Brown, left, and
Oscar Eustis of Trinity.
(H. Johnson)
A rare, but exciting consortium was announced in late May in which Brown University and Trinity Repertory company would create a new graduate program in theater arts.
The new program will add to the Brown master’s program, which awards degrees in theater arts and playwriting. Brown will expand the program to include acting and directing, and offering a Ph.D. in theater and performance studies.
Those close to Trinity and Brown suggest the new program will rival that which exists at Yale University, becoming among the premier programs of its kind in the nation. Besides the connection to Brown, the consortium is expected to expand to Rhode Island College, where Trinity currently has a relationship, and Rhode Island School of Design.
Among the main architects of the program are Oskar Eustis, Trinity’s Artistic Director, and Spencer Golub, a professor of theater and comparative literature and chair of Brown’s Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance.
What follows are excerpts from an interview with Eustis and Golub, talking about various aspects of the program from its conceptual stage to how this program might assure that a regional acting company remains in Providence well into the future.
PBN: How did this all begin?
EUSTIS: My version of this is it’s what I wanted to happen since the moment
I arrived here. I arrived here, and said what a fabulous combination of resources
we could put together. But what was clear there was a longstanding schism between
Brown and Trinity that I think had to do with a lot of issues, but struck me as
completely without content We talked more and more and decided it was a good thing
to pursue.
GOLUB: Oskar was the catalyst. From my perspective I was asked by my then chair, Nancy Dunbar, if Oskar and I might want to get together and see if we have any common interests and goals we did and we talked. He said MFA and I said Ph.D. That’s just kind of the tip of it. Actually there was quite a lot of talk prior among our faculty, about why don’t we, wouldn’t it be nice, why haven’t we. Most of us knew the answer to why haven’t we, but not why we shouldn’t do it now.
What is the why haven’t we?
EUSTIS — I think that Adrian (Hall) not only wasn’t actively interested in
an alliance with Brown, I think he was actively interested in discouraging it.
One could talk about Adrian, but primarily this is a generational thing. I’ve
seen it in the artistic directors of Adrian’s generation. They were trying to
establish something (a regional theater movement) that had no real precedents,
which is a professional, non-profit artistically driven theater. The only models
that had existed beforehand that were any way analogous to regional theater were
the university theaters and community theaters. Not coincidentally, Providence
has an incredibly proud history in Community Theater. Barker Players is really
an extraordinary institution in America as far as its longevity and continuity
and work as a community theater. And at Brown and RIC and URI there’s terrific
theater tradition in the universities as well.
What Adrian was trying to do was come to town and say we’re not a community theater and we’re not a university theater, we’re a regional theater. To do that he was essentially involved in a wall creating exercise. you see very similar things in Adrian (and others of his generation), where you would have these mavericks come to town and carve out their area of uniqueness of what the regional theater was. My feeling was that Adrian and his generation succeeded at that so brilliantly that there was absolutely no worry that anybody is going to confuse what happens at Brown with what happens at Trinity. They have established their autonomy as separate fields. Now what’s interesting is how you put them together.
GOLUB — The fact was we had done some exploratory work, some very basic exploratory
work, with Ann Bogart, not Oskar’s immediate predecessor, but predecessor, in
her very brief tenure here. She was academically friendly. We had a number of
discussions on social occasions, none of which netted any programmatic proposals,
just the idea that we would have friendly relations. change was possible, not
necessarily inevitable. Theaters in a sense are microcosms in terms of generational
change, because theaters tend to have their historic moment, peak and then it
is very difficult for them to stay current from one generation to the next unless
they change. And, of course, what we see happening at Trinity is such a generational
shift that is now happening. As a result Trinity is thriving. We feel the same
way about our department. Change with the times, otherwise times change you. We
pretty much felt as a faculty, we wanted as much as possible, within the limitations
of being a part of the university, to be the masters of our fate, not to let the
winds of change blow us every which way. as a result we thought we needed to take
an active role in this.
It was just serendipity. Serendipity is what it is. It just doesn’t happen by accident; it’s by a kind of considered accident that usually takes more than one party. That’s what happened in this case. The right people were in the right place at the right time. The stars are aligned. It doesn’t happen very often.
The idea is this makes too much sense to let whatever nonsense that might come
up get in the way. As Oskar said and others have said before, you look up and
down College Hill it’s a no-brainer. You’ve got Brown, RISD, and Trinity all sitting
there. And that kind of alignment really doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country.
Add to the mix, RIC and other possibilities that happen within the relatively
immediate vicinity, the question really becomes not why do it, why not do it.
Once you start removing the negatives, and realizing the negatives were put there
by personalities responding to their historical moment that is no longer your
historical moment, then those negatives begin to disappear.
What does this do to the current RIC program?
EUSTIS: It still exists. We have two more classes. We will graduate a class
in the spring of 2002 and in the spring of 2003 that will have MFA degrees from
Rhode Island College. We will continue to train them in a way that I think will
be wonderful. We hope in the next month or two we will be able to announce the
creation of new MFAs with Rhode Island College so that we never have a year that
we don’t have RIC students as part of our MFA. Currently we are looking at stage
management, management and technical theater MFAs through RIC. If we can make
those work, I’d be absolutely delighted. The ability of this to be a public-private
partnership is part of what will make it absolutely unique.
What’s RISD’s role?
