PVCC Puma Press: November 2004

As much as he enjoys performing as an actor and dancer, Michael Grittner, PVCC Theater Technician and adjunct instructor, relishes the technical magic that permeates a production. He is drawn to the smoke-and-mirrors: scenery, lighting, sound and props. He takes great pleasure in transporting an audience to a different place and time before the first lines of the play are even spoken.

He labors to weave this magic around actors into a new reality that stretches people’s minds, opens their hearts and allows them to think about the magic in their own lives. His life is that of an actor, dancer, technician, director and visionary. For the last three years, he has been teaching students at PVCC how to find their voices through Technical Theater and Post-modern Drama.

Grittner’s passion to connect compels him to be part of something much larger. One aspect of that passion is his desire to help others learn the value of their position in that theatrical universe so they, too, may become connected. On a mission to tell the human story through theater, to help others to learn how to tell it and to change some lives along the way, he encourages others to live their dreams.

Grittner knows about dreams. He started community college at age 32, after following the prescribed path of his high school buddies—get a job and get married. He drove a truck for 15 years. At 32, he was committed to achieving his dream of making a living in the theater.

He chose to teach at the community college level because students there are beginning to determine the course of their lives. They are passionate about looking forward to learning their craft and making it a career. “It’s a hard decision to have the faith in yourself and the strength to make a choice and go forward,” he says, “but a lot of people are doing it…and it’s inspiring.”

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Grittner believes storytelling can change lives.
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Grittner believes story telling can change lives. “Even in a comedy, there can be moments that makes you go, ‘Hmmm.’ Although theater entertains, it teaches people something about themselves.”

While directing Greek Theater, Grittner discovered the Greeks were dealing with some of the same things we are dealing with today. It was that experience that helped him realize today’s storytellers are connected to all the storytellers before them. He had become a brother in a timeless fellowship.

Grittner has experience in storytelling from many angles. During his first community theater experience, at 16, he played six different parts in “My Fair Lady” with the Lakeshore Players in Minnesota. He had costume changes for each character and for different scenes. At one point he was dancing as a sooty chimney sweep, had to run up several flights of stairs, let down the street light for a scene, pull it up after and reappear in a tuxedo. “That part of the theater meant magic and creating that for the audience excited me,” he says. It’s that excitement that he passes on to students at PVCC.

“Story telling has always been a part of who I am,” he says. “An artist’s life sort of chooses us. I remember being really young and gathering the neighborhood kids and getting them into costumes and putting together the Christmas pageant for the neighbors in my basement.”

Continuing that tradition, Grittner has worked backstage for the last two years in the Actors Theater of Arizona’s production of “A Christmas Carol.”

He spends his summers as artistic director at the longest-running summer-stock theater in Minnesota, the Paul Bunyan Playhouse. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, Grittner began directing and teaching theater, which led to his current position at the playhouse. He completed his master’s degree in theater at the University of Arizona in Tucson where he also taught and directed.

“Theater encompasses so many art forms,” he says. “We are working with costumes and scenery, wood, texture and textiles. Each of these requires some kind of artistic vision. We need painters, draftsmen and many talented people to bring it all together.”

He is looking forward to completion of the Performing Arts Center and the changes it will bring to the program. “It is state-of-the-art,” he says. “It will attract more people in theater and the arts to the campus.” There are so many possibilities. By virtue of its size and sophistication, the new building begs for an expanded theater arts program.

Grittner envisions longevity in the theater. “Life could take any number of paths and it could still work. I could be in a wheelchair. I could even be blind and still be able to work and create in this art form.”

He doesn’t expect it to be over any time soon. Many years from now, at his retirement party he hopes to hear someone say he found the compassion and empathy to tell people’s stories and to make a difference in the lives of others. And that he did it in the theater.