So Many Acting B.A.'s, So Few Paying Gigs

New York Times

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December 7, 2005
Making Artists

So Many Acting B.A.'s, So Few Paying Gigs
By BRUCE WEBER


On a rainy Monday evening in a small rehearsal studio in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, Rachel Hoffman, a casting director for theatrical musicals, was holding in her thrall a host of hopeful young performers, all of them college juniors and seniors, acting students at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Ms. Hoffman's agency, Dave Clemmons Casting, was screening candidates for several shows, including out-of-town productions of "Little Shop of Horrors" and "Cats." But the students who waited anxiously for their turn weren't just hoping to earn a job that night; they were also fulfilling a course requirement. Ms. Hoffman was giving a hands-on lesson, not in the art of performance, but in the art of the audition.

At a time when more colleges are producing more actors than ever and the job market is stagnating, Ms. Hoffman's class is emblematic of how the training of American actors has shifted in the 21st century. Instead of the pure education-of-an-artist approach that dominated in undergraduate acting programs through the 1980's and 90's, there is now a growing emphasis on helping students find work in a famously competitive field.

The result is something of a confounding dilemma both for educators and for some professionals, who fear, on the one hand, that vocational training robs student actors of necessary artistic exploration and, on the other, that schools have to do a better job of preparing actors for the grim realities of professional life.

"It's a big, internal curricular wrestling match," said Gregg Henry, the artistic director of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, a nationwide program involving hundreds of theater schools. "How do we effectively prepare our students for a career that has no interest in them being part of it? And how do you plug that into an effective undergraduate education?"

Despite what seems like an enormous boom in entertainment outlets, acting jobs have not grown much. Actors Equity, the stage actors' union, which keeps track of the number of weeks worked by union members, has reported very modest gains since the 2001-2 season, from 277,000 workweeks to 294,000, a rise of less than 2 percent a year. The number of movie roles cast in 2004 rose slightly from the previous year, according to figures published by the Screen Actors Guild in October. Meanwhile, roles for actors on television, diminished by the increasing popularity of reality shows, slid for the second year in a row, by 3,523, a 10 percent decline from 2003.

At the same time, the consensus is that the number of undergraduate acting degrees conferred has never been higher. The National Association of Schools of Theater, which accredits some graduate and undergraduate programs, lists 146 members, but it does not include some of the country's biggest or most prominent schools (like N.Y.U. and Juilliard). These days you can get a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Fine Arts in performance, by most estimates, at more than 200 American colleges and universities. All by itself, the Tisch School - which offers by far the nation's largest undergraduate performance program - graduated more than 300 actors in June, almost triple the number in 1990.

"It's just tragic how many people want to go into this business," said Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors Equity. "These schools are just turning out so many grads for whom there is no work."

Perhaps. But as Mary Schmidt Campbell, the dean of the Tisch School, pointed out, these are only undergraduates, with many life decisions yet to make. Many Tisch students, she said, go on to work in show business in other ways, as an agent or producer, for example, or go on to law and business schools. What's more, she noted, the Tisch program requires a spectrum of liberal arts courses around the core conservatory training.

Actually, it wasn't so long ago that if you were a teenager hungering to be an actor, the last place you'd prepare would be college. Maybe you'd go to New York and study in a private conservatory environment with a guru like Stella Adler or Lee Strasberg. Maybe you'd study accounting, try out for amateur productions of "The Music Man" and "The Taming of the Shrew" and then apply to a graduate program like Yale's to hone your skills as an artist. Maybe you'd go to Los Angeles and hang out on the stool at Schwab's Pharmacy and look pretty. There was, in fact, no such thing as an undergraduate degree in acting until the mid-60's, and you could probably count the number of schools offering one on two hands for more than a decade after that.

The explosion in the number of programs has come in the last 15 years, a natural outgrowth, educators say, of the increasing influence of the entertainment world. It's a familiar pattern, one that resulted, for example, in a swelling of business school enrollment during the 80's, and that at other moments in the last half century increased the numbers of aspiring doctors and lawyers.

The rise in the number of programs offering B.A. and B.F.A. degrees in acting has undoubtedly democratized theater training in this country, said Scott L. Steele, the executive director of the University/Resident Theater Association, a consortium of graduate theater programs and professional theaters.

