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TRAINING Andy Robinson, top left, and students in his Spring 2005 class
“A Physical Approach to Acting 499.” The students were doing warm-up
exercises, following guided imagery given by Robinson to spark their
imaginations. Later in the exercise, they interacted in pairs without
speaking. Finally, they integrated some of the new movements into their
monologues. Photo by Mark Berndt |
Issue: Summer 2006
Dramatic Changes
Energized by new programs and stunning new professional opportunities for students, USC’s School of Theatre raises the voltage on a longstanding tradition of furnishing bright lights in the big city.
By Allison Engel
Minutes after Madeline Puzo
first met Michael Ritchie, the can-do dean of USC’s School of Theatre
and the incoming artistic director for the professional Center Theatre
Group made a pact to break all the rules.
Walking to
lunch from USC’s unpretentious Drama Center, the two had barely made it
past Cromwell Field when they were shaking hands on an epic deal.
Trojan theatre majors, they agreed, would grace the boards as well as
the backstages and business offices of one of America’s leading
regional theatre companies. CTG operates three major theatrical venues
in Los Angeles: the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theatre and the Kirk
Douglas Theatre.
By fortunate coincidence, Ritchie and Puzo were on the same
wave-length. He had created a similar arrangement with Boston
University when he was the producer of the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre
Festival. And she had only recently been a member of the CTG family,
having spent years there as a producer.
The handshake came in the fall of 2004. Just a few months later, USC
juniors and seniors auditioned for the $3.1 million Ahmanson production
of Dead End,
Ritchie’s Los Angeles debut. Fourteen out of 42 parts in the
elaborately-staged Depression-era piece went to USC students. Another
student came on as an assistant stage manager. During the show’s
six-week run, they juggled classes and eight performances a week.
Much more than a handshake was needed to make it happen. Student actors
had never before appeared on the Ahmanson stage; they required special
dispensation from Actors’ Equity Association to do so now. But both
Puzo and Ritchie say it was well worth the effort.
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BEHIND THE SCENE Clockwise from top left, USC intern Julie Brinley
looks over contracts in the casting office at the Center Theatre
Group’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters; CTG artistic director
Michael Ritchie and other professional staff meet with student interns
over brown-bag lunches; an intern takes careful notes during the
meeting; Ritchie amuses the interns with war stories from his early
days in theatre; CTG associate producer Kelley Kirkpatrick encourages
students to try stage managing; USC intern Brandon Alter reads scripts
in the artistic director’s office. Photo by Mark Berndt |
The director, Nicholas Martin, told the dean that the USC students were “the soul of the production.”
“Phenomenal and flawless” is how Geoffrey Lind ’06, one of the Dead End cast members, described the experience.
“The leads, who were professionals, were all giving us advice and encouraging us. It felt like a big family,” he recalls.
The USC-CTG casting accord is an educational coup that may jumpstart
the careers of many Trojan thespians. But it is hardly the only good
news from the school. On nearly every front – academic offerings,
faculty hiring, student opportunities – the USC School of Theatre is
redefining what theatre training should be in this city and this
century.
Puzo makes no bones about her goal: she means to make her school the best in the nation.
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USC School of Theatre Dean Madeline Puzo Photo by Mark Berndt |
“Los Angeles should have the great school of theatre,” says Puzo, who is herself an L.A. native. “It’s one of the great cultural capitals of the world.”
Before becoming dean here in 2002, Puzo had been a producing director
at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and associate producer at Center
Theatre Group. Significantly, her career began as a stage manager. Like
the all-knowing figure in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the Stage Manager is the focal point of any production.
In just four years, Puzo has sent powerful ripples of change throughout
the school, working with the faculty to create new Master of Fine Arts
programs in dramatic writing and acting; to retool the critical studies
component; to inaugurate CTG internships; and to open a new design lab
for undergraduates.
As faculty member Andy Robinson says: “Madeline is firing on all cylinders!”
Her most ambitious enterprise might be the new MFA acting program,
which enrolls its inaugural class this fall. Nationwide auditions were
held last spring, and 12 actors of a variety of ethnicities were
chosen. They will work toward becoming an ensemble company that
performs several plays in repertory.
Robinson, the program’s director, is a high-profile stage and screen
actor who was co-artistic director at the Matrix Theatre Company in Los
Angeles. The model he uses is Peter Brook’s multi-national company in
Paris, known for what Robinson calls its “thrilling work” using
nontraditional casting. With this first group of MFA actors, “we are
creating a company here that looks like the world,” says Robinson.
Located as we are in a global city, “I think we are capable of creating
something truly wonderful here.”
Actress Charlotte Cornwell – whose résumé includes starring roles in
the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the Royal
National Theatre, as well as film and television – will teach MFA
acting classes with Robinson. Director and choreographer David Bridel,
who has taught at conservatories and universities in America, Israel
and Europe, will teach movement. Natsuko Ohama, a film and stage
actress and celebrated vocal coach, who begins at USC in the fall, will
teach voice.
