About the REP/PTTP

The University of Delaware Professional Training Program/Resident Ensemble Players is a powerful and unique marriage of a resident professional acting company and a conservatory training program. Operating like two sides of a single coin, the PTTP and the REP are each distinctive aspects of one artistic mission that manifests itself in a theatre organization that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Resident Ensemble Players
(REP)

The REP consists of 10 Equity actors and an Equity Stage Manager who are contracted for a four year period of residency that commences with the beginning of each PTTP training cycle. The company is composed of some of America's most experienced and respected regional theatre actors and actresses as well as two members directly from the most recent PTTP graduating class.

During the first three semesters of the training cycle, while MFA actors rehearse and perform full-length classic plays in which all the leading and major supporting roles are played exclusively by MFA students, the REP acting company performs in a season and a half of productions cast exclusively from the professional company, directed and designed by PTTP faculty and some of America's leading professional directors and designers. During this three semester period, REP professionals also play minor and supernumerary roles in the MFA productions, thereby providing strong mentoring and support to the MFA actors in this crucial period of training.

This unique utilization of a resident professional company in conjunction with a conservatory is designed to:

• • Provide audiences with a steady diet of outstanding professional productions of a wide variety of classic, modern, and contemporary plays;
• • Provide exceptional mentoring and support to MFA actors from remarkably talented and trained professionals;
• • Provide MFA actors with Equity Membership Candidacy that enables them to compete favorably for professional roles after graduation;
• • Provide long-term employment and respectable compensation to outstanding professional stage actors, affording them both regular acting opportunities in outstanding professional productions and opportunities to meaningfully contribute to actors entering the profession.

Professional Theatre Training Program
(PTTP)

Once every four years, a group of exceptionally talented students is selected for admission to the University of Delaware's Professional Theatre Training Program (PTTP) for three years of conservatory training leading to the Master of Fine Arts degree. This group is carefully selected through an extensive search conducted throughout the United States in the year between the graduation of one class and the beginning of the next class.

Students are trained in one of three areas: Acting, Stage Management, Technical Production. Because there is only one class enrolled at any one time, the faculty is able to focus its full energies - as well as the program's entire time, space and budget - toward fulfilling the potential of each member of this select group. This unique structure allows extraordinary flexibility and affords the opportunity to respond quickly to individual needs. Small class sections and an emphasis on tutorial work further ensure that each student's development is fully and powerfully addressed.

While PTTP graduates have distinguished themselves in many styles and mediums, the PTTP is specifically designed to train for the stage, where human, rather than electronic, energy is the medium of communication.

Training is focused on plays from the classic repertoire and the PTTP seeks students with a particular commitment to, and appetite for, the classics. Each season's productions are chosen primarily from the great plays of our dramatic heritage. These productions also provide the surrounding community with the opportunity to attend high quality, reasonably priced performances of masterpieces by such playwrights as Shakespeare, Shaw, Moliere, Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams, and Wilde, among many others. During the first three semesters of each six semester training cycle, PTTP students perform the leading roles in, stage manage, and serve as technical directors and other principal technical production heads in MFA productions in which members of the professional REP company play supporting and minor roles so as to provide valuable mentoring to students.

In the fourth through sixth semesters of the training cycle, the PTTP and REP combine fully into a single performing organization in which each student in the Acting Area is always rehearsing and/or performing a principal role opposite REP company professionals in productions that are stage managed by PTTP Stage Management students and technically directed and technically supervised by PTTP Technical Production students. Acting and Stage Management students are enabled to complete their Equity Membership Candidacy during this final year and a half of training.