Major in Theatre Arts (B.A.)

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Major in Theatre Arts (B.A.)

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Play your part.

In theatre, many moving pieces need to come together for a successful show. With that in mind, we offer an intensive study in six different focus areas — acting, directing, technical theatre, playwriting, dance, and dramaturgy — to enable you to pull back the curtain and explore the various dimensions of theatre arts.

Professors with extensive theatre experience will guide your learning, emphasizing teamwork, career preparation, and the collaborative nature of the creative process. And by balancing your theatre studies with a broader liberal arts education, you’ll gain a multidisciplinary focus by considering subjects that embrace and transcend this art form.

Catalog Requirements for:

Major

Minor

Why Study Theatre Arts at Clark?

Join a theatre arts program that the Princeton Review has ranked among the top 20 in the nation.
Perform and participate in Clark’s many theatre groups, award-winning improvisation troupes, and school productions.
Collaborate with student directors, producers, set designers, actors, costumers, and other theatre arts majors to create productions for Clark’s New Play Festival, a biennial event where student playwrights stage their work at Clark’s Michelson Theatre.

Theatre Arts

Featured Courses

TA 211

Performance Philosophy

Join an international network of performers exploring the relationship between philosophy and performance. Attend weekly Friday morning seminars, and devote the afternoons to developing new work in the studio.

TA 206

The Image and the Word

Photographers and Playwrights are brought together in a “forced collaboration.” This course is designed for advanced artists who are up for a challenge and co-taught by professors Gino DiIorio and Stephen Dirado.

TA 126

The Physical Theater/ Environmental Studio

Explore how physical and digital technologies can influence theatre design and direction, and try your hand at creating interactive fiction, escape rooms, virtual reality experiences, and audience-immersive theatre.

TA 212

Actor as Thinker

Investigate a conceptual approach to acting theory and its application while gaining a greater understanding of script analysis, characterization and style, as well as the relationship between actor and audience.

TA 215

PLS

Stage Combat

In this course, you’ll (safely) explore the role of violent action in theatre, and learn the vocabulary, processes and techniques of combative movement, including hand-to-hand basics, positions and reactions.

View All Courses

The Theatre Arts Path

Clark’s theatre arts major offers courses in performance, production, history, and criticism. Whether your goal is to pursue a professional career in theatre or simply to gain a greater understanding of the play or the performance process, Clark faculty will work with you to design a program that fits your interests and goals, and to incorporate complementary internships or study away/abroad options.

The major consists of 13 courses: five core courses (required of all majors), five specialty courses (focusing on your area of interest), and three related courses chosen to complement your professional program. You can specialize in acting, directing, technical theatre, dramatic criticism and playwriting, or design your own area of focus. Related Visual & Performing Arts Department courses are to be chosen in consultation with your adviser.

Skills you will learn include:

Acting students will develop an understanding of script analysis, characterization, style, and the relationship of the actor to the audience
You will learn to interpret and critique plays from different points of view and reference, including those of the playwright, actor, director, historian, and dramaturge
You will be introduced to the techniques and organization involved in providing the stage with scenery, lights, and properties, including drafting, scaled ground plans, elements of design, and styles of production. Makeup, lighting, and set construction are hands-on in applied lab/crew assignments.

Patricia M. Plamondon Undergraduate Award in Visual and Performing Arts
The Patricia M. Plamondon Award is given to juniors and seniors who have demonstrated their talent in and commitment to the arts and for whom the award will serve to enhance their studies, research, or project-related travel. The award is made annually by a vote of the full-time faculty of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts.

During your junior year, you might be accepted into the theatre arts honors program. Joining the program means you’ll work closely with a professor to create a project on a topic of your choice. This can take the form of writing a play, performing a role, etc., with an emphasis on attaining a professional standard of work. The thesis must be performed and/or presented as a senior.

The bustling Little Center is home to Clark’s theatre arts program. In addition to rehearsal and performance spaces, it houses:

The Michelson Theater — a 120-seat black box theater used for all V&PA theater productions
The Experimental Theater — a 30-seat theater used for student productions and student groups, as well as for “read-throughs” of student-written plays
Costume-design shop
Set-building workshop

Building your foundation

The Clark Experience

We structure our curriculum around Liberal Education and Effective Practice (LEEP), which connects classroom learning with action through world and workplace experiences.

Learn More

At Clark, your education extends beyond the classroom. Visit the Career Connections Center to learn more about internship opportunities that complement your coursework and put your theater arts knowledge into practice.

