By the time a student graduates from Wofford with a theatre major, he or she will have endured a highly rigorous and time-consuming training program. A lot is asked of our fine theatre students, because a lot will be asked of them outside the fold of their collegiate work and life. Our main goal as teachers and mentors is for them to succeed out there.
Theatrical productions are a massive undertaking. They require skill, talent, humor, efficiency, finesse, knowledge, communication, respect, research, curiosity, passion and collaboration. While participating in and studying about theatre, our students are not only figuring out how to successfully direct a production or create a character or design a set, but also how to navigate through challenges, assignments and life. Theatre students learn to communicate clearly and effectively with a team, how to speak well in public, how to creatively solve problems, how to examine an issue from several different perspectives.
They are athletes, driven and disciplined. They are artists, creative and curious. Our theatre majors are great readers and writers and designers and theorists and critics and performers. They are incredible students and humans who have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and who have survived a rigmarole of high departmental standards, projects and challenges and lessons beyond their wildest dreams, plus intense academic and personal expectation.
When they graduate they are hireable. They are focused, articulate, well-trained, sympathetic and grounded. They are strong lawyers, public relations associates, insurance agents, comedians, teachers-- and of course, theatre professionals and performers.
The Theatre Department, like the college as a whole, is strongly committed to study abroad. The opportunity to move out of your comfort zone as a student and a human is powerful and an important part of an education. And the opportunity to spend a single semester focused entirely on acting, directing, writing or designing can be transformative for artists, scholars and thinkers.
Seventy percent of theatre majors over the past 10 years have spent full semesters studying acting or filmmaking in London, Dublin, Bueno Aires and Prague. We also have a relationship with a program that places extremely gifted and committed students for a semester at the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre School.