EUSTIS: The hope is — and again we don’t have the announcements on this —
the hope is that RISD will offer degrees in sets, lighting and costume design.
What does all this mean for Rhode Island as a whole and Providence in particular?
EUSTIS: I feel like this is Rhode Island to its roots because the heart of
the idea is you’ll take all of the assets, the cultural and intellectual assets,
pedagogical assets that exist here in Providence and Rhode Island and by combining
them creating a center of excellence that takes advantage of the smallness of
our geographical scope to crystallize something that is more exiting, pure, more
inclusive than in any other theatrical training program in the country. To me
that is exactly what Rhode Island needs to be doing, to take advantage of two
key things. Rhode Island has absolutely first rate resources and in this case
the resources are the educational students at Brown, RISD and RIC, and the cultural
institution of Trinity, and the faculty and staffs of all of those by taking advantage
of the smallness of our geography. You could never pull this off anywhere else.
There would be too many barriers. We’ll demonstrate that our size is a huge asset
in the creation of excellence.
GOLUB: It is literally and figuratively a renaissance idea. It’s like a renaissance city-state, minus the big wealthy patron that has to be satisfied. There is that notion the very thing that makes Rhode Island what it is for the outside world, a small place, perhaps people don’t have a sense of how it works. Once you get on the inside of Rhode Island and realize what an incredibly galvanizing thing that can be You couldn’t pull it off in a larger state
The distinction that has to be made is regionalism doesn’t equal parochialism. That’s sort of a misperception that people might have from the outside. Just because you’re small and put great emphasis on the idea of being regional it doesn’t mean that you’re inbred and parochial. It just means you have a sense of who you are and where you’re from.
How does this filter down to the acting company here (Trinity)?
EUSTIS: That’s a good question. We don’t know. We have ideas about how it’s
going to filter down. I will share with you the parochial version of why this
is so important to me, Trinity.
It is my firm belief that over the next 10 years, Trinity has got to establish a way for its acting company to renew itself at a level that is as high or higher than it’s ever been before. And in doing so we are swimming against a national tide. There have been over the last 15 years far more companies disbanding than forming. The idea of a permanent resident acting ensemble has come to seem antiquated, useless, inappropriate, unwieldy and literally to the point now, that outside of the Shakespeare Festivals, almost no major regional theater has a company. Just since I’ve come here the Guthrie has disbanded its company, the ACT in San Francisco has disbanded its company, the Arena Stage in Washington has disbanded its company. We are totally anomalous. I’m not going to disband this company. And I’m firmly convinced I’m right in not disbanding the company. There is something unique and special about the idea of a resident acting ensemble. It cannot be replaced by anything else. The challenge now for us is we are trying to do that, whereas 30 years ago we were part of a national movement trying to do that. Now we’re trying to do this in a much more isolated way. Other people aren’t doing it. What that translates into is these days, Dick Kavanaugh, Dick Jenkins, Barbara Meek are not coming out of schools and auditioning to become part of a regional company. All those people I mentioned graduated from MFA programs, auditioned for Adrian, he cast them and they moved to Providence. That is unheard of now. The reason is that the whole profession has changed. Students are now aiming for L.A. and New York the minute they are out of school. They are aiming for film and television. They see theater as something that they do more on the side. What we need to do is train people, not only technically, not only the incredibly difficult virtuostic skills that actors and directors need to function, but spiritually.
They need to be trained (to understand)what the theater stands for. And that’s
where our alliance with these educational institutions is so important to us.
When I started teaching at Brown — I’ve taught at a lot of different places —
Brown students are different. Brown attracts the most idealistic, the most creative,
the most socially committed students in the country. I’ve never seen a student
body like this. We can take that idealism, wrap it within a professional training
program that has intellectual rigor and technical virtuosity. I think we have
a chance of turning out the actors — not their only function- – but that to my
narrow parochial interests will guarantee that Trinity will have an acting company
in 20 years that is at least as good or better than it is today.
GOLUB: Our aspiration, both individually and collectively, is to attract to the graduate program students who are on par with the students Brown attracts as undergraduates, not only intellectually at a certain level, but as Oskar says, spiritually in terms of their aspirations and the adventurousness of their natures, of a similar caliber.
What does this mean to Rites and Reason Theater?
GOLUB: That’s another good question. We hope that it will be meaningful
to them. They’ve had a very difficult road for a very long time. We’ve had preliminary
talks with them. We want to make sure that what we are able to do is have Rites
and Reason participate to the extent that Rites and Reason wants to participate.
That we don’t want them to feel in any way encroached on, given the fact that
they have long-standing projects and visions of what they want to be. By the same
time, as with any partner or participant in the consortium, there has to be a
sense that you bring something to the table and leave something on the table,
so all of that is still being talked to, negotiated. We hope that Rites and Reason
will certainly hope to expand the profile of the sort of student that is attracted
to the consortium Rites and Reason to a certain extent has to tell us what it
wants to be in this arrangement and what it is actively seeking to be on its own.
EUSTIS: I think it’s going to give a huge boost to Rites and Reason. They have fought a valiant and often lonely battle because they have been a theater that is both of Brown, yet tied to the professional theater world. They have been the only example like that on the Brown campus. Suddenly, there is going to be a much more dramatic sense of that kind of partnership being the norm, rather than the exception and we’re going to find out how to turn all that to our advantage.
