Can You Sue Your Theatre Program for Not Casting You? Sharing My Thoughts on Auditions in Drama/Theatre Programs

I was reading a blog post on the Onstage Blog recently where the author dissects whether a student threatening legal action against their college BA Theatre program for not getting cast in a single show during their time there actually had grounds for doing so. And to make a long story short, the author concluded that stage time is just as important as time spent studying and working behind the scenes in a theatre education.

I will admit that reading this from a theatre professional was shocking, since throughout our careers in the performing arts world we're taught that rejection is part of the process and we're not gonna get cast in everything. That maybe we're not what the casting directors are looking for at that moment. That life isn't always fair. And maybe we're not actually that good. (That last sentence is likely a side-effect of dealing with situations like this regularly.) But I never thought the student could actually have grounds to sue for not getting an equal education because they weren't given equal stage time in their Theatre BA.

If you read my bio, you'll learn that I myself have a BA that taught us everything to do with theatre, not just acting. So if you knew acting wasn't your strong suit, you could specialize in whatever you proposed was. The college I transferred out of (Hampshire College) gave out BAs in Liberal Arts regardless of what subjects you studied to make up your senior thesis project. And after many failed theatre and a cappella group auditions in the sparse month I was there (besides the for-credit chorus), I eventually determined that auditions are degrading.

This wasn't even a BFA program, which is already notoriously cutthroat and so you audition in order to get accepted before devoting the next 4 years to strictly what you auditioned for and nothing else. But the culture of that specific college outside of the theatre was one of cliques based on your identity along the LGBTQ+ spectrum and other categories such as race and substance use and even these living and learning communities based on your interests (I didn't get accepted into the arts one for whatever stupid reason). And being a third-culture kid who wasn't quite an international student and a black girl who grew up with a different experience of racism, I was ironically this square peg that didn't really fit into a lot of the round holes made by other students in a college that heavily touted the idea of academic nonconformists coming to create their own degrees.

(I have an inside source that told me that the students that came after our freshman group were more open-minded, which is an improvement given the political landscape at the time.)

If suing your educational program is possible, then I should sue this college for their lack of investment in student care and making sure their students are functioning human beings outside of the classroom. Because college is not just about books and whatnot. You gotta look at the whole person and instill into their emotional and spiritual wellbeing in the curriculum, not just in knowledge. Especially since in my case it almost cost me my life.

This picture is appropriate because while I want to sue, when I was young I wanted to be a judge, until I got talked out of it because of a ton of law school after college (made sense because I hated school). The creative side of me won out so it wasn't a total loss.

Not seriously (but maybe), I could probably also sue my high school Drama program since I was never cast in a single major production and got my stage time from student productions (known as house plays) instead. High school drama programs are depicted in American schools as this big place of camaraderie and collective quirkiness. Not so in South African schools, or at least the one I went to. You're only taken seriously if you can do it amazingly and have the show credits to prove it. As well as a bunch of history and theory that still sits at the back of my brain like a Dewey decimal-categorized filing cabinet that I could reach into effortlessly throughout college.

No one really pays a ton of attention to the tech people running lights and sound and the backstage people doing the set transitions. Only the people on stage. And you could get awards for the non-acting stuff and for specific produciton opportunities (Shakespeare, an inter-school festival, theatre technical, house plays and the major production) until they phased it out and if you were me, you could only get a Dramatic Arts scroll if you were in three house plays. Or in one of the bigwig productions as well. It was also nearly impossible to get half colors or full colors (even in choir) thanks to a flawed determining system that made no sense and made some of my classmates cry. This is yet another example of why politics need to stay out of art, unless you're covering Political Theatre. Kind of takes the fun out of it if you're genuinely talented and yet you're being sidelined. At least I got a disctinction in Drama, and you bet after all the rejections and underestimations of the weird American kid I worked like the world was ending for that distinction.

Thanks to all the cutthroat-ness of school-based theatre, upon transferring to Gordon College, the school I graduated from, I had no intentions of being in a show ever again and spent most of that time building the sets, ushering and stage managing. But I got cast my first try (couldn't accept the role though for other reasons😢). And when they did the Mini-Fringe Festival my junior year or so and I proposed my show "This is Not a Bill," my advisor dispelled my narrow-minded thoughts of stage managing the show and told me he wanted me to be in it. As in play a role. Good gravy, woman. I could sing well enough thanks to some vocal training. But I hadn't acted in years.

That moment of belief in me though led to many more opportunities on campus to perform. And all the stuff it did for my writing career. All it takes is someone to say yes to your ideas, your creativity, your talent, whatever. And harkening back to the article about the student not getting cast in anything, I personally don't think the student was so untalented that even the Vulcans would be bored of them. I don't know them personally, but it's possible the BA program had the same amount of people to draw from and the same designated few people that can act in anything. Basically, politics. I went to school with several neurodivergents that didn't get cast till later in their college years or at all. How are they going to learn how to act or do what they want to do well if someone doesn't bother to give them the opportunity to do well (and they're paying thousands of dollars for it)? Sure, you have acting classes where you act out scenes, but that's nothing compared to being on stage and having an audience see you in action and have their own opinions on how well you did as opposed to just your one lone professor and classmates who probably have their own bias. Some BAs actually limit the amount of shows a student can do in one semester for the sake of giving other students an equal opportunity. And for good reason. You're not granting an equal opportunity to all students if you're not giving them an opportunity to start with.

Neither me nor the author of the aforementioned Onstage Blog know what the outcome of the lawsuit will be. It may very well be laughed out of court because the student could have transferred somewhere else or dropped out and joined community theatre (I personally know several people who did this). But I think this is something BAs need to pay attention to. The stage is as much an education as the classroom in a theatre program, and if you want to improve your acting (or improve anything and do so by learning through webinars and such), whatever you learn is sort of useless unless you actively apply it to something. And for acting, being on stage is really the best way to apply your knowledge.

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Stay educated,

Alexia