And Avoid Making the Same Mistakes I Did
by David Fairhurst
1) Don’t put yourself in a huge financial hole.
There’s no need to belabor the obvious: Trying to hold down a day job that pays you enough to rent an apartment and cover your bills in America’s most overpriced city (New York or L.A.—take your pick) while also allowing you sufficient time and disposable income to find work in the world’s most competitive industry is extraordinarily difficult. Add $600 a month or more in student loan payments and you’ve entered fantasyland.
Welcome to my world. The sad irony of many high-priced M.F.A. theatre programs is that they saddle you with such a huge debt burden when you graduate (well over $100,000 in my case) that it becomes almost impossible to pursue the very career you’ve been trained for. A six-figure debt may not mean much to a law school grad eyeing the partner track at a Midtown firm. But to an M.F.A. holder who’ll be forced to serve drinks at Bennigan’s (or copyedit at Back Stage) for God knows how many years before his acting career starts paying dividends, it’s a different story. If you’re not careful, you could find yourself, like me, spending so much time trying to pay off the bill for your acting training, there’s little time left for actual acting.
In 2003, three years after graduation, I was in such a deep financial hole that I had to make the embarrassing decision to join millions of other desperate Americans and file for personal bankruptcy. (In another irony, the young New York bankruptcy lawyer who handled my case told me that bankrupt M.F.A. grads constituted one of his major income streams.) Though bankruptcy helped by eliminating my other debts, student loans—except in rare cases—are not dischargeable in court.
And so the following year I found myself sitting across from Meredith Vieira as a contestant on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and thinking, “Oh, God. This is what I’ve been reduced to: going on game shows to pay off my student loans.” (My $50,000 prize was nice, but after taxes it merely reduced my debt from that of a medium-size Third World country to that of a small Third World country.)
So unless you like the idea of helping a law school grad pay off his student loans, or cozying up to Alex Trebek on the game-show circuit, think hard before applying to any M.F.A. program that will leave you mired in debt. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is: From now until the day I’m old and gray, every single career decision I make (and many noncareer decisions, too)—from the selection of a headshot photographer to the choice to focus my career on the lucrative but soulless commercial market instead of the deeply satisfying but low-paying world of live theatre—will be influenced by my dire financial situation.
Of course, if you’re independently wealthy, you have rich and generous parents, or your uncle is Steven Spielberg, feel free to ignore this advice and spend away.
2) Study with theatre professionals, not teaching professionals.
George Bernard Shaw’s oft quoted line “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” applies as much to acting as to anything else: The industry, unfortunately, is filled with failed actors now making a living by teaching the techniques that didn’t work for them to unsuspecting students.
The faculty at the school I attended, I hasten to add, was top-notch: My teachers were amazingly talented and insightful. I have had some unfortunate dealings, however, with so-called acting “professors”—academics who’ve spent their entire lives in the shelter of some leafy campus, whose acting “technique” is based on stale, outmoded classroom exercises with little real-world application, and whose idea of professional experience is directing the university theatre club’s annual production of "Guys and Dolls."
Acting is a craft, not an academic exercise. Stay away from any school whose faculty isn’t filled with people whose resumes feature credits at nationally recognized theatres or in major films and TV shows and who, most importantly, continue to get paid to act or direct on a regular basis. Study with people who teach as a sideline—to supplement their work in the industry, not to replace it.
3) Pick a school that emphasizes performance, preferably in a working professional theatre.
I was well into my 30s before I even thought about going to grad school. Until then, everything I knew about acting came from taking what I was taught in class and applying it to whatever small roles I could get in real theatres, beside real actors, in front of paying audiences—the sort of apprenticeship system that’s served the theatre admirably for centuries. My classroom training was valuable, but performing under real-world conditions is what turned me into an actor.
By contrast, the graduate school I attended was born of the utopian notion that actors, directors, and playwrights, despite their very different needs, should be trained side by side. While this was a valuable experiment in the tricky art of collaboration (and one of the main reasons I chose the school), in practical terms it was a disaster. The huge number of students and the lack of stage time only made matters worse, and I could feel my hard-earned stagecraft atrophying—and my confidence as a performer along with it.
A small, selective M.F.A. program that’s affiliated with a reputable professional theatre should be your first choice: a place that emphasizes practical performance skills and provides its students with opportunities to work not just in the classroom with their peers or in student “showcases,” but in front of real audiences in full-length professional productions (for which you have to audition, just like everybody else) alongside established working actors, directors, and producers—the very people with whom you’ll be collaborating in the future and with whom you can start building relationships now.
4) Post-graduation support is at least as important as pre-graduation training.
If you’re the producer of a Broadway show, a feature film, a network series, entrusted with tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money, it’s not enough to simply cast the actor who gives the best audition. You need to be certain this person you’ve never met before is not a flake or a diva, but someone you can stake your reputation on. That’s why some directors like to cast the same actors over and over; to do otherwise is just too risky. So what’s an actor with nothing but a smile, a shiny new diploma, and no contacts to do?
Well, if you come from a school with a sterling reputation and a roster of working alumni who are not only willing to mentor the program’s new graduates but to recommend and hire them whenever possible—that can go a long way toward cracking open the seemingly impenetrable gates of show business. The Yale School of Drama, for example, has gained such a reputation for its network of alumni willing to assist their fellow Yalies, they’ve actually earned a nickname—the “Yale mafia”—with one message-board poster going so far as to claim that La Cosa New Haven “controls all theatre across the United States.”
That may be overstating it, and the talent and hard work of Yale’s graduates certainly has a lot to do with their long record of success. And, of course, even a degree from Yale is no guarantee you'll have a fruitful career. But there’s no denying that a little postgraduate support can do a world of good. Before committing to any M.F.A. program, find out about its reputation—particularly among industry insiders—and about the support it provides its graduates even after they’ve stopped paying tuition.