The arc of production at the Grad Acting Program is organized over three years in a variety of projects and productions selected specifically for each cohort of actors that expand your ability to work with different texts, and collaborators on an evolutionary route towards entering the professional arena as an actor prepared--and open to--any eventuality and experience. Faculty members support these productions with their involvement in your progress at rehearsals; they will both work with you directly on these productions and/or support the other professionals who come to work at Grad Acting.
The first year concentrates on a variety of projects performed in the classroom:
Ensemble Project: You are thrown headfirst into an ensemble project designed to establish a foundation of collaboration and curiosity in your cohort. Focusing on adapted literature, this project explores continual response to prompts and shared devising rather than leading towards a final product.
Rehearsal Into Production: This project begins to take the tools learned in your first semester and put them into practice working together as a cohort on a single text.
Shakespeare Projects: The year ends with the cohort split into two groups working on a pair of Shakespeare plays. You strive to apply a range of tools introduced in Year 1 over the arc of a play and within the demands of Shakespeare’s heightened text.
The second year builds on these ideas in fully realized productions in our smaller performance spaces. The arc of these projects seeks to bring elements of your classwork to bear on the demands of a role in full production. The class is usually split into two separate, concurrent productions, which helps provide an equity of roles for everyone in the ensemble.
Realism: You begin with a realism project. These plays are selected with your specific cohort in mind and meant to bridge from your classwork into material that directly connects closely to the kind of demands explored in Scene Study classes.
Cabaret: Directed by your singing teacher, Deb Lapidus; this allows you to communicate thoughts and feelings via song - asking each actor to work from a place of expansive truth and courage, no matter your previous singing experience..
Project/Project: Everyone works together on an ambitious yearly project that splits the ensemble into two separate productions played concurrently in two connected spaces. Built in collaboration with a guest writer, these are often explorations of themes and a collage of material and sources. The project demands students find ways to take their training and apply a sense of truth and integrity within the work to material and production demands that are often highly technical and non-realistic.
Heightened Text: Finally, the company splits into two separate productions that focus on heightened language. Again chosen with the specific cohort in mind, these plays ask you to take the newly honed skills from year 2 and deploy them in projects that demand greater dexterity with language and ideas than the rest of the projects that year.
The third year productions move you towards your professional career. Your season is performed in our state-of-the-art theatres at The Paulson Center. The season itself reflects a varied repertory: classical plays (often including Shakespeare), contemporary plays, and recent successes from Broadway or off-Broadway. All of these productions are directed by artists who are faculty and other working professionals, with a wide range of experience and expertise. An important aspect of your final year is "Freeplay" which allows you to conceive, produce, write and/or act in your own performance piece; we regularly have a festival of over a dozen such projects for each Freeplay season. Your production year culminates in your showcase presentations, which give you the opportunity to present your talents live in New York and digitally to professional agents, casting directors and producers.