated to speech departments) have in the past 25 years acquired enough academic respectability, thanks to the work of George Pierce Baker and those of his students who turned to teaching, to become more or less independent, more or less honorable divisions of study under college programs in liberal arts.

Most of the colleges and universities which offer courses in theater are careful to include in their catalogues a note disclaiming any specific intent to prepare young people for professional careers in the theater. They talk about drama and the theater as adjuncts or components of the liberal arts training, but--possible for tactical reasons--they veer sharply away from any implication of professionalism, from any suggestion that their students are being prepared for careers in the professional world of the theater. Yet the completeness of their curriculum in Speech or Drama or whatever it's called, the very existence of a "major in theater arts," inevitably implies, or anyway allows enthusiastic students to believe, that their college training is thorough enough, expert enough and exhaustive enough to justify them in considering professional careers. It tacitly suggests that this extensive and academically accepted program is a professional apprenticeship in itself, however much the catalogue protests.

For young men and women who do not intend going into the theater professionally, don't such exhaustive academic programs seem a bit excessive?

Now if you will grant for the moment that there is no intrinsic need for elaborate curricular courses in theater practice for students without professional aspirations, does it follow that no instruction or advice should be offered to such avocational students? I don't think it does. After all, they perform before a public which has a right to expect some competence, their work necessarily reflects credit or discredit on play and playwrights, their work is (or anyway can be) educational for themselves and their audiences (an acting group concerned only with its own rewards deserves no public), and students actors are usually, in name and in fact, associated with the college, which itself has (one hopes) some artistic standards. Furthermore, these amateur students of theater have some right to the same experience in planning, foresight, logic, discipline, as is offered them in more straight-forwardly academic programs: in physical sciences, who would build a laboratory and turn in over to untrained students without some experienced guide or instructor on hand? Does anyone expect the football, lacrosse, rugby, or swimming team to perform capably without coaching? Some instruction is essential: "major" or concentrated instruction belongs in professional schools.

Now back to Harvard and the Loeb Drama Center. You will see, I hope, how our reasoning has moved: enough instruction--extracurricular--to train the non-professional in his responsibilities, to help him to respect thoroughness, care, technical skill and intelligent planning, to show him how and why; but not enough to make him think of himself as a professional. He is not, and can not be professional until he works much longer and more concentratedly in his theatrical specialty than he will be able to do at Harvard, or for that matter at any other university, possibly excepting Carnegie Tech.

After all, most Harvard men and Radcliffe women are sensible, realistic and intelligent; and if any of them genuinely Knows he intends to be a professional theater man, he knows also that his proper place is not here, but in a school devoted singlemindedly to his craft.

But I hope he also knows he will be welcome at the Loeb Center for as long as he elects to compromise his craft with the liberal arts and stay among us.