For Price, theatre depends on collaboration

“Theatre can’t be done alone. It’s based on hard work, collaboration, and discipline. The skills you learn in theatre apply to most everything in life.”

Those are lessons Caroline Price, the new head of Cornell’s acting program in the Department of Theatre, has learned during her broad experiences as an actor, director, and teacher.

Price grew up in a theatrical family, watching the classic movie musicals from MGM and RKO, singing along with script in hand. Her mother is a theatre critic, and Price tagged along to shows. On the drives home, they talked about the plays. “I’m still always asking if we’re being true to what the playwright intended. My mother taught me that was the most important question,” Price says.

When she was 11, her family moved from Maryland to Maine, where she was cast in her first show, the musical “1776.” The friends she met through theatre became like family, whetting her appetite for more performing, she says.

Price pursued theatre in college, performed in a national tour, and acted in New York before pursuing graduate studies and teaching. She loves both acting and teaching, and says she came to Cornell last summer because this community offers the perfect opportunity to do both.

Path to Cornell

Born: Maryland

Age 6: Started studying dance

Age 11: Moved to Maine and first stage role

Theatre degrees: B.A., Keene State College; M.F.A., Wayne State University 

Tour: Four shows with Repertory Theatre of America, 64,000 miles

Stage career: 11 years

Teaching: Jacksonville State University; Wayne State University

Family connections to theatre:

Mother: Journalist, satirist, theatre critic

Father: Community theatre actor

Brother: Stage rigging sales manager

Grandmother: Introduced her to summer stock in Annapolis, Maryland, as a child