Our Department of Visual and Performing Arts sponsors three mainstage shows — both classical and contemporary works — each year in the Michelson Theatre at the Little Center. You also can join on-campus student groups, including Clark Musical Theatre and the Clark University Players’ Society (CUPS), that produce both on the main stage and in the experimental theatre. Many of these are directed by local professionals, while others are directed by students. Visit our Flickr album to view production images.

Participation in these productions is open to majors and non-majors alike. You can:

Audition for the cast or work as part of the production staff, or as play historian, dramaturge, or director’s assistant on department- and student-sponsored productions
Write a play for the New Play Festival
Attend the Tuesday Night Workshop, which presents readings of new works by students and faculty
Audition for the Peapod Squad, Clark’s award-winning improv troupe, or Shenanigans!, our award-winning improv and sketch comedy group
Audition for Clark’s dance troupes: Dance Society, Variant Dance Troupe, Ballroom Dance Team, and Hip Hop Collabo.

Other experiential learning opportunities include:

Many students take advantage of internship opportunities during the academic year or over the summer to connect what they’re learning with their professional development. Some organizations theatre arts students have interned with are:

Company One Theatre; Boston, Mass. (founded by Clarkies)
Custom Made Theatre Co.; San Francisco, Calif.
Columbia Pictures; Los Angeles, Calif.
CBS Comedy Development; Los Angeles, Calif.

In the summer after your junior year, you might be eligible for the Sara Bickman Music and Arts Summer Internship for Undergraduates, which provides financial support for summer internships for undergraduates majoring in the Visual and Performing Arts.

In alignment with Clark’s Liberal Education and Effective Practice (LEEP) curriculum, participation in a Study Abroad and Away program is an opportunity to gain world and workplace experience to complement your on-campus work. Clark approves semester, yearlong, and summer opportunities to earn credit through academic coursework, internships, community-based learning, or research. Explore our Study Abroad and Away page, where you can search programs by academic interest, location, and language; after you’ve identified some appropriate programs, ensure they fit into your four-year plan by talking with your faculty adviser as early as possible.

You also can complement your academic work by participating in Clark’s many clubs, organizations, and athletic teams. Here are some student organizations that might be of interest to you as a theatre arts major:

African Diaspora Dance Association
Clark Bars
Clark Maker Club
Clark Film Production Society
Radio of Clark University (ROCU)

Recent Department- and Student-Sponsored Productions

Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Good Person of Szechuan
Bertolt Brecht
Fifth of July
Lanford Wilson
Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare
Little Shop of Horrors
Howard Ashman
Urinetown
Greg Kotis
Fuddy Mears
David Lindsay-Abaire
Eleemosynary
Lee Blessing
Stop Kiss
Diana Son
This is Our Youth
Kenneth Lonergan

Clark is committed to action-based learning, which means as an undergraduate you can join faculty and graduate students in their research and creative work. Clark’s theatre arts professors — who are often working professionals — are experts in the theatre arts subfields of playwriting, acting, directing, and dramaturgy.

You can also apply for funding to support your own research on a project of your choice during the academic year or during the summer.

Clark’s theatre arts program offers many opportunities for young playwrights to develop their works and eventually see them produced on stage. Clark’s New Play Festival is held every other year in the Michelson Theatre, where new plays — directed by both students and working professionals — are given full productions. (We also engage many working theatre professionals in developing these new works.) The Festival is headed by award-winning playwright and faculty member Gino DiIorio ’83.

Actors, directors, and designers often create and develop independent projects that display their skills and capabilities in their chosen fields. This can take the form of directing or producing a play; performing a role; or designing lights, sets, and/or sound, all with an emphasis on attaining a professional standard of work.

A number of students engage in a new way to develop and create work called Performance Philosophy, a new and exciting academic discipline taught by Professor Raymond Munro. Performance Philosophy is a yearlong project in devised theatre to create original, dynamic work through the ongoing collaboration of actors, dancers, musicians, writers, designers, and directors. It starts with an all-day seminar in the fall semester: In the morning session, students engage with texts from philosophy, literature, and contemporary history to create new performance work, which is then developed in the afternoon studio session. Throughout the second semester, that work is further developed in a rehearsal process that culminates in a full production in the spring. This approach was used to create the very successful production, “…like sisters.”

Clark’s annual ClarkFEST is an opportunity to share your research or creative work with the Clark community while you hone your presentation skills. Some projects theatre arts students and recent alumni have presented are:

Presentations from “Image and the Word”
Presentations from the New Play Workshop

You also can submit your research results for publication in our student-run Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal.

At Clark you’ll get more than a great education; you’ll also be prepared for a long, productive career and life of consequence. And once you’ve completed your degree, you can join other Clark alumni who have gone on to work for great organizations and attend some of the best graduate schools in the world.

Graduate School Placement
Graduate schools attended by theatre arts graduates from Clark include: