Backstage at Yale Drama admissions

Last year, 1,270 hopefuls applied to the Yale School of Drama. Sixty-eight got in. That's a five percent acceptance rate. And you thought getting into Yale College was hard.

A look at the bare facts of Drama School admissions is daunting: Out of the thousands of hopefuls who request information, out of the hundreds who actually apply, out of the dozens who are granted interviews or auditions, a mere fraction actually make it past the final cut and spend three years learning in what is arguably the finest Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in the country.

Admissions is "an enormously difficult process," Earle Gister, director of the acting department, said. Gister sees approximately 900 actors every year, in New Haven, Chicago, and San Francisco. He picks 16. Gister has been teaching and auditioning actors for 34 years, 17 at Yale, and his criteria haven't changed.

Although auditioners look for things as specific as use of movement and as elusive as a sense of humor, "the bottom line remains talent and imagination. Once you've experienced it, you can recognize it very quickly," said.

If the process is difficult for professors, it isn't any easier on the applicants. "Auditioning in general is pretty scary," Adrienne Carter, TC '96, DRA '99, explained. As for the Yale audition, "it was terrifying, actually." Each actor is given just four minutes in front of Gister and the School of Drama staff: two for a Shakespearean monologue and two for a contemporary piece.

Carter knew many drama students from her undergraduate work at the Cabaret, and she solicited their help and criticism as she prepared her audition: Viola's ring speech from Twelfth Night and a selection from P.J. Gibson's Conversions. In February of her senior year, Carter performed her two audition selections for Yale drama faculty and answered their questions in a brief interview. Of course, she wasn't satisfied with her performance. "I didn't think I got in," she said.

Michelle Lee, DRA '98, a playwrighting student, also applied straight from undergraduate studies. Both Carter and Lee knew this put them at a disadvantage. "There is indeed a predisposition to take people who have been out working," Gister said. "They understand what the profession is about and understand why they want to come here." Lee was certain of her chosen career, however, and in her studies at Princeton--she has a degree in English and certificates in theater and dance--had already made contact with professors at the school.

All playwrighting applicants send in a script before a select few are interviewed, and choosing that one manuscript to submit is just as difficult as deciding on four minutes of monologues. "It's hard to pick which script represents you fairly and thoroughly," Lee said. Ultimately, it wasn't the application that was nerve-wracking -- "The interview was pretty painless," she noted -- but the waiting: Lee didn't find out until a few weeks before graduation. She applied to only one other school besides Yale. "I just went for it and said, `This is where I want to be.' It was a pretty big risk." Like Carter, she said, "Yale is an intimidating place. I didn't think I had a shot."

Rick Morris, DRA '97, a theater management student, was teaching public school English and drama and frustrated by the limited curriculum.

"[I thought] if I went into theater management, I could help give kids exposure to the performing arts," he said. He decided to apply to Yale after talking to an alum. In early March he got a letter requesting an interview, where the managing director, marketing director, and dean of the Drama School questioned him about his goals. He was surprised to make it even that far in the process.

Yana Landowne, DRA '98, studies directing at Yale and studied acting as an undergraduate at NYU. On her second try applying to Yale, she was called in for a directing audition: working for 45 minutes with two actors she had never met. Landowne carefully prepared her script--a scene from Brüchner--and practiced a lot in New York first, enlisting the help of colleagues at the Playwrights Horizon Theater School.

Nerves are the biggest obstacle to any successful audition, Landowne noted, but the School of Drama staff "do what they can to make you not be nervous. People think it's such a big thing, they get nervous and can't show their stuff." After her audition, Landowne didn't think much of her chances. But was grateful for her 45 minutes. "I thought it was a tremendous opportunity just to audition," she said. "If I didn't get in, that was my Yale education."

Clark Jackson, DRA '97, another acting student, took a more roundabout path to York Street. Though he went to a performing high school near Atlanta, he spent his undergraduate years at Stanford University planning first to be a lawyer--"I'd act in the courtroom"--and then to do graduate work in research psychology. "I was afraid of acting," he said. "It's such an unstable career."

Jackson continued to pursue his latent interest in the theater, and in his senior year he rewrote Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire as a multimedia presentation set in Los Angeles during the post-Rodney King riots. Jackson loved the "immediate effect on the community" the performance evoked, especially the way in which acting connected him to people.

Research would never be like this. Plus, graduate work was easy and safe. "I guess I've always been one of those crazy people types drawn to the unknown," Jackson explained. He dropped his master's program in psychology--the first time he'd quit anything--and after a 4 a.m. phone call to his mother, decided to devote himself to his first love, acting. He then spent three months with a Suzuki-trained coach preparing his four minutes.

The story of Jackson's Yale audition has become theater lore among his Stanford friends. He applied to several schools, but at Yale he had "the least amount of nerves and my best audition," he said. Afterwards, he asked Gister what kind of actors they were looking for. "Talented actors," Gister told him.

Jackson then asked him what was taught at the School, and Gister mentioned "transformation and sublimation of the ego." Jackson said that he was much more confident with the physical side of his acting than the mental/emotional side. Gister agreed and told him, "You had no inner life." After that comment, Jackson was sure he hadn't been accepted.

