As a theatre educator, Melanie Dreyer-Lude is as seasoned as they come. The drama professor has directed 80 live theatre productions, performed in two dozen plays and started two theatre companies, sharing all of that experience with thousands of university students.
But about 10 years ago, she began having ethical qualms about preparing students for careers that might not end up being in the entertainment industry.
“I struggled with the reality that I might be educating my students for inevitable unemployment,” Dreyer-Lude confesses in her new book, , published by Routledge.
As she began her research — mainly examining the American post-secondary landscape — theatre programs were closing across North America, and those that survived were rapidly losing funding. Only a small minority of her students ended up earning a living on the stage, since there are only so many places in the industry for them to work.
After completing a survey of just over 1,100 theatre graduates, she realized there was something more significant going on. While they may not have found full-time jobs in the theatre — only about 30 per cent defined themselves as “working artists” — many had thriving, successful careers in fields as diverse as law, finance and medicine.
That led her to a radical shift in perspective: far from being an impractical training with a slim chance of resulting in a career, theatre education can be beneficial for almost any profession, she says.
Dreyer-Lude argues that at least some theatre training can improve the employability of every college student. When you consider that 40 per cent of university graduates end up in fields different from their chosen major, and that the average graduate will change jobs 12 times over their careers, adaptability is more essential than ever.
“We now live in a world in which abilities like interpersonal communication, adaptive problem‑solving and creativity are at a premium,” she says.
“The foremost skill applied to any discipline is adaptability, applying skills that can be continually adapted and recombined. Employers want interpersonal communication — a human skill that a computer cannot provide — listening, responding, understanding body language, tone of voice, style and discourse, all of that.”
She calls it “the secret sauce of theatre.”
To illustrate, she recalls being approached by an economics student after giving a workshop at Cornell University.
“She was five-foot on a good day, very small in stature, and she said, ‘I have a specific job I really want — I need to win that interview.’ So I taught her how to command a room with her body and her voice, and how to construct her story so it was compelling, engaging and persuasive.
“She got the job, and I’m so happy about that.”
What this demonstrates, says Dreyer-Lude, is that theatre training should perhaps not be promoted first and foremost as training for a narrowly defined profession, but rather offered across disciplines through workshops, classes or project‑based learning to help all students perform better in their careers.
That pitch could also serve as an effective survival strategy for theatre departments fearing their demise.
“I’d love to get theatre people connected with career counsellors to help students — particularly those with poor interpersonal skills or struggling to communicate — to recognize that a theatre class or two will improve their employability.”
And for those who do opt for the full theatre degree, there should be no pressure to necessarily work in the industry, she says.
“It’s not a failure if you get a theatre degree and do something else. It’s actually an asset, which makes you more marketable in many ways than with just one degree.”
