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Tristan Reed

E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu.

Illustration

JESSICA DONIG/DAILY BRUIN

This past Saturday, in the courtyard of an anonymous Roebling apartment complex, theater department students held their annual welcome party for incoming freshmen.

It was, in a word, theatrical. Around midnight, the crowd jeered playfully as two young male exhibitionists embraced near an open window on the second floor. Below, first-years scampered about, costumed (at the behest of upperclassmen) in immaculate white, eager to make excellent first impressions.

But the actors, ecstatic as they are to enter the theater program ranked No. 1 by the Gourman Report on colleges, may end up dissatisfied.

They enter a department plagued, until recently, by low morale. Such sentiment may have been due to the department’s former flaws that have been recently reformed. It is probably due more so, however, says theater Professor Gary Gardner, to students’ own illusions about the profession into which they are taking their first steps.

We can learn from their struggle. Success after college – and while in it, they may find – depends less on what you’re given and more on what you get for yourself.

Shelley Giesler graduated from the acting program last year and has just moved to Chicago to begin her career. She left, though enriched as an actor and intellectual, with the sour feeling that the department had not lived up to her expectations.

“I wish the department treated us like we were worth what they told us we were,” she said, referencing the exclusive selectivity of admissions touted in the department’s literature.

Her complaints, echoed by others, are valid.

Before this year, undergraduates, unlike those at most top acting schools, were only cast in shows written or directed by graduate students and performed on Macgowan’s diminutive classroom stages. The shows directed by professors and famous visiting directors as well as those performed in the grand Freud Playhouse, with the exception of the spring musical, were closed to them.

This arrangement left students, who are trained primarily in realist acting technique, able only to ply their trade in the nonlinear, absurdist and occasionally downright bad plays preferred by graduate students. Most vexing, however, is that undergraduates are denied a senior showcase. The showcase, common at other schools, is an event in which students can springboard into their careers by showing off to agents and casting directors.

For students like Giesler, such a formal introduction to the industry would validate the prestige accorded the department by its rankings. Her complaint echoes those of undergraduates across campus, each asking for more real-world opportunities.

Luckily for current students, the department reformed this year. The newly appointed head of musical theater, Gardner, a charming, somewhat flirty, older man beloved by his students, admits that past options available to undergraduates did not represent “a wide spectrum of acts.” He also laments that undergraduate productions were poorly funded.

This year, four fully funded and professionally written plays will be available just for undergraduates. One, Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed,” will show in the Freud Playhouse.

Students are happy. “The teachers finally listened,” said Mike Oleon, a fourth-year musical theater student.

Still, however, Gardner will not concede the showcase. He says his students – and all undergraduates – are “part of the generation that wants immediate results.”

“I get mad at our students – and I love our students,” Gardner said, “Because they think we’re going to hand them a career in their lap.”

Such a gift, he argues, is impossible to give in a business where success is more often than not determined by looks and panache rather than smarts and talent.

A showcase, Gardner says, would do little for students’ careers that they cannot do for themselves. Anyway, he says, agents are already invited to the plays and musicals, which display talent far better than a five-minute showcase slot.

Gardner frames the program thus: “We try our darnedest to prepare them for the world – not stardom, but for the world.”

In many ways, that’s all a university can do. We as students are right to demand our fair share of UCLA’s stage. The rest is up to us.