"The development of excellent programs at a number of universities around the country has displaced the half dozen schools that 20 years ago claimed the exclusive ability to train great actors or designers," he said, citing relatively youthful programs at University of California at Irvine; the University of Washington; Penn State; and Florida State, among others. But not every program is so scrupulous, he said, and the larger volume of students being turned out also means more students are being insufficiently prepared, both artistically and vocationally.

"We're producing too many people," Mr. Steele said, "many of them poorly trained or moved into the field without the connections or relationships necessary to make their transition to a career possible. It's as if medical school were graduating people without giving them internships at a hospital."

Arthur Bartow, the departing artistic director of Tisch's drama department, takes a more sanguine, if wry, view: "Do we have too many actors? Well, you can never have too many good ones."

Nonetheless, even schools with longstanding reputations for artistic excellence are pushing hard on the practical side of an actor's education. At schools like Tisch, Carnegie-Mellon, Juilliard, the North Carolina School of the Arts and the University of Michigan, courses in "the business of the business," with lessons in things like how to find an agent and what makes a good head shot, are becoming as steadfast a part of the undergraduate curriculum as voice training, script analysis and Shakespeare.

The concentration on practical matters is a necessity, both educators and professional theater people say, both as a way to entice top students and to reassure their tuition-paying parents. As college costs have skyrocketed (tuition alone at Tisch this year is $31,690, compared to $14,940 in 1990), educators also view career preparation as something of a moral imperative.

"The competition for students is getting stiffer in all of the arts," said Ms. Campbell of the Tisch School, which has contracts with six professional studios to provide conservatory training, and which counts dozens of working actors, directors and designers among its 300 faculty members. "But we have New York. Our location is one of our biggest advantages."

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Tisch graduates do get some work out of school, "but it's pretty much impossible to compile actual statistics because the number changes from year to year," said Lee Gundersheimer, who works as an industry liaison for the drama department. "Besides, if somebody's working on a movie this month, he might not be next month." But, Mr. Gundersheimer said, each year, 32 Tisch undergraduates, "the ones who are deemed most ready," are chosen by the department for an industry presentation, "and all but one or two get a response."

Ms. Hoffman's auditioning seminar is one effort to iincrease the responses. Too much vibrato, Ms. Hoffman told a young man who sang the U2 song "With or Without You" and finished each line with a lovely tremulous quiver. Vibrato is more expressive than communicative, she said; in an audition, you want to communicate.

He still had trouble. "It's really hard, I know, to stay on pitch when you're straight-toning," Ms. Hoffman said, this time adding, "So you can add the vibrato if you feel yourself sliding off."

On the same night that Ms. Hoffman was handing out advice, Scott Edwards, an agent from the Harden-Curtis Agency, was scouting for new clients among another group of Tisch actors at Stonestreet Studios, an N.Y.U. affiliate that specializes in film and television work. The students trooped in front of him to deliver monologues from plays like Kenneth Lonergan's "This Is Our Youth" and movies like "Cruel Intentions" and "Envy," and received the same kind of pointed instruction that Ms. Hoffman was handing out.

"You want to make your first moment count," Mr. Edwards said to a young woman whose delivery of a sexual confession he deemed too timid in getting started. He warned a 21-year-old senior with head shots that made him look younger to make sure not to send out conflicting signals by trying to audition with material for older characters.

"These are good because you can play young," Mr. Edwards said of the photos. "But I'd definitely go with monologues for no older than 18 or 19."

This is precisely the kind of experience that new acting schools in Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma have a hard time matching. Still, at the very least, almost every far-flung undergraduate program now routinely brings its students to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago to help them showcase their talents before an invited audience of agents and casting directors. One veteran agent, Mark Schlegel, a partner at the Cornerstone Talent Agency in New York, said he received at least 50 such invitations every year.

"Twenty years ago, you didn't sense the kind of urgency these kids have now," said Mr. Schlegel, who represents many successful New York theater actors, including Jefferson Mays and Jayne Atkinson. "Now they think if they don't get signed by an agent right away, they've failed. They never think they've got to learn the ropes a bit, get seasoned. They want to know, 'Where's my TV series? Where's my film audition?' It's wrong, of course, but that's what they think, and in a business where we fall all over the young ones, you can't blame them."