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Acting
teacher Charlotte Cornwell coaches students Philip Ross Weiner and
Natalie Urquhart on their monologues, in Massman Theatre. Photo by Mark Berndt |
Puzo
vows that none of this new MFA programming will come at the expense of
the undergraduate majors. Indeed, the school recently announced a
bachelor-level plum in the form of academic-year internships at Center
Theatre Group.
These internships drop students into the
thrum of daily life at a professional theatre. Julie Brinley, a theatre
major/business minor from Anaheim, says she “absolutely loved” her gig
as assistant to CTG acting casting director Erika Sellin. She learned
all about “deal memos,” “riders” and “check avails” as she researched
agents, filed stacks of headshots and studied Equity contracts. It was
a revelation, she says, to see the amount of serious preparation
required on the producer’s side of the audition table.
Brandon Alter, a senior from San Diego, spent his internship in production meetings, castings and rehearsals for 13,
a new musical by composer/writer Jason Robert Brown (a USC adjunct
professor), during the run-up to its workshop production at the Kirk
Douglas Theatre. He sat in on high-level meetings in the artistic
director’s office and opined on scripts under consideration.
“These are working professionals and potential lifetime connections,”
says Alter. “Getting to know them and how they work is a huge asset
when you’re going into this field.”
At the end of the spring semester, both the interns and CTG artistic
director Ritchie declared they had gotten the better end of the bargain.
“It exceeded my hopes,” Ritchie told the interns at one of their
regular brown-bag lunches with CTG managers. “You really delivered. We
had hoped this would not be free labor to be exploited. Reports from
all departments on the learning taking place have been good. Center
Theatre Group wants this program to grow and get even better.”
With all the change
afoot on and off campus, it’s reassuring to note that the school is
blessed with continuity and institutional memory – embodied literally
in the form of John Blankenchip. In his 51 years on the theatre
school’s faculty, he has introduced hundreds of students to the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where USC performances are now a
long-standing tradition.
Drama has been part of USC’s
history since its founding in 1880 – although it did not become its own
department until 1945, and only gained school status in 1990. Some
notable former students include Fess Parker ’51, Forest Whitaker ’82,
Daryl Hannah ’81, Swoosie Kurtz ’68, the late John Ritter ’71, LeVar
Burton ’76, Tate Donovan ’85, Kyra Sedgewick ’88, Anthony Edwards ’82
and Eric Stoltz ’81. Director Andy Tennant ’77 (Hitch, 2005; Sweet Home Alabama, 2002) and screenwriter Grant Heslov ’86 (Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005) are two of the well-known graduates on the other side of the camera.
“There was a strong collection of faculty members when I got here,”
says Puzo. “I came here because I knew how good the program was.”
Plays and musicals – the public face of the school – are its calling
cards to the USC campus and community. There’s the lavishly staged
spring musical, directed for the last nine years by Kelly Ward, recent
winner of both an Emmy and a Humanitas Prize. There are the big-deal
spring and fall dance performances, with dozens of dancers taking
curtain calls. Each year sees four BFA-only shows and two BA-only shows
(the former program gives rigorous, conservatory-style training; the
latter is for less hard-core undergrads who may wish to double-major or
minor in another field). In addition, the school puts on about 10
independent student productions, including readings and experimental
shows. Student troupes such as Commedus Interruptus and MRS Degree also
contribute improv and sketch-comedy performances.
Associate dean Jack Rowe, a faculty member since 1979, reads stacks of
scripts each fall to craft the season’s dozen-or-so shows. In recent
years, the contemporary repertoire has become a bit more adventuresome.
“We have to remember,” he says, “that Tennessee Williams is not a
contemporary playwright anymore. The culture changes so fast that
there’s a kind of impatience now. The ’70s or the ’80s are almost
period pieces. But we also have to stimulate curiosity for what came
before, and will always do classics.”
Rowe also heads up the Senior Showcase – two nights in mid-April when
graduating BFA students present short scenes to casting agents,
managers and talent agents. Held at a theatre in west Los Angeles, the
showcase is a classy affair – complete with professional headshots and
résumés of each actor, printed programs, hors d’oeuvres before and
glasses of wine after. It’s well worth the expense: nearly
three-fourths of the participants in last spring’s Senior Showcase were
later invited to audition or meet with a manager.
One such manager, Andy Corren of Generate, a Santa Monica-based talent
agency, had high praise for the showcase: “It was without a doubt one
of the best ones we industry-types will feast on this year,” he wrote
in a letter to Puzo. “All of your students showed themselves to be
vulnerable, funny, conflicted, smart and sexy. Many of them should
prepare themselves for long, durable careers in the theatre.”
The school has also been at the forefront of USC’s effort to increase cultural participation of all
students on and off-campus. This past year, Puzo chaired the deans
committee for the new Visions and Voices: The USC Arts and Humanities
Initiative – a program of innovative lectures, films, dance, fine arts,
theatre and music sponsored by the Provost’s Office (see related story
on page 16). The initiative will be transformative for USC, Puzo
predicts. “It acknowledges the arts and humanities as an integral part
of education, not something you do when you have the time.”
