A day in the life of a UMass theater major

If you had to ask me what the majority of my conversations look like when asked about my major, I’d sum them up like this:

“What’s your major?”

“Theater.”

“Oh… really? That must be so easy! It must be so fun! You don’t have tests or papers or anything! I’m so jealous, no wonder you’re on Dean’s List.”

And you know what? I’m damn sick of it.

Fellow UMass students, hear hear:

Being a Theater Major is not a walk in the park! I work hard for what I do – very hard, and so does every single one of my peers.

The work that I, and my fellow Theater majors do, is very, very different from typical classroom work, and it’s work you, my dear skeptic, have probably never experienced before! That’s OK. But before you call us theater majors lazy or tell us we have it easy, please understand the work we do is hard work – really, really hard work.

Busy af season means busy af majors

We don’t study for tests – but we memorize like machines. Have you ever memorized an entire play? It’s a lot more than just a few pages of some Orgo notes.

We don’t sit in 200-person lectures- we have 20-person acting classes that we cannot miss, because our professors are on a first-name basis with us, and they are not afraid to call us out for missing class.

We don’t write papers – except we do. Welcome to dramaturgy requirements, folks. What’s dramaturgy you ask? It’s the contextual analysis of plays for performance, and before you scoff and tell me that’s fluff work, let me promise to you that trying to figure out what Shakespeare was saying about the patriarchy in relation to the Roman Empire when he wrote Titus Andronicus is just as hard as doing OWL’s or writing papers on Polysci.

“But you all don’t sit through three hour labs,” you say. “You all don’t understand what it’s like to have classes that long.”

Funny! All my classes are at least two hours long, most of them ranging from the three to four hours.

And tech weeks! Oh… the tech weeks. It would take a novel in itself to explain what the grueling, exhausting process of a tech rehearsal does to the human psyche, especially one as fragile as your typical college student’s.

The pinnacle of theater stress

Wondering what a day in the life of a UMass Theater major looks like? Here’s what my Mondays, my easiest day of the week this semester, look like:

I think it’s written in the theater requirements somewhere that you have to walk up these stairs at least a million times before you graduate

9am

Wake up: I run lines for an upcoming monologue presentation I have in my head while I get ready for the day. I stare at the mirror in my bathroom and check out the dark circles under my eyes. I think about my day ahead, and wonder if it’s because I love myself or hate myself that I chose such a life.

10:10am – 1:10pm

Actor/Director Collaboration: a 400-level, intensive acting class that kicks my ass every single Monday and Wednesday.

1:25 – 2:15pm

English 221- Intro to Shakespeare: Here’s the dramaturgy I was talking about. I love this class because I can sit the whole time. Ah, sitting.

2:30 – 3:30pm

Hit the gym.

Believe it or not, this part of my day is academic. My studies don’t only utilize my brain and knowledge. As an actor, I need my entire body to be the best it can be to succeed in my academics.

3:45 – 5pm

Rehearsal for Actor/Director Scene Showing: Just like your group projects outside of class… except ours judge literally everything our entire academic career has taught us, not just one subject of one class.

5 – 6pm

Club meeting

I do have a life outside the Theater Department. Or at least, I try to.

6 – 10pm

Love and Information Rehearsal: This Mainstage show is a 20-30 hour a week commitment that’s consumed my life since before the semester even started. The process is exhausting, terrifying, overwhelming at times, but most of all, exhilarating and more wonderful than I could have ever guessed.

10pm – 12am

Return home, decompress, do all my homework (yeah, all of it). Spend time with my roommates for a quick second, eat (often, for the first time in many, many hours) then pass out into an eight-hour stress-induced coma.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the daily schedules from two different sides of the Theater Deparment: Mary Margaret Hogan, sophomore Theater/English double major and active member of the UMass Theater Guild, and Ellen Keith, sophomore Theater major and my Assistant Stage Manager for Love and Information.

