In the final year of training, we work to tie together all the strands of your training to prepare you to enter the professional world. To this end, there's an increased emphasis on individual tutorial work, specialized dialect work, and coaching in connection with productions. Important classes include working with some of the best teachers in New York to help you begin taking charge of business affairs and learning how to audition, as well as your many options in the world of theatre, film and television. There are additional workshops to broaden your sense of collaboration, including a unique and essential class at the Public Theater, taught in tandem by Oskar Eustis and Suzan-Lori Parks. You also have the opportunity to work on-camera with experienced professionals as well as students from the NYU Graduate Film Department. In addition, there is on-going selection and preparation for your final scenes for your showcase presentations in Los Angeles and New York.
Steve White
Beginning the first semester of the third year we revive the scenes and rehearse them for realism safety and to blend the acting with the physical. At the end of the first semester third year we present the scenes to the entire school at a demonstration of weapon-based scenes.
Meet Steve White
Annie Piper
The third year continues your physical practice, but adds emphasis on seated meditation and grounding. Trusting silence. Trusting stillness. Finding your center. Preparation for “real life”. What is your internal "home base" as a trained actor? Breath work leans toward triggering 'relaxation' effect.
Meet Annie Piper
Fay Simpson
Lucid Body Advanced; Tools for Character Development - This class applies the Lucid Body tools for each character the students are working on in school, promoting the individuation of process; each student will be encouraged to find a private process that is practical and reliable for them to embody a character. This course also covers in depth work with partnering by lifting, throwing and falling as a way of building trust and learning the suspense of risk. The goal of these exercises is to develop the active space of physical listening between two people, and promote impulse based on physical sensitivity, instead of mental control. Finally, the class will encourage the students to create a practical process of coming out of character, to help sustain physical and emotional stability.
Meet Fay Simpson
Scott Miller
The first semester third year is focused on the art of full integration and application. We increase the load the brain must deal with, both physically and mentally while attempting to stay as tension free and expansive as possible in the breath and voice. We begin working on bigger sound in bigger spaces and theaters - the focus here is to keep the integrity of intention in the voice while fulfilling the demands of bigger spaces. We meet for private tutorials in order to tweak any adjustments that need be made and emerge with a few daily exercises to focus on for the individual's unique needs.
During this semester, there is also a concentration with on-camera film and TV work. While students have an acting on-camera class, the vocal version of this concentration explores how breath and voice are used differently in film work vs. live theatre. We work very specifically in this area so the student is left with an understanding of what are the nuances that tend to hold an audience’s attention from a vocal standpoint.
During this final semester we meet less frequently and more in the realm of coaching. By this time, you have created your way of working and little attention is given to altering the choices you've made. The focus is more on pure coaching, a more sterile approach you might receive out in the professional world. Simple adjustments, specific direction - often given for the sole purpose of seeing if you are supple enough to adjust accordingly; we work exclusively in a large theater space and concentrate on deeper (more physically challenging) and more athletic warm-ups. All this work morphs nicely into coaching on the showcase scenes, by this time we’ve built a shorthand which requires very little effort and comes with great ease.
Meet Scott Miller
Shane-Ann Younts
In the Techniques of Voice and Text classes, my goal is to develop the actors' voices so that they are flexible, versatile and strong. The techniques that are taught include exercises to clarify ideas, to sustain thoughts, to build speeches, to express contrasting or parenthetical ideas, and to convey a point of view. In Year Three, all of the technical exercises are connected to their acting training when each student works on monologues from Shakespeare's plays. We work to combine acting with the voice work and with the techniques they have learned. This work is definitely advanced and the students are ready for this step and eager to embrace it. Although these exercises use Shakespeare, everything they learn can be applied to anything from a voice over, to a TV sitcom script, to a monologue from, August Wilson or Chekov, to a film script.
Meet Shane-Ann Younts
Larry Maslon, Associate Chair & T. Oliver Reid
This is a unique class, which combines skills learned during Years One and Two (singing, phrasing, character, style) and brings them together by exploring the fearless, presentational, often outrageous world of musical comedy. Deb Lapidus and Larry Maslon collaborate, drawing on their respective backgrounds (singing and history of musical theater). Students are given solos and duets taken from the best material in musical comedy (from songwriters such as Cole Porter to Mel Brooks; shows such as On The Town to Spamalot) and learn the technical skills of characterization, timing, risk-taking and listening to a partner. Even students who aren’t gearing toward a career in the musical theater field learn about filling an outsize role and committing to large idea in a presentational style. Frequently, the students present their work informally to the rest of the school at the end of the semester.
Meet Larry Maslon
Meet T. Oliver Reid
Janet Zarish, Head of Acting
Scenes in the first slot of this semester are tailored to each actor’s individual needs at this point in the training. Scene assignment is specific and diagnostic, chosen to stretch the actor in those areas where attention is most required; some of these might include language, transformation, size, or an open expressiveness through heart, mind or body.
After being stretched in every way imaginable, we bring you back to yourselves. The final scenes you are assigned are chosen from the current New York Broadway, Off-Broadway, Downtown seasons, and you are cast to type, playing the kinds of roles in contemporary plays you will be stepping into once you graduate. You have come full circle.
Meet Janet Zarish
Oskar Eustis, Suzan-Lori Parks, Scott Illingworth
This class, unique to students of the Graduate Acting Program, involves the basic vocabulary of collaboration among actors, writers, directors, and designers on new material. Students attend a weekly session under the guidance of Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, which folds in students of the Dramatic Writing Program of NYU, supervised by Suzan-Lori Parks. New works are created, changed, evolved, and critiqued in a workshop environment and working relationships are forged.
Meet Oskar Eustis
Meet Suzan-Lori Parks
Meet Scott Illingworth
Guest Teachers
In the fall semester of the third year, we work exclusively on auditioning for the camera, using film and television material.
In the Spring semester of the third year, the Career Class is designed to prepare students for entering the profession. The curriculum includes panels with Agents, Managers and Casting Directors (both theatrical and commercial), as well as work with professional theaters such as Lincoln Center to gain professional audition experience. In addition, we hold six working sessions with professional film and television Directors and Casting Directors. The course's professional collaborators include Bob Balaban, Daniel Swee (Lincoln Center Casting Director), and Findley Davidson (Warner Brothers).