Temple's theater department was a member of the League of Professional Theater Training Programs, along with such well-known and respected theater schools as those at Yale University and the Juilliard School. Each year, the league rents a theater in New York and sponsors a presentation for graduating students. Because the auditions promise to show off the best of the new crop of trained actors, the session is well attended by those who recruit acting talent. Normally these people will not even talk to, let alone seriously consider for a position, an actor with no professional experience.
Last May the league, citing what it considered to be deficiencies in the school's acting-training program, dropped Temple as a member. At the time, Neil Bierbower, chairman of Temple's theater department, acknowledged that the auditions, regarded by students as the culmination of the three-year acting program, were "the biggest single thing" that league membership offered the university.
This spring, because Temple was shut out of the league-sponsored auditions, the department decided to conduct an audition of its own. So it rented an Off- Broadway theater, invited hundreds of agents and representatives from the theater and TV industry, and presented its 14 graduate acting students to the profession.
The response, Bierbower said, was "exceptional and very positive."
The audition was organized and supervised by theater department faculty member Dugald MacArthur, and he, too, was pleased at the results. "Not only did we draw more responses than last year, but the quality of the calls is consistently superior," he said recently. "Last year when we took the class to the league presentation, almost all the calls were calls for resumes. (This year) all the calls were 'see me,' whether they were from agents or theaters or TV."
