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• Prospective students: Check out the Theater page in Majors, Minors, and Concentrations

Curiosity, hard work, and excitement are qualities the faculty and staff hold dear, in themselves and in their students, and with those qualities, students are well set up to learn the skills involved in theater. 

Developing those skills is partly the scholarly work of researching and reading theory, and partly the work of putting that theory into practice. As actors, dramaturgs, directors, designers, stage managers, and in many other roles working on theater productions, students are asked to take what they learn in class and rehearsal and go deeper, by applying that learning to the creative process of making live performance, as well as through discussion and writing.   

The Theater Program actively supports and promotes the value of creative practice in a liberal arts education. 

The Theater Program is made up of working artists. Everyone involved has their own creative life—they act, direct, research, write, design, and make all sorts of things, here at ���ҵ���and beyond the campus, in their own lives. As artists committed to the development of their own creative practices, faculty and staff are deeply committed to helping students develop a creative practice and lives of their own as artists. 

Why is all that important? Associate Professor and Director of Theater on the Theresa Helburn Chair of Drama, and Director of The Arts Catharine Slusar, an actor, director and the program's main acting professor, has this to say about the role of theater and the arts in a liberal arts education:

Theater is like a curiosity engine that helps to form agile minds through learning to dissect metaphor and imagine new worlds from a variety of perspectives. This curiosity serves to further students in any major they choose to pursue. We cannot create new worlds, new vaccines, new experiments unless we can imagine them. Bell Hooks writes, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” We cannot imagine if we do not learn to question and to wonder. The study of theater and the arts is not an extra; it is essential to a true liberal arts education.

Students do not need to major or minor in theater to be involved (but they can!). And students don’t need to want a career in theater (although, faculty and staff will happily guide them in that direction if that is the goal—even for those who are not majors). Every student involved in the Theater Program is welcome to audition, take classes, work in production, dig deep, ask questions, and expand their liberal arts education and their lives as creative thinkers through the work done here. 

Reach out to theater@brynmawr.edu to learn more.