>> My name is Marcel Graham.
I am a performing arts center coordinator and a technical director at Lake Zurich High School.
On a daily basis I do anything from building sets to running sound to designing lights,
to supervising 40 kids using power tools.
Anything that has to do with theater.
The hours vary mostly.
I'm involved with the after-school program, but I usually I do a lot of work during the day.
I'll come in usually around 11:00 a.m. and leave roughly around 8/9 o'clock at night.
The hours are worth it.
The pay is really decent and the benefits are very decent
and especially in the public school system.
I do do a lot of work at home.
I do some scheduling.
I do some contract work at home.
I do office work.
Just various stuff that I can do on the computer here I do at home with the kids.
So that the time that I have to spend here building or designing sound or designing lights
or something, can be spent here focusing on the client.
[Pause] I love the fact that I don't do the same thing every day.
The job changes every single day.
When I was in professional theater, we would build a show and then put it on for three months
and it would be, you know, the same thing every day for three months.
This job doesn't allow for that.
At one point you might be doing a band concert, the next day you might be doing,
doing a play of some sort or even just a, you know, a movie night.
So, it changes on a daily basis.
On a day-to-day basis, the challenges are working with people
that really don't know much about theater.
They're not sure exactly what they want.
They don't know how to ask for it.
And that becomes extremely challenging.
We didn't have those same challenges in the professional industry.
We just have those problems, you know, really at the high school level.
[Pause] Study, study.
School. And, hands on.
Hands on. Never turn down anything.
You hear that a community theater is working on something, work with them.
You hear that a professional theater is looking
for extra people to strike a set, work with them.
Get any information that you can, as much as you can, as fast as you can.
Because it's all going to become helpful for you in the future.
A technical director will usually have a very strong base in one thing.
For example, mine is sound engineering.
But others will have a strong base in lighting, a strong base in set construction,
hydraulic mechanics actually is another one for technical directors.
So, it just depends on what you feel that you're drawn to.
And then from there, you have to learn everything you can about lights, about sound,
about sets, about, you know, even hydraulics in some cases, rigging.
Just so you can move forward on a regular basis.
Theater, in general, is a lot of networking.
It is who you know, it's [pause].
People tend not to use people that they do not know and that they are not comfortable with.
[Pause] I went to college for sound engineering at Columbia College in Chicago.
My theater career started in high school.
As a sophomore in high school, we had a great theater program at my high school
and I really fell in love with theater at the time and I tried
to learn everything I possibly could about lighting or sound or anything along those lines.
And then there's a small dinner theater on the south side of Chicago, its gone now,
called, "Candlelight Dinner Playhouse."
They hired me when I was 16 as a spotlight operator.
I would come in, I would run a spotlight.
When I graduated high school in '89, they were looking for a new position
for a head backstage person downstairs.
[Pause] And I interviewed for the job, they hired me, they moved me into that position,
and then that year I worked with, we did "42nd Street".
I worked with Marc Robin that year.
About three or four years later, he ended up being the artistic director
over at the Joliet Theater in Evergreen Park and I get a phone call from him
out of the blue saying, "Hey, I'm looking for technicians
and looking for a technical director.
I think you would be perfect.
It would be running sound for the shows and being the technical director production manager
for the space, so I moved over there and I remained their technical director
and production manager and their sound designer/sound engineer for about 11 years.
And then, that theater closed down.
They were building this facility over here at that time,
so I actually made the lateral move over to this facility.
I was only off work for about 2 weeks.
So, luckily, in the 20 plus years that I've been in theater, both professional and, you know,
professional high school level I guess you can call it, I've really only been off work
for about two weeks during that entire time, which is an amazing feat in theater.
It's really not what people should expect.
Theaters, especially these days, is a lot of freelance work, so you can expect to be off work
for a couple weeks or a couple of months here or there.
But, when you do work it's extraordinarily rewarding.
Everything you learned from past experiences helps you in theater.
[Pause] I guess the final advice is you used to be able to do this type of career.
You used to be able, it used to be like a trade.
You used to be able to work yourself up, like I did,
through the ranks with hard work and dedication.
And keep moving forward.
And finally reaching the pinnacle, which is, you know,
a salary job somewhere with health insurance.
[Pause] You can't really do that anymore.
You really have to, now, go to college.
You really now have to focus on a specific place.
Lighting design, sound design, something along those lines.
When I was at Columbia, all of their sound design was focused on recording.
The recording industry, recording records, recording CDs.
There wasn't much out there for live sound.
Now, everything is live sound.
And everything is going digital.
So, you can't stop learning.
You have to be a continuous learner in this process.
The big thing is, you know, I'm only 40 years old.
I started when I was 16.
When I started it was real-to-reel tape recorders.
That's how we played back all of our sound.
Then it went to cassette tapes.
Then it went to CDs.
Then it went to minidisc players.
And now we're at MP3s, MP4s.
Everything's being edited and played on a computer.
[Pause] It's an amazing world, but the technology doesn't stop.
And if you stop learning, you're going to just get run over
and nobody's going to end up using you anymore.
So, you really have to just be a continuous learner in this job
or else you're not going to go very far in it.