ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the wedding between the professional theater and the university—a marriage that is now about fifty years old. The students were being trained for the newly created American resident theater movement, and specifically as permanent company members, the reasoning being that every theater needed new ideas and fresh young blood to keep it alive. The resident theater movement had originally been formed as an alternative to the profit-making theater, not as an extension of it. Its guiding principle was hardly to be a farm team for the major leagues on a quest after enhancement money, but a generator of new techniques, new plays, new approaches to the classics in order to advance the art of the theater. America's continuing adolescence in regard to support for the arts helps explain why the so-called not-for-profit theater is now sometimes serving less as an alternative to the Broadway system than as a tryout house for commercial interests.
