COLLEGE PLANS ACTORS’ ‘BOOT CAMP’ : TWO-YEAR PROGRAM OFFERS VOCATIONAL TRAINING IN THEATER

Instructors Phillip Beck and Jerry McGonigle have a favorite description for the full-time, two-year acting conservatory they are launching at Rancho Santiago College in late August.

“We think of it as a boot camp--but for theater training. We see it as the most intensive campus program of its kind in the area,” said McGonigle, an alumnus of the American Conservatory Theatre’s (ACT) nationally known training program in San Francisco.

The 50 students now being sought for the first semester, which starts Aug. 25 at the Santa Ana campus, will spend 40 hours a week in sessions on career preparation as well as stage techniques.

(There were 70 applicants in the first round of auditions, and 21 were accepted. Additional auditions are set for June 28, July 26 and early August. Tuition is $50 a semester. For additional information, call (714) 667-3109 or 667-3177.)

“Obviously, we’re looking for people who are really committed to a theater career, people who already have had some academic training (in theater) and have done some shows,” explained Beck, an alumnus of ACT’s program and Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama.

“This is, essentially, a vocational program, except that this one’s for the theater. Our goal is that after two years, our people will be well-prepared to pursue their careers in one of the toughest of businesses.”

According to Burt Peachy, dean of the college’s Fine and Performing Arts Division, planning for the Professional Actor Conservatory Program has been under way for three years. In its first year, the program will cost the college $100,000, he said.

Peachy said the theater program is the latest of the division’s certificate programs with an emphasis on career preparation. Others already are under way in dance, fine arts, journalism and telecommunications.

For now, McGonigle and Beck, both of whom are professional actors, will be the new conservatory’s only full-time faculty. When new students are accepted for the program in August, 1987, additional staff instructors are expected to be hired, Peachy said. But McGonigle and Beck said they plan to limit growth of the program to about 70 students.

(Beck and McGonigle also teach acting in a Rancho Santiago College program affiliated with the summer Shakespearean festival at the Grove Amphitheatre and Gem Theatre in Garden Grove.)

Beck and McGonigle have already lined up several guest instructors in drama for the conservatory. Among them are representatives from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, ACT in San Francisco, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and South Coast Repertory Theatre and Grove Theatre Company in Orange County. An instructor from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ clown college in Florida also will participate.

In addition to classes in voice, movement, singing, dance, fencing and theater literature, there will be sessions on theatrical agents, casting practices and auditioning techniques. Students in the program will not be taking courses in any other campus department or field.

Conservatory members will be staging studio productions of classical and contemporary works that will be seen only by faculty and students. Performances for the general public will be given at the end of the two-year training period.

In the works, Peachy said, is a proposal to house the conservatory--along with Rancho Santiago’s other performing arts programs--at the city’s proposed Yost cultural center.

Last year, the city took over ownership of the 900-seat Yost movie house in the downtown redevelopment area. The city is studying a $6-million plan to renovate the Yost and make it a showplace for plays, concerts and other performing arts. (The city’s planning consultant is Allan Colman, former chief administrator of the Los Angeles Music Center.)