A scene from the recent Powerhouse apprentice company production of Phaedra. The design elements were created by apprentices Alison Impey (costumes) and Neil Becker (sets).

On a sultry summer afternoon, 24-year-old Carrie Silverstein, associate production manager of the Vassar Powerhouse Theater Program, sits on a grassy hill of the 138-year-old Vassar College campus located in Poughkeepsie, New York, and watches as a rehearsal of Chekhov’s The Seagull unfolds at the foot of a placid lake. “I’m in mourning for my life,” says the actress playing Masha, puffing on an imaginary cigarette, dressed in a floor-length white petticoat topped by a faded gray T-shirt.

Against this pastoral setting, Silverstein reminisces about how she came to Powerhouse a few years ago in hopes of using the program as a stepping-stone to an acting career. The next summer, however, she returned to the company not as an actress, but as an assistant production manager. Today, she is associate production manager of the season, overseeing all aspects of the summer’s professional shows. “When I started as an assistant production manager, I didn’t even know what the job was,” concedes Silverstein. “But after two weeks, I knew it was for me.”

For 16 years, the Vassar/New York Stage & Film Powerhouse Apprentice Training Program has taken nascent actors and exposed them to the exciting—and often grueling—realities of a life in the theater. In recent years, the program has also turned out a number of technical and design theater professionals, some of whom started as actors and some who have come to the company expressly in search of a career on the other side of the footlights.

Much of the credit is due to Arden Kirkland, the director of design apprentices. She arrived at Powerhouse two summers ago to work with the actors. Her goal: to expand their knowledge of the technical and design components of theater and strengthen their connection between the visual and verbal aspects of production.

Marjorie Loughran as Nina in the Powerhouse apprentice company production of The Seagull

This last season, Kirkland helmed a newly-formed design apprentice program. “In the past,” she said, “those interested in design just worked on crews. Now they actually design the shows and have creative input.” Alison Impey and Neil Becker are the two charter members of the new program that Kirkland hopes will grow to include six design apprentices in the coming years. On any day of the eight-week-program, the apprentices can be found in the basement of one of Vassar’s facilities, creating sets and costumes. Becker, who will be in his senior year of high school this fall, is thrilled to be “working side by side with professionals.” Impey, after earning a degree in studio arts from Bates College, came to Powerhouse to apply her skills to the theater. She considered several summer theater programs, but felt that none offered Powerhouse’s intensive hands-on experience. In a typical 16-hour day, the apprentices design and build costumes and sets for the outdoor shows, attend rehearsals, consult with the professional designers and run crew.

Alison Impey makes adjustments on Phaedra’s costume.

The Powerhouse program began as a collaboration between a budding theater company and the venerable college, which executive producer Beth Fargis-Lancaster succinctly describes as “a sharing of financial and artistic resources.” In 1984, Mark Linn Baker (of TV’s “Perfect Strangers” fame), Leslie Urdang (freshly graduated from Yale Graduate Drama School) and Max Mayer (of New York University’s Graduate theater school) founded New York Stage and Film Company in order to develop film projects and produce new plays. Mayer recalls travelling up and down the East Coast, searching for a farm at which the team could spend the summer months workshopping original work. “For new plays,” says Mayer, “the three-week rehearsal mode doesn’t work. It leads to putting up plays that are bad—or simply not ready.”

Upon discovering that the cost of farms was far beyond their means, their thoughts turned to universities, with their rich resources and state-of-the-art technical facilities. It so happened that Vassar was, at the time, looking to start a theater program. Soon, a viable and synergistic bond was forged. In addition to turning out hundreds of actors and design technicians in the last decade-and-a-half, the Powerhouse has exported numerous productions to the New York stage, among them Tru, Chesapeake and A Bomb-itty of Errors (which recently closed off-Broadway).

From the 17 apprentices in the 1985 inaugural season, the program now numbers 55 theater neophytes between the ages of 17 and 26. This year there were 45 actors, six directors, four playwrights, two designers and one stage manager. Deirdre Burns Somers, the theater training director, describes the “down and dirty” style of the summer. The pace is set on the first day, as the apprentices are called together to embark on their first project—a 24-hour play festival. The playwrights are dispatched to write 10-minute plays, and somehow, by the evening of the next day, six miniature plays have been written, cast, rehearsed, “teched” and performed. “This year,” Burns Somers recalls proudly, “as they were taking their curtain calls, they were smiling in delight, their hands were pumping in the air—they looked triumphant.”

The intensity of the program barely lets up over the subsequent weeks. A typically overstuffed day is filled with rehearsals, master classes, tech work, seminars and performance. “Come here and we’ll convince you that you don’t want to be an actor,” quips co-artistic director Meyer. “And if we can’t convince you, you’ll know you’re in the right place.”

The pastoral al fresco setting for The Seagull

Silverstein knew that theater was the right place for her, but finding her niche took time and some hard-won self-knowledge. After her first season at Powerhouse, she graduated from college and moved to New York, planning to conquer Broadway. There was, however, one problem—going on auditions. “I felt frightened and nauseous whenever I went to one,” she relates. “I didn’t know what to do. Theater was the only thing I knew and loved.” Recalling the tech work she had done in high school, Silverstein returned to Powerhouse the next summer as an assistant company manager—her first paid theater gig. The summer after that, she was entrusted with the role of assistant production manager, which is an all-encompassing job that involves hiring, budgets and trouble-shooting, as well as serving as a tactful and supportive liaison between the designers and the producers.

As associate producer for the 2000 season at Powerhouse, Silverstein feels confident that she has found her life’s work in theater. “I was shy before this,” says Silverstein. “I used to have no head for numbers. But when I connected them to theater, it all came together.”