Events the theatre school has planned for the current academic year
include staged readings, with professional actors, of four dramas
exploring freedom of expression: the McCarthy-era critique Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? by Eric Bentley; Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, on the Church’s silencing of the Renaissance physicist; Mandelstam’s Witness by V.M. Rakoff, exploring Stalinist repression of a poet; and Czech playwright-politician Vaclav Havel’s one-act Protest, examining the public role of the artist.
There will also be trips to see Culture Clash’s Water and Power at the Mark Taper Forum, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Ahmanson Theatre, and Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter’s In the Continuum at the Kirk Douglas Theatre – all featuring post-show dialogues with directors, producers and cast members.
These “reflective components,” held before or after an event, are in
themselves a creative act, says Puzo. And taking students off campus
“allows them to explore the cultural richness that is Los Angeles.”
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›› PERFORMANCE Glimpses of the 2005-06 season. Clockwise from top left: After Juliet, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Swan, Once Upon a Plié, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and A Busy Day. Photo by Mark Berndt |
One of the distinguishing
characteristics of USC’s theatre school is, obviously, its geographic
location in the world capital of the entertainment industry. Yet USC
also distinguishes itself from other theatre schools by the personal
attention it lavishes on students. The student-faculty ratio in studio
classes is a manageable 18 to 1. (As of fall 2005, the school enrolled
546 majors, minors and graduate students; up from 487 in fall 2000.)
While the undergraduate acting program has always been the jewel in the
crown, notes Rowe, “we’ve become a very, very strong graduate program
in a very short time. That’s exciting.”
The “intellectual spine” of the school, as Puzo calls it, is its
critical studies curriculum, recently redesigned by professors Sharon
Carnicke and Meiling Cheng, both well-known theatre scholars. Required
of every student, the program grounds future professionals – be they
actors, playwrights, directors or technicians – in the literature of
theatre, along with the discipline’s artistic and academic
underpinnings.
One of the few things holding back the school is space. Dance, voice,
movement and acting classes all hit a bottleneck in the limited number
of available studio classrooms, says faculty member Paul Backer, who
teaches voice production and speech.
The school operates from a small, 1970 building tucked behind the
muscular brick wall honoring Trojan baseball legend Mark McGwire. More
accurately, that’s where a part of the school operates. Theatre
classes, offices and operations are spread across 17 buildings on
campus – including the venerable Physical Education building. One of
Puzo’s top goals is to have a single building hold studio classrooms
for dance, movement and acting; workshop spaces; a student lounge; and
faculty offices. The school has been conducting space planning with an
architectural firm for more than a year, she adds, in advance of a
capital campaign.
The dean also longs to build up the school’s meager endowment, noting
an urgent need for MFA fellowships and endowed chairs. While Yale’s
drama school, widely considered the nation’s finest, does not disclose
its endowment, it is generally believed to exceed $80 million, she
notes.
Under-endowed and short on facilities, USC’s School of Theatre still
manages to hold its own, ranking among several highly regarded theatre
schools nationally: Juilliard, Northwestern, Carnegie-Mellon, UCLA, New
York University and the University of Michigan among them. That’s quite
an achievement in a crowded field of more than 200 colleges and
universities offering degrees in performance.
A December 2005 New York Times article actually lamented this abundance, noting that it far outpaces demand.
“It’s just tragic how many people want to go into this business,” Alan
Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors’ Equity was quoted as
saying. “These schools are just turning out so many grads for whom
there is no work.”
Those are fighting words for Puzo.
“The article is an incredible dismissal of artists. It is basically
questioning why we are teaching. The implication is that you don’t
think actors should be educated or a cinema artist should be connected
to the world. All good actors are very bright. If they are artists,
they need to be well educated.
“Look at what theatre teaches: the great literature of our
civilization, the subtle school of morals embedded in our literature,
how to collaborate and how to have confidence and tell a story. Such
incredible life lessons! We’re preparing students for any other
profession they want to pursue.”
She gathers steam.
“This profession started in the temple. It has an incredible history.
It continually addresses in a closed, safe place very difficult
questions of personal responsibility. The Greek plays were about the
relationship of the person to the state, and what makes a person good.
When the New York Times
diminishes us because a certain percentage doesn’t end up in the field,
it questions nothing less than the role of arts in society.”
The Stage Manager has spoken. Stay glued to your seats for what comes next.
2006-2007 Season
A partial list of upcoming performances by the USC School of Theatre.
Noises Off – by Michael Frayn
A backstage glimpse at the backbiting world of the stage, seen through a play-within-a-play.
October 5-8. Bing Theatre.
The Threepenny Opera – by Kurt Weill (score) and Bertolt Brecht (text)
The jazz-cabaret classic about a womanizing thief on the run in London’s criminal underworld.
October 26-29. Bing Theatre.
Barbarians – by Maxim Gorky
The arrival of the first railroad shakes up life in a provincial Russian town.
March 1-4. Scene Dock Theatre.
The Pajama Game – by George Abbott and Richard Bissell (book); Jerry Ross and Richard Adler (music/lyrics).
A revival of the 1954 musical finds the light side of management-labor relations.
March 29-April 8. Bing Theatre.