All graduations are special; all graduations are the same — the robes, the hugs, the tears, the sense of promise. Except this one.

When the 12 members of American Conservatory Theater’s class of 2022 strode across the Geary Theater’s stage to receive their Master of Fine Arts degrees on Monday, May 23, they ended a 54-year tradition of graduate acting training that’s consistently ranked one of the top five programs of its kind in the country.

It has educated Hollywood elite — Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Elizabeth Banks — and has reinvigorated Bay Area theater each year with a fresh crop of top-tier talent: Monica Ho, Rod Gnapp, Jomar Tagatac, Omozé Idehenre, Eddie Ewell, Liz Sklar, Patrick Russell.

Now, no more, thanks to a longtime financial quandary exacerbated by the pandemic.

Anna Deavere Smith, Annette Bening, other ACT alums reflect on their time in its MFA program

The mood at the Geary on commencement day was mostly joyful, with graduates shouting, “Yes, mama!” and “This photo is everything!” as a slideshow played before the ceremony.

The class of 2022 achieved more than most. They didn’t get a full year together before the pandemic kiboshed in-person classes, but they all stuck with the program anyway.

“你必须改造学生,”Board Chair David Riemer said near the top of the ceremony. “This was the Energizer Bunny class: You just kept going.”

Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon listed the unique skills these students had to master: eyeline (where, down to the millimeter, to point one’s gaze during Zoom plays), camera framing, rearranging their living rooms.

“We turned our bedrooms into stages,” graduate Madeline Isabel Yagle told the crowd. “We dealt with neighbors who didn’t appreciate our 9 a.m. vocal warm-ups. Our parents became stagehands. Our family members became camera operators.”

American Conservatory Theater to close its star-making MFA program in 2022

Only occasionally during the festivities did a sense of loss become explicit.

“For the next few minutes, I am still head of acting at ACT,” said Lisa Anne Porter, introducing Yagle and the other student speakers, Morgan Gunter and Wesley Guimarães.

Porter herself is an ACT alum.

“It’s been horrible,” she told The Chronicle in advance of the ceremony. “The last year was just like watching someone die that you love, and you can’t do anything to stop it.”

In December, ACT leadershiptoldstudents, staff and alums about the plans to close.

“People who came as actors to do a show at the main stage would all talk about the energy of the building, that it was just different from going to any other theater because you have this incredibly vital, vibrant training program going on,” Porter went on. Students weren’t cosseted in an ivory tower; “they really got a front-row seat at how a nonprofit regional theater works,” she said.

longstand程序的财务困难ing, MacKinnon and Executive Director Jennifer Bielstein told The Chronicle. Each student’s $30,000 tuition covers just a third of expenses. As is the case with many theaters, ACT over many years has seen a decline in both subscribers and single-ticket buyers, which had previously helped cover the rest of the program’s cost.

At the same time, other schools support their students with a range of services ranging from a financial aid office to mental health facilities to a gymnasium, and it’s not financially feasible for ACT to create such resources for just one small program. Other schools also have opportunities for grad students to work as teaching assistants, offsetting the cost of their tuition.

As of early 2020, ACT had been in promising talks with local universities about potential partnerships to save the program, but then the pandemic halted those conversations. Without firmer plans set, ACT didn’t feel it could accept new students. It also wanted to give as much notice as possible to the four full-time and three adjunct staff members it would be laying off.

“Theaters around the country are having to contract in order to get more muscular in order to build back,” said MacKinnon, noting that ACT is restructuring in other ways. (Its next main-stage season features two fewer shows than usual, stretched over a longer period of time. ACT also paused its internship program.)

Still, Bielstein said there’s a glimmer of hope that a university partnership might happen in the future — just not in enough time to continue the MFA program for the time being.

“We are continuing conversations with some universities,” she confirmed. “The decision-making of a university to bring on another program, it’s big.”

On May 19, the MFA program opened its last show, a production of “The Pliant Girls.” Meghan Brown’s script, directed by Peter J. Kuo, adapts Aeschylus’ Greek classic “The Suppliants,” about 50 sisters who flee forced marriage to their cousins.

The show gave each of the 12 students a chance to show unique gifts: Breezy Leigh’s down-to-brass-tacks ease; James WDL Mercer II’s ability to suggest a secret and let it transform him; Nicholas Giovannoni’s “Who, me?” vibe that instantly dials up any scene he’s in; Yagle’s way of evincing disgust, as if she’s tasted poison but has to swallow it anyway.

What also came through was the amount of investment required to get students to this level: not just the 10 hours a day, six days a week that students have spent together for the past three years under instructor expertise, but the physical space for rehearsals and shows, the design team that imagines and builds the lights, sound, costumes, sets and projections that make up characters’ worlds. All this, for something as evanescent and ephemeral as theater training for plays that are still gleams in artists’ eyes.

Throughout the graduation ceremony, the class referred to themselves as “the Lost Boys.” Graduating student Evangeline Edwards told The Chronicle that nickname came in their first year, honoring the class’s “raucous and heart-forward nature.”

“We had no idea how true that moniker would later become.”