Almost one month after getting the call asking him to be a visiting assistant acting professor, William Langan’s desk
is still heaped with papers, a stack of moving boxes is piled next to it and the walls are bare.
Langan said his transition to Oklahoma has not been easy. The day he was supposed to fly to Oklahoma City from his apartment in New York, his bags were stolen from the lobby of his building. On his first day in town someone scraped his rental car, and he’s had a root canal, he said.
“It’s been a real whirlwind,” Langan said. “I’m very glad I did it, and I know it’s going to be great, but these first couple weeks are a little head-spinning.”
When Langan got the job, he had just returned from a stint at the Florida Studio Theatre, and he was working his off-season gig as a tour guide, he said.
“I’m a licensed New York City tour guide,” he said. “Every actor has his survival job, and I have two, but that’s probably my favorite.”
Lance Marsh, head of performance and theater professor, said real-life working experience is what he looks for in guest professors.
“When we hire a new faculty member in the performance area, we want them to be a working professional who also has great teaching jobs. There is a very small, limited number of actors who are also good teachers to be found in the United States,” Marsh said.
Marsh said Langan’s resume is strong. Langan, a former Ithaca College acting professor, has appeared in CSI: Cyber, Criminal Minds, Numb3rs, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. He has done national commercials and worked in places from New York to Los Angeles, acting in Off-Broadway plays and with repertory companies.
It was during his 11-year term at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that Marsh met Christine Albright-Tufts, outgoing theater professor. Albright-Tufts left a vacant seat in the faculty this summer when she took a job at Actors Theatre of Louisville as director of professional theater training.
“Chris had an incredible opportunity offered to her at the last minute. She’s gone and taken over the whole intern program at a huge professional theater in Louisville. It’s like, a giant step up for her,” Marsh said.
Marsh said faculty turnover is not an uncommon event.
“Our salaries are incredibly low compared to competition for these jobs across the country, so we have a hard time keeping great faculty here. Theater has had a reasonable, not unreasonable, but a reasonable amount of turnover,” he said.
Danielle Pike and Emily Tryon, acting seniors, are in Langan’s auditions technique class. They said having a new professor teach their auditions technique class is an asset.
“In a way, that’s an advantage because he’s looking at you kind of the way all these people you’re auditioning for when you leave are going to be looking at you–they’ve just met you,” Pike said.
Tryon said she likes having the practice of auditioning before strangers.
“I also kind of like how they don’t have that professional connection with us from watching us grow from freshman up because we get more of an experience of what it’s like to walk into an audition room and be like, ‘Hey! This is who I am, what do you see?’” Tryon said.
Pike said Albright-Tufts will be missed by female students like herself.
“She was very much an activist for female opportunity and expanding the possibilities for females, not putting females into boxes,” she said.
Pike said she thinks all of the theater department staff are open-minded and not discriminatory, but there is still a lack of diversity, and the departure of a female staff member is noteworthy.
“It’s important to have strong female voices,” she said. “It’s important to have people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, just for an artistic perspective, not because I want to look at everyone individually and be like, ‘there’s a checklist of diversity,’ but because that’s going to inform a much more well-rounded and comprehensive view of the world and of the art that we’re making and why we’re making it.”
Marsh said the acting faculty wanted to do a standard hiring search to replace Albright-Tufts, but the process would have taken two to three months, leaving students with no professor for the majority of the semester.
“We are all of us very aware that we lost a female faculty member,” he said. “Bill was the finalist in two other job searches and was the only one we could have hired in the time period.”
Langan said he wants to empower actors to take control of their careers.
“I always say the amazing, extraordinary, incredible thing about being an actor is that there are no rules–you make it up as you go. The terrifying thing about being an actor is that there are no rules–you make it up as you go,” he said.
Langan said students should know their careers are up to them.
“You are not a reed in the wind,” he said.
Langan said he wants his students to be able to learn from not only his acting experiences, but also his mistakes.
As a young actor in New York, Langan once got an opportunity to audition at the office of Jay Binder, a Broadway casting company, for the recently deceased Neil Simon’s 1993 original production “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” Langan, a nonsmoker, tried to get into the part of a heavily smoking character by smoking the weekend before the audition. Langan said the plan backfired, and by the evening before the audition he was sicker than he had ever been.
“I call Binder’s office, and I say, ‘I’m really sick, is there any way I can come in and read tomorrow,’ and they say, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Simon’s only in town today.’ And I didn’t go,” he said.
Langan said he tells that story to young actors as a lesson to take every opportunity possible, no matter the circumstances.
“The cap of that story is: If I had that to do over again, I would go get depends and crawl there,” he said. “I could have read for Neil Simon and Jerry Zaks. That’s the kind of experience I can relay, not about diarrhea, but about when the opportunity comes, you have to be willing to jump, whatever it takes.”
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