Opportunities

With strong local connections and a global reach, Lafayette’s Theater Department offers students a range of opportunities that appeal to individual theater interests and foster professional and community-based learning experiences.

Joseph Rothschild ’16 and Becky Byers of Flux Theater Ensemble in “Tartuffe” at the conclusion of the Flux residency.

To enrich the theater education of our students, the Department regularly schedules workshops, lectures, and master classes on campus. Ping Chong and Company, Bread and Puppet Theater, and Flux Theater Ensemble have worked with Lafayette students during campus residencies. Funding from Lafayette’s IDEAL Center brought together theater students and Flux members in a production of Tartuffe that played on College Hill and Off-Broadway.

A short seventy miles to our east, New York City, one of the world’s great theater centers, plays a central role in the formal and informal pursuits of Department faculty and students. Field trips to see Broadway and Off-Broadway performances are a regular feature of Department courses, and NYC Lafayette offers classroom space and meeting areas for our faculty and students in lower Manhattan.

The annual lecture endowed by Paul Staubi ’88 brings theater luminaries to campus, and the Department is committed to contracting guest artists whose work with you has an immeasurable impact on your education. Your opportunities to learn from these artists in master classes, workshops, and tutorials are unparalleled in other theater programs of Lafayette’s size.

Professor Mary Jo Lodge [l] and Marsha Norman [r], the 2016 Staubi Lecturer, at an open discussion in the Weiss Theater.

The faculty can guide you in choosing professional internships in this country and abroad. Faculty-led courses in New York, London, Dublin, and the South Pacific allow you to experience theater from a global perspective. You also will be encouraged to take advantage of fully accredited semester and summer study at the Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute, Atlantic Repertory Company, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Lafayette’s program at Goldsmith’s College of the University of London.

The Department’s 2012 production of “Noises Off” was awarded a Certificate of Merit from the Kennedy Center.

The College participates annually in the Kennedy Center American College Theater
Festival, which regularly cites Lafayette students and faculty for merit in directing, acting, scenery, lighting, and sound design. The theater faculty also coaches acting students preparing auditions and advises design students assembling portfolios for the University and Resident Theater Association (URTA) during the senior year.

The Performance Series in the Williams Center for the Arts, Creative and Performing Arts Fellowships, student work-study positions in Buck Hall, research assistantships, and the EXCEL Scholar Program all offer our students ways to gain theater experience, learn how to be part of a collaborative process, and get paid for doing both!