The Yale School of Drama looms as seniors muse about their careers post-graduation.

The Cabaret, the Companies, the Dramat, the Drama Coalition, Sudlers, streamers, and an alphabet soup of other theater organizations, theater support facilities, and theater props warehouses compose the massive skeleton that anchors Yale talent to the theater scene. Every week two to five plays go up…and unceremoniously end, cleared away for the next batch.

Websites abound. The Theater Studies major instructs. Professors refine. Professionals direct and act. There aren’t neon signs, but it’s as close to Broadway as all but a few dedicated, driven and audacious students get. Or even want to get.

You won’t find the typical theater experience here. Or if you do, it’s no more important than any of the others. Some students do, inevitably, audition during the day and wait tables at night. They go to an agent, they get auditions, and they try…and they try…and they try. Others might to grad school immediately after completing their undergraduate education. But, according to theater student Cordelia Istel, SY ’10, “Tried and true is tried…but not true.”

It’s easy to think that all actor- and actress-types have vanity mirrors, personalized backstage rooms, and very expensive haircuts. Although I’m sure those caricatures exist, they weren’t the people to whom I spoke. Yale School of Drama professor Ron Van Lieu remarked, “Theater teaches students to understand the structure of language, to use their bodies in a disciplined in expressive matter and to know themselves in an honest way.”

And so it’s not surprising then that theater students pursue a wide variety of interests and applications for their talent. They learn to be individuals as much as they learn the technical skills and earn the stamina that enables them to have a sustainable, enduring, professional career. Some theater students pursue social action; others form companies; and still others gointo film and television. Theater students don’t learn to act so much as they learn to meet their goals, however varied they may be.

Figuring out these goals, and even figuring out whether acting is the best medium through which to meet these goals, is an integral part of the learning experience; it’s also one of the key components of determining readiness for the School of Drama. The Yale School of Drama, reconstituted as a separate professional school in 1955, was the first such school in the Ivy League, and remains a longstanding testament to the ongoing commitment to theater that Yale students first showcased with the formation of the Yale Dramatic Association (the “Dramat”) in 1900.

The application process is rigorous, with an acceptance rate that almost makes Yale College look like a safety school. But beyond the requisite accomplishments, the admission process is not just about the numbers. The admissions office doesn’t preferentially admit those with professional acting experience, it is true, but it does require a certain level of maturity to attain admittance. With this maturity comes “a good sense of one’s strengths, weaknesses, and the lifestyle that they will live.” Students must show evidence of the self-examination, reflection, and openness to criticism that they need to grow as an artist. If they haven’t developed that introspection, they need to learn it; the School of Drama insists less on technical training than on developing a sustainable base from which the actor or actress can base his or her career.

Students admitted to the school pursue a discipline, such as acting, directing, or design. Classes end slightly after midday, and students then pursue their various production agendas.

Projects are put together through the mix of students’ talents—students who pursue directing, direct, etc. Students may also understudy professional actors, or even act themselves, in productions put on by the Yale Repertory Theater.

Students who participate in the Cabaret shake up this mix. The Cabaret is an extracurricular activity, but it allows students to pursue interests outside their field of study—these projects are called “passion plays.”

But students who don’t go to drama school immediately don’t forsake their goals. Istel, who grew up in a theater-oriented family, from the beginning had “more realistic expectations” regarding theater and its process—she plans to try collaborative theater in the city, with friends, and her own vision. But the two aims are not mutually exclusive. Drama school is the end point of many trajectories.

Istel is the co-director of Control Group, an experimental theater company on campus that prizes inventiveness and cheapness in performance. The group is notoriously low tech; they have, for instance used tinfoil to convey the feeling of outer space. They have performed T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in dialogue form. They have walked around Yale on stilts, in orange dresses. At Yale where Sudler grants practically hand out wads of money, and while the Drama Coalition has compiled a handbook for clarifying the inscrutably dense bureaucracy and formula for putting on a play, her stance seems almost reactionary.

Similarly, while Yale provides theater spaces even in its residential colleges, she expresses an interest in found spaces, non-traditional areas of theater performance, like a bar, a park, or a loft, where theater is removed from the traditional audience-stage divide. Found spaces force a different theater philosophy.

