Struggling to Perform : Low Enrollment, Budget Cuts Among CSUN Theater Department Woes

Cal State’s theater department here is finding itself in the midst of an unfolding tragedy these days.

Enrollment of majors is at its lowest level in years, down by nearly a third since 1991. Some of the department’s main buildings are still buckled from last year’s earthquake. And budget cuts across the Cal State University system have meant fewer professors, classes and resources.

Few believe the program will go dark, but the doldrums have left some students considering other majors or even universities, while administrators are struggling to make do with the dwindling resources.

In a department renowned in the late 1980s for its theater education, and with a string of Hollywood stars to its credit--like Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr and Debra Winger--the decline is enough to make some future thespians wonder if it’s time to call it curtains.

“It just doesn’t have the same enthusiasm that it did before,” said senior Sierra Cleveland, an aspiring actress who says she is more anxious than ever to graduate.

“Students had a lot more things than they do now; there were more shows produced, more faculty to work with and more classes.”

Faculty members aren’t quite as dark in their assessment but acknowledge they are worried.

“I don’t feel that we are a threatened department,” said department head John Furman, “but it would also be foolish to say that we’re not a concerned department.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the department boasted nearly 300 students, popular courses like “Scene Study” and widely known faculty members such as Bob Ellenstein, now artistic director for the L.A. Theater Center, and Jeff Corey, whose film credits include “Little Big Man,” “They Call Me Mr. Tibbs” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

Then, between 1991 and 1994, CSUN’s theater department saw a 30% drop in student majors, from 229 to 160. That is a larger drop than the three other major departments in CSUN’s School of the Arts. Yet, as Furman noted, CSUN’s drama department is not alone when it comes to shrinking numbers.

The Northridge campus suffered a 20% slide in overall enrollment between 1991 and 1994, declining from 30,441 to 24,310 students. Even two of the university’s largest departments--English and political science--had drops of 20.8% and 11.2% respectively, between 1988 and 1993.

Cal State enrollment slumped statewide as well, dropping by 42,536 students, an 11.8% decrease.

Although Furman and other faculty members say the decline doesn’t signal the imminent demise of their department, some argue otherwise.

Ivan Hess, who heads the theater department at Humboldt State and is president of the Council for CSU Theater Administrators, sees the drop in majors at Northridge as the start of a downward spiral not only for CSUN drama but also for theater departments elsewhere.

A significant drop in majors could diminish the quality of the courses being offered, which would make the program less attractive, Hess said. That, in turn, could lead to a decline in general enrollment, triggering still more budget cuts, he added.

“We in the arts have gone from being the top state-subsidized programs to the bare-bones bottom of the barrel,” said Hess, who started Humboldt’s theater department 25 years ago and has spent the last three years dismantling it because of budget cuts.

CSU’s financial woes reflect a national trend, as the arts have become the target of cuts by Congress. Still, at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, theater department Chairman Bill Esper maintains that there is an enduring interest in music, drama and fine arts and they will somehow survive.

“I think if people have a real passion for the arts and theater they’ll find a way to do that and won’t be swayed away from it,” Esper said.

That optimism aside, several veteran drama professors like Hess, Furman and CSUN professor Peter Grego are skeptical of the support the arts will continue to receive. Teaching the arts, they say, is labor-intensive, requires highly personalized, individual contact with students and thus often becomes the whipping boy when cuts have to be made.

“When you can put 150 students in a chemistry class and have one professor lecturing them, it’s pretty easy,” Hess said. “But you can imagine the pandemonium with trying to teach 150 students to act.”

Furman blamed the earthquake and budget cuts over the last four years for the drops at CSUN’s theater program.

Shrinking budgets led to a reduction of full-time faculty from 16 to nine professors, and to the cancellation of several general-education classes such as “Actors and Acting” and “Plays and Players.”

The earthquake severely damaged at least three of the department’s primary buildings, including the main Campus Theater, the scene shop and the design shop.

“It feels like an erosion,” said Furman, who took over as chair of the department in 1991, shortly before massive budget cuts swept through the Cal State University system.

Yet even before the devastating earthquake, back to the late 1980s, the theater department’s numbers were falling. And there’s no definitive explanation for those declines.

“Majors go in and out of fashion,” said Colleen Bentley-Adler, spokeswoman for the Cal State system.

“One year you’ll have somebody go into business, and the next year it’ll be engineering,” she said. “It’s really hard to predict what the next fashionable major is going to be. I think that’s what’s happening with theater at all of the (Cal State University) schools.”

Between the fall semesters of 1988 and 1993, the number of students majoring in theater at CSUN fell 36%, from 287 to 183. That was nearly triple the 13.5% drop in total enrollment at the university during that time and the sharpest decline in the School of the Arts’ four biggest departments.

The music department saw a 19.3% decline between 1988 and 1993, while majors in the art department dropped 20.3%. The graphics department had the only increase of the four, climbing 2.5% from 235 to 241 majors.

Philip Zlotorynski, a sophomore, started a semimonthly newsletter with three other theater majors to voice their frustrations about the cuts in the department and motivate students to try to improve conditions any way they can.

“It’s not just the department chair who can make things better or worse; it’s also up to the students,” Zlotorynski said. “Since the earthquake, people are apathetic and frightened.”

Freshman Kierstin Barile’s biggest frustration is that she may spend five years instead of four working toward her diploma because of the lack of classes, a campuswide problem. Cleveland is frustrated by the reduction of faculty.

“Our voice professor, Linda DeVries, has been cut back to part time, so now we don’t have a dialect coach to help us with our accents for plays,” Cleveland said. “I know that sounds trivial, but it’s not. Now, we have to pay $50 an hour for a dialect coach when we used to get that for free with Linda, and she was wonderful.”

For the upcoming performance of “Workin’ Texas,” which requires heavy Texan accents from a certain region of the state, the production’s director, Prof. Joyce McCart Selber, petitioned administrators for enough money to pay DeVries to assist the cast members.

“Having Linda help us focus on the accents for the show has really made a difference,” said Donald Hulson, a junior who is majoring in theater and deaf studies and playing several roles in “Workin’ Texas.”

Hulson, 28, who transferred to CSUN from Bakersfield College, said he sees few problems with the department, considering the cuts at his old school.

“I haven’t found anything to be lacking,” he said.

But several students as well as faculty have found deficiencies--if not in the declining number of students, then in the demise of the Green Room.

The Green Room was the hangout room, a cubicle with a few old chairs and comfortable couches--perfect for comparing audition experiences, meeting a kindred spirit or gossiping about nothing in particular.

“It was just our space,” Cleveland said.

Since the earthquake, the room has been used to store construction equipment and books from the damaged library. Green Room devotees have grudgingly resigned themselves to a lone couch in the hallway, a tattered symbol of their school’s lean times.

“I think we’re all frustrated . . . because opportunities of the past aren’t available anymore,” Furman said.

“We’ll certainly bounce back from where we are now and stabilize at some point, but we’ll never have the numbers we’ve had in the past. That time is gone.”