It's time to do an interview with a person in the technical side of theatre. We asked Steve Retsky what he does at MPC and he explained, "My job is listed as Instructional Technician, which according to MPC means I am an assistant to an instructor for lab portions of MPC Drama classes. In reality my job has two parts -- the academic and the technical. Academically, I am a lab assistant for the Stage Lighting class and handle the acquisition and maintenance of theatrical teaching tools involving electricity. Technically, I am the Master Electrician for the department, act as Scenic Carpenter during the construction phase of our productions, and I find and train backstage personnel."

Steve also does freelance work for various organizations like the Sunset Center, does the Carmel Mission shows for the Carmel Bach Festival, and is on the Board of Directors of The Children's Experimental Theatre. As Steve says, "Sometimes I even have a life."

Steve grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He didn't do any theatre until he was in the 5th grade. He got to run the strip lights up and down to create the UFO look for his class play on pollution. He says that it so taxed his creativity that he had to take a break for 8 years, until college, to try again. As to college, he says that if you include having to register at community and junior colleges to work at certain summer stocks, he's attended about 10 colleges and universities while working in theatre.

Steve says he fell into theatre. He had spent a year at the University of Maryland at Baltimore as a pre-med student and had butted heads with chemistry and math and was facing calculus. He decided to "chuck the doctor thing." He scanned the University of Maryland course catalogue and found that the most credits that you could get for a single course were the six that you could get for "Theatre Practicum." He signed up for the class and by the end of A SCHOOL FOR WIVES he was accepted as family. After another semester of theatre classes, he decided that if theatre was to be his career, he should train at a place that had a good reputation. He applied to three universities and decided to transfer to Temple University in Philadelphia "because Bill Cosby went there."

From Temple University Steve received a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and Theatre. Did he do any acting while at Temple University? He states, "I waited until I'd hoped they forgot I had to take acting to graduate. When they didn't I took the two required acting classes from a wonderful woman named Jan. She taught us about analyzing text, defining a character, movement, shaping the space around us, acting and reacting, and most of all staying focused on what was going on on-stage, not what was going on in our lives and not what was going to happen in the next sentence or scene. That was the best single lesson from that year in any class I took."

He continued his training primarily On The Job. He learned to weld at summer stock in Santa Rosa, learned electronics at the Pacific Conservatory for the Performing Arts in Santa Maria. He took some courses in electronics while he was a master electrician at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. Like most technicians, he learned what he needed to know to do a new job, and then, if he had time, took courses later to polish those skills. That's why he took Ornamental Ironwork and Toolmaking at Hartnell College.

He ended up on the Monterey Peninsula in a rather circular way. In 1987, at a wedding, he ran into an old school friend who was working at The Western Stage. He spent his vacation helping his friend Rick Shandler at The Western Stage in the morning and would come to tour Monterey in the afternoon. Rick's boss, Steve Buck, offered him a job and he accepted it. He worked there until the end of summer in 1998. The Western Stage had reorganized its technical department, Steve Buck quit, and Steve Retsky was "sans contract, so I applied for work at all the theatres I had wanted to work at in my life, from Yale to Goodman, and Seattle Rep to the Old Globe. I even sent a letter to NASA saying that I thought that a stagehand would be the perfect addition to the team building the Space Station. Also I am a SCUBA diver, so I'm used to wearing an environment suit and carrying my own air. But they never replied." After sending out about 50 resumes, he finally got a job at the University of South Carolina. After working there for 10 miserable months, he got a phone call from Peter DeBono, saying that the job he had applied for at MPC before he left had opened again. He returned for an interview, got the job, and has been at MPC ever since.

We asked Steve to make a comment about designing theatre lighting. He offers a wonderful quote from Robert Edmund Jones, an American theatre designer from the 1920s to the 1950s. In his book on modern theatre (circa 1950) he ends his discussion on lighting with this, "We have the mechanisms with which to create this ideal, exalted, dramatic light in the theatre. Whether we can do so or not is a matter of temperament as well as technique. The secret lies in our perception of light in the theatre as something alive. Does this mean that we are to carry images of poetry and vision, and high passion in our minds as we are shouting our orders to electricians on ladders in light rehearsals? Yes. That's what it means."