Yet Carter found out after spring break that she would stay on in New Haven, Lee got a phone call from the head of playwrighting telling her she had made it, Landowne got her good news late in the spring, Morris found a congratulatory letter waiting for him in May. Jackson called the Drama School, "just to make sure I didn't get in," and had to cancel his flight home when he heard that he was on the list. Shock was the common reaction. For most of these students, though, the decision to accept Yale's offer of admission wasn't too difficult. Jackson was at first reluctant to come; Harvard was actively recruiting him, and as he put it, "I'd be someone special there." Ultimately, "it was a career decision," he said.

And Yale has not disappointed. Once they had cleared the admissions hurdle, these students generally found an intense environment with plenty to teach. "This school is teaching me things I didn't know how to ask to learn about," Landowne explained.

Lest you have any illusions that this Yale school is easy, the Drama School seems to require at least as much out of its students as the undergraduate college. "You spend the three months before you get here being really excited that you got in," said Karen Hartman, DRA '97, a playwrighting student, "But once you're here, you're just doing the work." Hartman noted that this can be hard on playwrights, because a writing program is basically, "three years of output with no input."

Students find the school generally devoid of the competition and pettiness that can mar arts programs. "There's so much honest support of each other's work and love of the craft," Landowne said. "I feel I'm in a place where everyone's working as hard as I am." She described an early assembly of first-year students, where "suddenly second- and third-year students just get up and applaud.

Once you've gotten through the enrollment process, the school just wants you to grow." Carter concurred: "It seems to be a very warm environment," she said. "I feel like we're all equally talented." Still, working with the same handful of colleagues seven days a week for three years can be trying. Jackson describes how a "high-school mentality" can creep in to some dealings among actors. "Because it's drama, there's no clear line between the personal and the political," he said, "It's all about personality." The closeknit artistic community that Yale provides may be intense, but it's also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. "By now, we know each other pretty well," said Hartman, who is in her last year. "You learn from other people's work."

And of course, there are also plenty of practical benefits to studying at Yale. When she sends out her scripts, Lee notes, "because they have the Yale School of Drama name on them, they'll get read." Students are quick to stress that Yale teaches both sides, the craft and the business. The theater management program requires a semester internship at an area theater, as well as continual work at the Yale Rep. "There's a lot of hands on practical experience," Morris said. "We get an opportunity to work on every aspect of the theater." In a field where work is at best scarce, this kind of training--and a Yale degree--opens a lot of doors.

But the Yale name also carries baggage of a different kind. The size and exclusivity of the Drama school creates an aloofness from the rest of the University and the world in general. "It doesn't need all the mystique," Landowne said. "its just a good program with people working really hard." Much of that `mystique' is evidenced in Yale's recruitment procedure--or lack thereof. "At one point, we had a minority recruitment office," Maria Leviton, School of Drama Registrar, said. "We don't have any formal recruitment now." The minority recruiter "was here on a grant," Morris explained. "When the grant ran out, they did nothing to replace this person." Though Gister points out that the school does advertise in minority publications--"that's the only advertising we do"--the general assumption is that if you should know about the School of Drama, you already do.

This isn't necessarily the case. "The means by which information about the school is disseminated is elitist and exclusive," Jackson said, adding that many potential students still view Yale as "primarily white and mainstream". Jackson is part of a group called the Folks, the Organization of African-American Students at Yale School of Drama, which publicizes Yale at forums like the National Black Arts Festival. He describes the mission as "trying to make people more aware".

The school does show a strong commitment to diversity in its admissions. "I want a composite group of people," Gister explained, "who reflect the heterogeneity of the ethnic makeup in this country." A look at photographs of the acting classes reveals a mix of all sorts of faces. Other departments may not be quite as varied: Lee is not only the only black female playwright at the school, she's the only female playwright in her year. But as many students pointed out, goals of diversity are not always compatible with the school`s small size and traditional bent. Each acting class, for instance, conforms to a rigid split: ten men and six or seven women. "Because of the classical nature of our program, you just don't have the roles for women," Gister said. "Look at Shakespeare. Across the board, you can say that about dramatic literature. Its predominately male." But other changes wouldn't sacrifice this classical emphasis. "I think the real criminal lack of diversity is in the faculty," Hartman said. In three years of classes, she's had two female instructors; all the rest have been white men. This homogeneity means that most of the rich diversity in work presented at the school is student-generated.

Diversifying the faculty may attract a larger minority applicant pool. But even critics are quick to point out that the problem is larger than any one drama school. "To make changes in who`s at the School of Drama as a student," Hartman said, "you'd have to make changes in who`s interested and working in the theater, which hopefully can happen." Yale hopes to take a lead in making that happen by creating a diverse group of talents who can go on to change the face of the business. "The theater won't change until training programs train sufficient numbers of [diverse] people," Gister said.

Yet beyond concerns about diversity, and careful interviewing, and practice and application, there is an element to School of Drama admissions that is completely unquantifiable. All agree that the process works, and may even be enjoyable--"I love meeting all of these actors and talking with them," Gister said-- but all also admit that the most crucial factor is a nebulous blend of luck, coincidence, and natural gifts--and being able to recognize all three. "You cannot really predict what the profession is going to find useful," Gister said, "You make your decision based on your own aesthetic." Or as Lee put it: "There's no objective standards on talent." Nevertheless, getting into the Yale School of Drama is a standard most theater professionals recognize or covet. "People try to put a finger on it," said Jackson of admissions, "but there's no real formula." Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, dozens of these people will call the York St. office requesting application information--and this elusive, exclusive process will begin all over again.