Looking Theatre

I'm going to say something that's not very popular in the school I go to. Receiving my college degree in Theatre and English, I believe that I have a unique perspective on the way academia and these fields work, because I sit inside and outside both of these departments. And I see that a lot of their problems are the same. I'm probably going to do a series of articles on this, so stay tuned.

Today, though, the cardinal sin I'm going to talk about is not looking the type.

In theatre, type is thegroup of parts that one would presumably play. However, that's not always true. You can also cast against type. And, despite my searching around the internet for a little while now, I can find no really definitive list or consensus of how many types there are or even what they are (this site is one of the few that I've reviewed that has a list of any kind).

However, from talking to my friends here and in other schools, they are constantly told to go for things in their type and to educate themselves in their type and to live, breathe, and die their type because the almighty type is the only thing that matters. It's like breathing. It's like bathing. It's like my roommate Raven cleaning the apartment. It's just one of those constants of the universe.

I guess that this lack of identifiable types has always bothered me. I mean, I know about the ingeneu and the leading man and the hotshot rebel and the old man, but then you come to the minefield of "character actor." What the hell does that mean? What are the requirements? Or is it just everybody that couldn't play one of the leads?

The fact that these thigns are so perilously non-defined strikes me as a problem. I'm looking for a list. Any help?