“The amount of talent that passes by my door every day, the joy and theater that just kind of emerges no matter where you are, it’s indisputable, immutable and you can’t tamp it down,” said Anne Mundell, a professor of scene design who has been at CMU since 1989.
As of April, School of Drama alumni had earned a combined 52 Tony Awards, 13 Academy Awards and almost 150 Emmy Awards, plus the six Tonys that three CMU grads won at this year’s ceremony. The school has become a force to be reckoned with among the nation’s top arts conservatories.
But — like much of the broader entertainment ecosystem — CMU’s School of Drama is also trying to find a new sense of balance when it comes to pushing its talented students to do their best without burning out and preparing students for their next steps without feeding into stereotypes or discouraging those who might not fit traditional molds.
It’s not an easy balance to find. But then again, easy isn’t a word one hears much around the CMU School of Drama.
‘Working themselves to nubs’
About 3,000 prospective students apply to the School of Drama every year, according to Mica Harrison Loosemore, its inaugural director of recruitment and enrollment. Of that group, 1,000 to 1,200 typically get auditions for a freshman class that usually includes about 60 students.
Anyone who gets in can expect to work. Hard.
2018 grad Myha’la Herrold, now the star of HBO’s “Industry,” described her time at CMU as “the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.” The work was intense, she said, but she learned so much.
That’s not news to anyone at the School of Drama, including Mary Ellen Poole, who has been dean of CMU’s College of Fine Arts since August 2021. She has already gotten the impression that the students’ and faculty’s combined ambitions sometimes come at a steep price.
“They’ve created a kind of situation where they are working themselves to nubs,” Poole said.
Carnegie Mellon graduate Myha’la Herrold in a still from the HBO series “Industry”. (Amanda Searle/WarnerMedia)
“I don’t want to lose anybody unnecessarily. They know this. I’m not saying anything they haven’t been talking about for years. Everybody has a lot of optimism that … they can find ways to maintain the incredible rigor and quality of the program while making it a more humane workspace for everybody.”
Times and teaching philosophies change when a school has been around as long as this one. Established more than a century ago in 1914, it holds the distinction of being the first dramatic institution in the U.S. to offer a degree-granting program.
Set up as a conservatory, the school’s students are trained in every aspect of six disciplines: acting and musical theater, directing, dramaturgy, design, dramatic writing, and production technology and management.
Dagmara Domińczyk visits Carnegie Mellon University in February 2019. (Courtesy of Louis Stein/Carnegie Mellon University)
It’s the kind of place where students like 1998 graduate Dagmara Dominczyk regularly “went to bed and woke up breathing theater.” That intensity is fed by the passionate students and teachers who believe in creating a training ground where young talent can “fail spectacularly” in the name of learning, as senior associate head and assistant professor of acting Kyle Haden put it.
Certainly, proof of the results are everywhere. CMU alumni grace the big screen, small screen, Broadway and stages across the country. There are even more in behind-the-scenes roles throughout the entertainment industry. This little school keeps pumping out generation after generation of stars, helping students from Joe Manganiello to Ming-Na Wen to Billy Porter achieve their dreams.
No one wants to lose that magic.
“You can’t teach people to be talented, but you can teach them to make the most of their talents,” said Stephen Schwartz, a 1968 School of Drama graduate who composed and wrote lyrics for the Broadway classics “Godspell,” “Pippin” and “Wicked.”
“And I think CMU really excels at that.”
‘Nobody is better educated’
It’s a safe bet that you’ve come across CMU alumni in your favorite movies, TV shows, and plays or musicals without even knowing it. Heck, all you have to do is turn on HBO or HBO Max to find Dominczyk starring in “Succession” and “We Own This City”; Herrold on “Industry”; 2003 grad Griffin Matthews on “The Flight Attendant”; 2006 grad Anthony Carrigan on “Barry”; and 2014 grad Denee Benton on “The Gilded Age.”
Before that, they honed their craft on School of Drama stages in Oakland — and maybe had a little fun in Squirrel Hill or Shadyside.
Alexis Floyd, a 2015 graduate, fell in love with local dining staples like Pamela’s and Mad Mex. “The Haunting of Hill House” star and 2017 graduate Victoria Pedretti bought her first drink at the Squirrel Hill Cafe. Herrold got inked at Sinners & Saints Tattoo Shop.
Alexis Floyd in “Seven Guitars” in 2014. (Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)
And they put on shows.
Local theater enthusiasts in the mid-1990s may have caught Dominczyk in a 1997 CMU production of “The Philadelphia Story” or 1995 graduate Patrick Wilson — Dominczyk’s future husband — in a 1995 student-run version of “Cabaret.” Anyone attending shows in the early 2000s could claim they saw performances from 2003 graduates Matthews, Josh Gad (“The Book of Mormon”) and Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”).
The early 2010s saw Benton in a 2013 production of “As You Like It” and Floyd (Netflix’s “Inventing Anna”) in a 2014 version of the August Wilson play “Seven Guitars.” More recently, folks might have seen 2018 graduate Kennedy McMann (The CW’s “Nancy Drew”) in “A Bright Room Called Day” and 2021 graduate Simone Joy Jones (Peacock’s “Bel-Air”) in “The Dance Floor, the Hospital Room, and the Kitchen Table.”
As Carrigan put it in a recent Post-Gazette interview, CMU afforded him “an opportunity to really try and fail and learn from all those failures.”
Jones told the Post-Gazette in February the school helped her gain the stamina for a shooting schedule that often requires 5 a.m. starts and late finishes. She cemented that work ethic through juggling classwork and performance responsibilities with real-world acting experience in locally filmed Hollywood projects like Netflix’s “The Chair,” Showtime’s “American Rust” and Amazon Prime Video’s “Anything’s Possible.”
Matthew Stocke, a Green Tree native and 1995 graduate, has been working consistently on Broadway since the late 1990s. Earlier this year, he was in town as a cast member in the national tour of “Pretty Woman: The Musical.”
As a freshman, he struggled to the point that faculty threatened to cut him if he didn’t get his act together. His desire to stick around became “the driving force behind my newly applied work ethic.”
“One of the things that has sustained my career is that every audition I’ve ever gone into, nobody is better educated than I am or has better training than I have,” Stocke told the Post-Gazette in February. “That’s a very confident thing to take into auditions with you. In a business that’s very subjective, that’s one thing I can always rely on.”
Denée Benton performing in “As You Like It” in 2013. (Courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)
‘Very, very talented students’
Each freshman class at the School of Drama contains about 24 acting and musical theater majors, 24 design and production specialists, and 12 students across the other tracks, according to Loosemore. The school graduated 76 students in 2022 — 57 undergrads and 19 MFA candidates.
“One of the things that I talk with students about is that whether or not they get in doesn’t have to do with their talent level necessarily,” Loosemore said. “As we’re admitting students, we’re looking at forming a cohort. And there’s no right way to do that.”
Those accepted must be ready for a four-year crash course in what it takes to become a working entertainment professional.
Tomé Cousin, an associate professor of dance who has been teaching there for 11 years, schools his students in five different choreography styles and techniques. His plan is to “overtrain the actor” with “the hardest, most difficult things they can do.”
