Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2010 - 55

the Elizabethan Theatre period.
It took less than a decade for the ideas initiated by baker
to develop into a full-fledged degree program. In 1914 Thomas
Woods Stevens at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now called
Carnegie Mellon University) offered the first theatre degree
program in the U.S. This was followed at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, with Frederick Koch's founding of the
Carolina Playmakers. Then in 1925, Stevens was offered an irresistible opportunity at the Art Institute of Chicago-he would
oversee a producing theatre company and a theatre degree
program. The result was the Goodman Theatre and the Goodman School of drama (now housed at dePaul University).
At about the same time, the facility at Harvard University
where baker conducted his "47 workshops" burned. Harvard,
despite requests, declined to build or supply a suitable replacement facility. Enter Yale University. Yale offered to build a facility
to baker's specifications if he would move south. Thus in 1925,
the Yale School of drama started under George Pierce baker's direction with the offering of the first graduate program in theatre.
Many other collegiate programs were started over the next few
decades, but Carnegie Institute of Technology at the undergraduate level and Yale School of drama at the graduate level remained
the premiere institutions for theatre training in the U.S.
despite the intensity of the training offered at Carnegie and
Yale, many collegiate institutions were in a situation where they
were paying lip service to the liberal Arts ideal-possibly as the

rationale for being permitted to teach such subjects in the Academy. The operating model for many academic theatre programs
was the little Theatre movement of turn-of-the-century Europe
and the Art Theatre movement of the early twentieth century in
the U.S. because of this, commercial theatre received bad press
in many academic theatre programs. I still remember from my
late 1950s collegiate theatre classes the pejorative references
to the commercial productions and practices and how what we
were doing was not related to that-what we were doing was
above that. Ironically, whenever the opportunity presented itself, both faculty and students would make the trip to New York
City to see broadway productions. This anti-commercial theatre
rhetoric was an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft as described
and promulgated by Robert Edmond Jones and others. by their
definition, New Stagecraft could only be done by Americanborn practitioners, could not include commercial theatre, and
certainly could not include musical theatre or reviews. Such
attitudes were widely accepted and repeated through much of
the academic theatre world at mid-century. despite their earlier
disclaimers, virtually all of the New Stagecraft disciples eagerly
accepted their first commercial contracts when they were offered and rarely looked back. Thus, at mid-century, with some
notable exceptions, many academic theatre programs avowed
an anti-commercial theatre philosophy. That division permeated most theatre training; however, at some institutions attempts
were being made to bridge the artificial divide.

S P R I N G

2010

theatre

design

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2010