Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 293
Snow falls on a barren landscape in this 2011 University of California–Irvine production of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot, set in wintertime. The portrayed actors (from left, Ben Jacoby as Vladimir and Chris Klopatek
as Estragon) and the designers (Robin Darling, scenery; Gwyn Conoway Bennison, costumes; Karen Lawrence,
lighting; Patricia Cardona, sound) were all graduate drama students. © Paul Kennedy
and Guildenstern Are Dead—were first conceived as
extracurricular college projects.
The founding of the Yale Drama Department (now
the Yale School of Drama) in 1923 signaled an expanded
commitment on the part of American higher education to
assume not merely the role of theatre educator and producer
but also that of theatre trainer. Today, the majority
of American professional theatre artists receive their
training in American college and university departments
devoted, in whole or in part, to that purpose. As a result,
academic and professional theatres have grown closer
together, and many artists work as both theatre professionals
and theatre professors. For this reason, performances
at many university theatres may reach sophisticated levels
of excellence and, on occasion, equal or surpass professional
productions of the same dramatic material.
Community theatres are amateur groups that put on
plays for their own enjoyment and for the entertainment or
edification of their community. There are occasions when
these theatres, too, reach levels of excellence. But polished
perfection is not the goal. Rather, as the name suggests,
community theatre aims to entertain and bring together a
local town, neighborhood, or district. Some community
theatres are gifted with substantial funding, handsome facilities,
and large subscription audiences, and some (such as
the Laguna Playhouse in California) become professional.
One should always remember that many of the greatest
companies in the theatre’s history, including Konstantin
Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre and André Antoine’s
Parisian Théâtre Libre, began, essentially, as amateur community
theatres. The word amateur, after all, means “lover,”
which suggests that the artist who creates theatre out of love
rather than commercial expedience aims for the highest levels
of art. Community theatre has, then, a noble calling: it is
the theatre a community makes out of and for itself, and it
can tell us a lot about who we are and what we want.