Istel remarks, “If you look at theater audiences today, they’re old, they’re over 40, and that’s because theater is expensive…because it’s confined to the literal theater.” Found spaces turns all that on its head. In removing theater from its womb, it is forced to grow, but is not old; it forsakes props, conventional storytelling, traditional interpretations—and even, to some extent, old people. It forces theater on the audience by shocking them with unexpected Shakespeare or Chekhov; people find the theater without even looking for it. It makes theater more accessible, but it doesn’t sacrifice richness. This is not revelatory thinking (it’s been done before), but it waxes and wanes.

Istel speaks highly of a theater group known as Elevator Repair Service; the group gets its name from its founder, who, upon taking an aptitude test, was told that he was most suited for a career as an elevator repair man. It is this freshness, evident in name and style, that Istel is looking for. Particular to groups of this nature is a style known as collaborative theater, in which all members of the company participate in all decisions of style and form. “What frustrates me most,” Istel says, “is that most theater schools require you to pick a specific track, and right now I don’t want to spend three years of my life just acting, I don’t want to restrict myself just yet.” It’s not lack of maturity that stalls entry to drama school but different goals.

Similarly, O’Hagan Blades, PC ’10, will pursue theater in New York City post-graduation from Yale College. When I ask Blades what her plans are, she quips, “Plans sounds too organized, I don’t really have plans.” Blades, active in theater and improv comedy, isn’t sure whether she’s ready to, or wants to, make theater her life; so, for her, part of delaying graduate school in drama is the process of self-discovery.

But like Istel, she also plans to participate in collaborative theater. Collaborative theater, semi-marginalized by the dominance of the Dramat, is also somewhat contradictorily the outgrowth of the tight-knit nature of the theater community at Yale. (Blades is, unsurprisingly, a friend of Istel’s.) Her interest in collaborative theater stems in part from this proximity of talent: “I want to make theater with friends, but who will be in charge, I don’t know…so let’s just do it together.”

But the interest in collaboration is not a necessary or logical outgrowth—part of it is the attraction of its generally experimental nature. This experimentalism is what Blades thinks is essential to the vitality of theater, and it’s continued existence: “What theater needs to do is figure out what it can do better than film, and that’s what I want to work on.”

As film goes Hollywood blockbuster, theater goes for floating bodies above the stage, whirling stages, the tour de force. Both become bloated and sedentary with age. Theater began as monologue, then dialogue, then whole casts. Theater began with just the open-air amphitheater, now it is locked in doors. Theater began with masks. Now it has costumes. Well, what if we went back? We might again see that theater is “about seeing what you can generate with just the aliveness of two bodies.”

At least by one definition. For the theater inclined, there is the major in Theater Studies, where history and method coincide, where from tradition, avant-garde theater sprang. Where you look at these questions, amongst others.

Blades pursues found space theater because it encourages the practice of what she has learned. And for others, who still haven’t gone to drama school, there is the traditional route. While acquiring an agent and waiting tables may be dispiriting and staggeringly difficult, the dream of success is a handy crutch.

And for the lucky few, that dream is realized. Zoe Kazan, ES ’05, a Yale College alumna, and daughter of screenwriter Nicholas Kazan and multitalented mother Robin Swicord, went off to meet success with a Broadway debut in Come Back, Little Sheba, in 2008. She received terrific reviews in the New York Times and has, since then, appeared in several films. Her play Absalom debuted in 2009, and this year she will co-star in A Beheading in Spokane. She even dates Paul Franklin Dano, of There Will Be Blood fame. Kazan is now identified with the ever-elusive Girl Who Made It.

Yale is a liberal arts college. This distinction, in the literature anyway, means it is not a trade school. You’ve heard it all before. Theater Studies is not training, but a human discipline that encourages the exploration of process and consequence. It is about understanding context. It is about critical thinking. The liberal arts education purports to strengthen the mind; it presumes that in learning how to think, we are better equipped to deal with whatever the future asks. It is oft complained that we, Yale College undergraduates, learn no skills, that we live in an ivory tower, high above the real world. In learning for learning’s sake, we forget what that learning is useful for.

The same complaints could be leveled at the School of Drama. As Van Lieu states, “We don’t try to train artists, the aesthetic is not very narrow…we’re very interested in the individual.” The school specializes and professionalizes the Yale College model, but it maintains the same focus on learning about oneself and about others that the undergraduate experience tries to instill. Goal-oriented, yes, but more so about finding one’s goals. Put another way, it’s about finding where you are most comfortable. For Istel, at least, it’s “in a basement, waving flashlights.”

Cover design by Jinjin Sun.