I teach at NCCU (Chengchi University - Cheng-da) and the playlet competition in the English Department is an annual event with each class (frosh, soph, jr, sr) competing with a one-act play. The seniors also have a graduation play.
Faculty are usually asked to advise . . . but not direct . . . these plays . . . it is often an honorary position, with very little actual advising (albeit, this depends upon the teacher and the students involved). I have advised a number of these and served as a judge several times as well - when I’m not advising.
Most universities have something similar for their English programs . . . however, if your friend is primarily interested in doing theatre, this won’t be enough . . . the level of expertise and skills are just not there to be satisfying for most theatre types (I have a BA and MA in theatre with a comp lit PhD specializing in interactive drama).
There are a few theatre groups in Taipei aimed at the English-speaking population . . . but they are mostly of the amateur or community theatre level.
If your friend wants to teach at a university, she needs to get an MA at the minimum (if she wants to get into one fo the very few and highly competitive theatre programs she needs an MFA at the least) . . . most universities will NOT look at anyone with less than a PhD . . . NCCU and many other national schools will NOT hire anyone with less than a PhD with the exception of language instructors who may have an MA but they must also have a TESL or related degree with experience . . . however, when we look for folks for the English Department, we usually write the call for PhDs. So, your friend is underqualified for a university post of that type (and the language center is migrating towards hiring part-time positions for language teaching).
In any case, most universities have folks teaching Drama (in our department we have more “drama” folks than classes so the dept. tries to balance things out so we can teach at least one course in what we love but most courses are not related to drama - the vast majoritiy aren’t - I teach one acting class and one film class while someone else teaches modern drama and another person teaches Shakespeare and someone else has the production course) so she would have to luck into a position (unlikely) or be ready to teach the core language courses (the drama programs are already very competitive and most require Chinese fluency unless she’s already a top dog on a visiting prof’s program which obviously she’s not given her qualifications are only at the introductory BA level).
If your friend wants to teach at a university, she needs to get more credentials and that means either a MFA or PhD (if she needs to teach in English, then she will want the PhD as the MFA is a professional acting/directing/tech degree which is less appropriate for English programs which require the research degrees of PhD). She can check into community colleges or high schools but without language teacher training her chances are a lot lower. She may just have to go the bushiban route but then that has nothing to do with drama unless she’s happy to scrape by and build experience in language teaching and limit her theatrical experience to the odd project here and there.
If she wants to be an English teacher, then Taiwan might be helpful for her but if her love is primarily theatre, she should stay in the States and get her experiences there.
In my opinion.
And I have an invite to this year’s in my box right now… I think I’m feeling a cold coming on…
