When the Alley Theatre opens its production of The Shark is Broken next March, University of Houston graduate student Forrest Stringfellow will be playing the part of Richard Dreyfuss.
The following month UH grad student Claire Metusalem will be understudying the role of Annabelle Pennington in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.
A select group of UH theater students are now in their third year of grad school, not because they’ve fallen behind, but because they’ve demonstrated enough talent to have the chance to spend this year as apprentices at Alley Theatre every day.
It’s called the University of Houston/Alley Theatre MFA in Acting and this is the first class to make it to the third stage. The eight students in the program were selected in 2024 by appraisers from the Alley and UH. This now is their chance to gain professional experience.
“This is an apprentice year. They’re technically students but their lives are completely different from the other two years,” said Alley Artistic Director Rob Melrose. Besides being on stage they’ll be attending master classes at the Alley and will be shadowing the seven Resident Acting Company members at the Alley. As well as being exposed to visiting artists.
Students receive a comprehensive financial support package that includes a UH Graduate Tuition Fellowship covering tuition and mandatory fees each semester, as well as a graduate assistantship with a stipend.
Already, several students in this new program can be seen on stage in Romeo and Juliet (running through October 18 at the Alley) as part of this extension of the partnership between UH and the Alley.
Both Stringfellow and Metusalem say they were attracted to the UH program because it is known for incorporating movement into its acting training.
Stringfellow comes from the Dayton/Orlanda area of Florida and says he thought movement on stage was one of his weaknesses that he wanted to correct. Metusalem was similarly concerned about this component of her acting. “Getting in my body is not my go-to,” she says. Born and raised in Houston (an HSPVA grad) she was working in Chicago after graduating from college when she decided she needed more training and after looking at a number of programs, decided UH was the one for her.
Adam Noble, well known to Houston’s theater audiences as a fight and intimacy coordinator, is also head of UH’s MFA Acting . Movement on stage is a big part of the UH graduate theater experience, he says. “I get two full years with them before I get them at the Alley, I’m a bit of a sword nut. I’m an actor, I’m a director; I teach movement. I have some times with our students. It is one of the hallmarks of our program that we tend to generate highly gifted, physical performers. We are a physical program rooted in practice.
“By the time they’re at the Alley, I’m so happy to have those eight performers.
“We spend two years emersed in the practice of theater giving them all the tools third year at the Alley is their launch pad.”
“This is 4-5 years of my life finally coming to fruition,” Noble says. “To see my students in those halls and in these shows and rubbing elbows with those amazing artists has been really special.
Melrose says the Alley began talking about expanding its partnership with UH eight years ago and this is the result.
“What makes this program unique is they already had a two-year MFA that they were very happy with, but they wanted a three-year. We want a third that isn’t on the UH campus, that is 100 percent at the Alley. That was exciting to us. “
“The whole idea is providing them access. And I said to the staff it’s important you be open and generous.”
As he points out, the benefits are not all one-sided. “Besides helping the next generation of actors, in order to do plays that require larger casts, it helps to have students who can fill out the people required on stage.,” he says. “This is a nice way of getting young people into the mix [on stage].”
Melrose said when he graduated from Yale he was faced with a “what’s next?” feeling. “I had been so focused on my assignments that I didn’t really take the time to think about how does the professional world work? Where do I fit in? How do they make decisions? All these things I had to figure out on my own.”
This year, he said, is designed to help the students figure out the what’s next.” I hope this helps them skip a lot of steps that I had to go through.”