Mary Margaret absolutely SLAYING the game.

Here’s a word from Mary Margaret:

“Last semester, I was cast as Paulette in the UMass Theater Guild’s hella-successful ‘Legally Blonde.’ It was always a task to explain the incredible stress being in a show while balancing my academics, sanity, and decaying social life, but it was always a task getting any empathy for my struggle to keep afloat with all my responsibilities.”

And from the tech side of things, here’s the daily schedule of Ellen:

Ellen, in all her ASM glory

“Almost every single time I tell someone that I’m a Theater major, they respond with laughter and/or jealousy that they themselves don’t have such an ‘easy’ major. But being a theater major is anything but easy. This past semester has been the busiest time of my life. Here’s my typical ‘hump day.’

9am

On alarm number four, I wake myself up. While getting ready, I need to make sure I have appropriate clothing for the temperature for 9:30am all the way until 11pm, along with my laptop, books, birth control, etc…

10:10am – 1:10pm

This is my Actors/Directors Collaboration class. This is an integrative experience 400 level course. And let me tell you, it’s rigorous. If your director tells you to get up in front of the entire class and make-out with a fellow classmate for an exercise, you do it. In acting classes, you need to be able to let everything go, and it’s hard.

1:25pm – 3:45pm

Yup. Another long class. This one is only two and a half hours though… so that’s cool? This is on the other end of the “theater spectrum.” Stage Management. Stage managing is also an art, but an extremely different kind of art.

The SM (stage manager) of a show is the glue that holds the entire production together, and my work doesn’t stop in my class, it gets applied almost immediately after my class, which brings me to…

5pm

Start of my rehearsal for Love and Information, for which I am the Assistant Stage Manager. ‘Team Stage Management’ always has to be the first to arrive to rehearsals, as well as the last to leave. Since the actors are released around 10pm every night, I usually don’t get out until about 10:30pm. Since the clean up from rehearsal takes about 30 minutes.

10:30pm

I’m FINALLY released from rehearsal.

10:31pm – 12:30am

I walk back to my dorm, take a shower, do any homework I might have and see my boyfriend for a hello/goodbye kiss goodnight. Then, after roughly 15 hours of a non-stop day, I knock the fuck out.

“So that’s pretty much what every day has looked like for me this semester so far. I love the life of being a theater kid. I love the acting aspect as well as the techie aspect. It’s a lot, but it keeps me alive. It keeps me going. I know in my heart of hearts, this is what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”

Being a Theater major is unlike any other experience I have ever had in my life – I couldn’t even imagine that my days would look like this when I came to UMass as a confused Biology major. I would never imagine that a 12-hour day would be my “easy” day. I could have never guessed that I’d be at a point in my life where my body seems to fuel itself with stress rather than food (notice the lacks of meal breaks in my schedule).

However, amidst all this stress, I love being a Theater major with all my heart, and the UMass Theater Department just may be my favorite place in the world. I wouldn’t give up these long, hard days or the people I spent them with for anything. I’ve never been as happy with an education as I am with my UMass Theater education.

Biggest perk of being a Theater major: camaraderie like no other

Because of this, I want to see credit where credit is due – not just for me, but for my hard working, passionate, lovely fellow artists. All too often in our society, we consider artistry to be less “academic” than STEM, but art students are some of the most hard-working people I know.

So to all my STEM majors, my fellow students with more “traditional” academic careers, next time you meet a Theater major, don’t condescend. Talk to them, and understand we’re all working hard, and we’re all just trying to make it to the freaking weekend (even if some of us have rehearsal). Support the arts, love the arts, and the arts will love you back.

‘Work hard, play hard,’ that’s our motto

Want to see the fruition of hard-working theater majors? Come see the Theater Department’s next production, ‘Love and Information.’

(And follow the UMass Theater Department’s Facebook page for any and all Theater Department updates, including dates and information on upcoming shows)

Love and Information promotional poster