When you take over an institution in flux, it helps to be optimistic, and a little thick-skinned.

Last spring, when the president of the New School, Bob Kerrey, announced that the school’s drama program was ending its decade-long affiliation with the Actors Studio, the response from students was disgruntled, to say the least. Those midway through the program worried about the continuity of their training and were distressed that their diplomas wouldn’t bear the prestigious Actors Studio name. Even alumni, whose diplomas were safely printed, complained that their degrees would carry less weight than before. Several aired their anger to reporters, and there were rumors that a handful planned to sue the school for breach of contract.

But one person who wasn’t fazed by the acrimony was the drama program’s newly appointed interim director, Robert LuPone. A Tony-nominated actor and a producer – he’s the artistic director of the off-Broadway MCC Theater – Mr. LuPone saw transforming the newly named New School for Drama as a task he was perfectly suited for. “My goal is to turn this program around and make it competitive with the more famous schools in the city,” he announced in an interview last August. “Last year was a bit rocky,” he said, “because everybody didn’t know whether or not there was going to be a contract” with the Actors Studio. But he was unworried by the reports of simmering dissatisfaction. “There’s a driver at the wheel now,” he said, “that’s bringing [the students] something they can’t argue with, and that’s professional standards. Now it’s on them to prove to me that they can do it.”

Now, halfway through the year, Mr. LuPone still radiates confidence, and he’s satisfied with his progress in raising the level of the program – particularly the standard of student productions. In the fall, the actors did three full-length, professionally designed shows. Yesterday the third-year acting and directing students begin a 12-week festival of one-acts. In a nutshell, Mr. LuPone’s goal is to change the program from one primarily focused on technique – the training was exclusively Stanislavsky Method – to one that immerses students in the messy, practical struggle of being a working actor. From a program heavy in theory, it’s becoming a vocational school.

“These kids are sweating,” Mr. LuPone said, with obvious pleasure, in a recent interview in his office. He is a young-looking 59, with short gray hair and a slightly Roman nose – a modest version of his sister Patti’s more dramatic (and more famous) profile. His conversational style was enthusiastic and candid, if occasionally lacking in transitions. He moved quickly from reflecting on the quality of the fall’s student productions (“I thought the kids delivered in terms of the acting capacity, which I was nervous about”) to talking about the chaos surrounding his current show at MCC, which had just canceled its first preview. The play, “The Wooden Breeks” by Glen Berger, has now pushed back its opening, to February 21 from February 15.

The school’s upcoming one-act festival is new this year. In the past, third year students performed excerpts from two- or three-act works, a tradition that Mr. LuPone immediately nixed. (“I’m not casting aspersions, but – where do you go and pay to see excerpts?” he commented.) This year’s plays, by writers such as Christopher Durang, John Patrick Shanley, Lynn Nottage, and Mary Zimmerman – as well as a recent alumnus of the playwriting program Aurin Squire – are all complete one acts. The students selected them, and Mr. LuPone and Ron Leibman, the chair of the acting department, had to approve them. On the first go-round, half of the students’ choices were rejected. There was “a great harangue – we touched the poison of what was,” Mr. LuPone said, referring humorously to last year’s rancor. But now the students are happy, and being told no was a learning experience in itself. “What are you going to hear a lot in your life if you do theater?” he asked.

In early February, as a warm-up to the one-act festival, the third-year class put on a cabaret. In the spirit of tackling real-world challenges, everyone had to perform a song, whether he person could sing or not. As Mr. LuPone explained, cabarets are a tradition of summer stock theaters, which are most ly populated by straight – as in, nonmusical – actors. “If you work at Williamstown or New Jersey Shakespeare or the Berkshire Theatre Festival, you’re going to do a show on Friday night, and then everyone in the cast has to go in front of the town and do a cabaret,” he said. In the past, under the Actors Studio program, a scrappy exercise like the cabaret would have been “a bit of an anomaly,” Mr. LuPone noted, with clear relish. But at the New School for Drama, he continued, the evening was “not about singing – it’s about being foolish in public, and it’s about company spirit.”

Mr. LuPone’s other major initiative is also musical: a just-announced pilot program in musical theater training. This summer, the school will offer a three-week intensive program, taught by professional performers. If it looks like there’s a market for it, Mr. LuPone wants to develop a full-scale MFA in musical theater. (He himself got his start in musicals and earned a Tony nomination for the role of Zach in “A Chorus Line.”)

In addition to the musical theater program, Mr. LuPone hopes to develop a stage management certificate program and, possibly, an MFA program in theatrical projection. These additional, specialized programs will give him the financial room to pursue another of his major goals, which is to make the acting program smaller and more selective. For the first time this year, the university is sponsoring a national audition tour.

Although his current contract expires July 1,Mr.LuPone wants to stay in the job of director “as long as they keep me.” Already, he thinks he’s accomplished the paradigm shift he intended: getting students and faculty focused on real-world, professional obligations and skills. “I think I have the trust of the kids, to be honest with you,” he said, “and I also think they know that they’re getting things they never had before. Whether they can accomplish it or not, because it’s coming late in the program; whether they want it or not; whether they think it’s useful or not. … All of those things I don’t know,” he continued. “But I’ve created an atmosphere in which the faculty and students feel purposeful, and the spirit [of the school] is alive and well, beyond a particular production.”

Ms. Taylor last wrote for these pages about Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt.