Ep. 37 - What is the Theatre Arts major?

In Episode 37 of the CSUSB Advising Podcast, Matt Markin chats with Professor Tom Provenzano from the Theatre Arts department! What is the Theatre Arts major? What concentrations are offered? What career opportunities are there? What resources are there for students in Theatre Arts? Find out in this episode!

For more information on the Theatre Arts major, visit their website! 

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Transcript

0:06  
Alright, welcome back to another episode of the CSUSB advising podcast. On today's episode, we're learning more about the theater arts major at Cal State San Bernardino. So to help us learn more about it, let's welcome our guest Professor Tom Provenzano. Professor Provenzao. How are you?

0:21  
I'm well, how are you?

0:22  
Thanks for joining us today. And you know, can you tell us a little bit about yourself about your background?

0:27  
Yes, I've just been talking to people, I've been acting for about 60 years now. I started as a little kid, and I just stayed in it. And I went to become a famous actor, like all the other people in LA. And then I became a children's theatre producer. And then I became a theatre critic. And all of these things sort of came together and sent me back to graduate school and at about age 38. I changed my life completely and started teaching here. And it has been the great place to land. 

1:00  
Yes, awesome. And, you know, so with theater arts, you know, at Cal State San Bernardino, can you describe like, how would you describe the theater arts major?

1:10  
Well, it's a fairly small major, depending on on where we are in cycles anywhere from 80 to 110 majors. We do quite a few productions and we have several ways through theater as far as being an actor, being a tech person, being an educator being musical theater person. And since we are a small department, if you want to work in the department, you can be on stage and you can be backstage. You will start working right away in a small roles and small jobs backstage, but you can grow and grow. And you can do as many productions as you want to do while you're here. And that's what some students are just in production after production after production. Some people have a different path, they do a couple productions and really focus on other parts. But it's a very active department and a department who all the people know each other, which is really nice.

2:05  
Yeah, it's a lot of connections that that can be made. And like you were talking about being a smaller department. And that means that for students, they get a lot of hands on learning versus maybe an institution or department where there's a lot of students, so they may not be able to each term be part of any production.

2:23  
Yeah, exactly. And that's why part of our job is we have to advise every single student before they can go forward the next semester, because we want to make sure people are on track. And since there are so many different choices to make, we want to help them make those choices as best fit to their plans for life.

2:41  
Yeah. And within theater arts, you know, what are some of those different areas, different concentrations that a student might be able to do?

2:49  
Well, the most popular one, of course, is people come in on the acting track. Because that's they come from high school, that's what theater is to them, a lot of them will find out other parts of the theater that they love. The other larger track is the technical track. This is for the people who do not want to be on stage necessarily. But they want to build and they want to design. Interestingly, most of the people who are in that area actually do pretty well on stage once we convince them to get out there. And then there is the musical theater track, which is essentially the acting interact with some musical theater skills added to it. And we had the education track, which is especially important right now because California has, after about 50 years of arguing about it has finally created a teaching credential in theatre arts. And that is part of our job now is to connect with the education department and us and really build a program to get people their theater credential to teach high school. I think that's going to be incredibly popular here.

3:55  
Yeah, I think so as well. And within theater arts, do you have does theater arts offer any minors?

4:02  
Yeah, we have a very generous minor for anyone in the in campus who wants to do this. You have to take theater, Introduction to Theater. And then you have to either be in a production or work backstage and a production. And then we work with you for the rest of the units to take anything you want that makes sense to but you want to learn in theater. And that's why even miners work closely with us as advisors.

4:30  
And generally speaking, you know, with with some of your students, what kind of career opportunities have have they been able to go go on to when they've graduated?

4:41  
Well, this is a really important question, especially for parents who are saying what you can't do a theater degree. And what we help make them realize and their parents realize is that the theatre degree opens up a world of the entertainment industry is not just about being an actor, hardly anyone leaves here and becomes a professional actor, but lots of people leave here and become part of the entertainment industry, this love for theater translates into the love for that particular industry, which also happens to be about the third best industry in California, the highest money making the highest number of jobs. And there are so many jobs and every kind of stripe. But the willingness and the interest in the arts is what starts you on that path. And here's where you can start plus, then you get a general very good education from the University along with our major or minor, and you're ready to go into whatever part of the field starts interesting you.

