The Father

When I was there, from 1972 to 1975, it was a tiny program, and that was one of the great things about it. You were with directors and costume and scenic designers and you could see into the process of many aspects of theater. It was like a small town, where everybody knows everybody. But it was a pressure cooker, too, with everybody competing. The competition in the acting program was very wearing I was always standing in competition with my friends for every play. And there was no nod to egalitarian casting. Since each student director or playwright was casting his or her senior project, they pretty much got to cast it with whomever they wanted. So, some people got cast over and over and others didn’t get cast at all It was unfair. It was the larger world writ small. I got into a frenzy about this. It wasn’t that I wasn’t being cast I was, over and over. But I felt guilty. I felt I was taking something from people I knew, my friends. I was on a scholarship and some people had paid a lot of money to be there. Finally, I went to the dean, to Robert Brustein I said “I’m under too much pressure I want to be released from some of these commitments”. He said, “Well, you could go on academic probation” Which was the first stop to being kicked out. So I went to see a psychiatrist at the school who said “You know what? You’re going to graduate in 11 weeks and you’ll never be in competition with five women again. You’ll be competing with 5,000 women and it will be a relief. It will be better or worse, but it won’t be this”. (Meryl Streep, The New York Times, November 12, 2000)