5:45  
And I just go in along those lines. Like let's say there's a student that listens to this, or they go on the website, they take a look at the Theatre Arts page, or they look at the Bulletin, the catalog and they see the different majors, they look at theater arts, and they're like, that just sounds interesting. I may want to declare it. Do you have any suggestions for that student?

6:07  
Come take our GE class, that is one of the arts classes called acting for all majors. What it does, it just give you a sense of what the atmosphere is and how you work. We get a lot of people coming in that way, or taking the intro to theater class where they've just learned a lot about theater, but that one's online. But I think the inverse in class have actually been and taking class where you actually go through steps of things you never thought you would do. And you find out that you can in fact do it doesn't mean you're going to be a brilliant, accurate, but it does mean you can be part of the collaborative process. And that's what we're teaching is no matter where you are in the theater, you're part of this whole collaborative team. And then where do you fit in once you graduate? Is the question that you're going to be answering as you keep moving forward. But you have the ability and the knowledge that this area is for you.

7:03  
Yeah, and so you're mentioning the acting for all majors. So, theater arts 2640, or the introduction to theatres, ta 2660. So either of those would meet the GE arts requirement. And I think also, there's a couple of theater arts literature type classes as well, that would meet the humanities GE that being the theater arts 1160 world drama, or the theater arts 2612, the Oral Interpretation of Literature.

7:32  
Yes. And we also have the advanced literature, the 3663, which satisfies, I think, several of the designations.

7:44  
So yeah, so looks like yeah, I've seen it's interested, there's plenty of classes they can take, and it can also count for some of their graduation requirements as well. And not they have to go through every class, but generally speaking, like maybe what some of maybe these intro classes, what are students learning in these classes?

8:06  
Well, the very beginning classes, you take either acting for all majors or beginning acting, you're just getting the sense of what begun stages, what coming to life on stages, what tools you have, an actor has three tools, essentially, which is their voice, body, and imagination, those work on it's the building blocks of those, then in our design classes, the first thing that majors take in design is just what is called, which is just introduction to design, Introduction to design in the theater. So not you're going to actually build things, but you're beginning to understand what the design process is, what choices are made of what the collaborative process is there. So both of those things give you feel just those two classes, the beginning design classes, but gives an acting class, you'd have a real sense of what you're going to be doing for the next four years.

8:59  
And this comes up too, with a lot of majors that sometimes there's misconceptions. Have there been any misconceptions that students might have about the theater arts major?

9:10  
Well, the big misconception of anyone has heard about theater, especially coming you know, from being young in high school or not being around much theater is that it's all about coming in picking up scripts, memorizing lines and moving around. That is the ultimate goal. But everything we do to get into there are the building blocks of how to do that. You just tell somebody to go grab a script to do a play, it's going to be terrible. But if you get everyone through a process of acting, games, improvisations, design techniques, actual design, actual building, you see all of those things come together. It's not just a matter of being a star in a play. It's a matter of working with, you know, 20 other people on a production and not all of you get along but you get along in production. And that's what work. So that's one of the exciting things. Also, if you get through a successful theater program, you can deal with almost anyone in your life.

10:10  
And then are there any resources that your department offers, whether it's any clubs or scholarships or anything like that?

10:17  
Yeah, we in fact have a club that is probably the oldest club on campus. It was it began the same year that the school began, it's called the players of the pear garden, which is based on an ancient Chinese Theatre Company. But we, we've been going on with that particular club, for what however long the university has been here. They do a lot of projects. They do. Hootenanny is where they bring people into campus, little canteen type things, but they also do fundraising and they send people on they send other students to trips or to our competitions. And they raise a lot of money. We also probably are one of the largest scholarship providers on the campus for a very small department do we do a lot of scholarships, and we have an endowment from our original chair who created the department Ron Barnes, who are theatres named after, but we have a lot of money for scholarships, and we make sure that our students apply and get it.

11:24  
Nice. And then if anyone has any questions, would they reach out to any any faculty member in theater arts?

11:32  
They can certainly reach out to me, especially if it's about what do I have to take? But any theater one thing you come into our building, you don't even have to call. You're gonna see most of the professors have their doors open. Office hours are not or they're walking around the building. People will ask your questions. We're in a building also with music, so we're all artsy here. And we're all happy to talk to anyone.

11:58  
Sounds good. Tom Provenzano, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

12:03  
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai