Marina Prather, a junior majoring in Theatres Production and Performance, with a minor in Musical Theatre, participated in a 10-week paid internship in Massachusetts for a theatre production company during the summer of 2024. This experience has had an immense impact on Prather in terms of challenging oneself, embracing independence, and the opportunity to engage with people in different areas of theatre.
Internship Role & Responsibilities
As a General Production Intern, Prather worked alongside three other production interns, and three performance interns. She gained experience in hands-on experience in multiple departments, including costumes, lighting, sound, set, and design. In each show Prather has worked in, she’s worked with a different mentor in each department, and has gained knowledge and skills that have an everlasting effect on her future career in theatre, wherever that may be.
Prather was shadowing most of the time from a mentor in each department that she worked in, and every day she would bounce around different areas to learn new skills and knowledge from each person, saying it was a fun experience learning something new each day.
Although Prather says the internship was more of an individualized mentorship style that the company had because in every department you would be assigned a new mentor, Prather did the best she could to apply her skills in the internship, as well as take notes and listen to what each mentor had to say.
Most of the shows Prather worked in at the internship were close to controversial, as she said, but at the same time they weren’t because they hit deeper topics that got the audience to think critically about a certain subject the show was trying to portray, while challenging your beliefs, values, and perspective.
This included various shows such as “Smart,” a show about artificial intelligence coming into our lives, “Reef of Madness,” a show about a man addicted to marijuana and related to propaganda, and “Summer of 1976,” a show about two women who became friends, and also their daughters becoming friends and how they drift apart in the end.
Challenges Faced
Prather has also encountered significant challenges during her internship, particularly in the costumes department. Initially, she struggled with work management and scheduling, which led Prather to adapt quickly to this and become more organized.
Prather mentioned how she was put into costumes on her first day at the internship without any experience or help from her superiors, making her adapt even quicker when the moment came for her to display her skills and knowledge that she learned at Olivet.
Another major challenge Prather faced was not only in terms of her career, but rather her transition to independent living, as she navigated moving out and into a new state with a place to stay, and managing necessary responsibilities like cooking and doing work outside of the internship.
A normal day for Prather in the internship was normally to wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, take a walk in the city and be one with nature, go to work at around early afternoon, and work until the job was finished, usually ending late at night, and would go on like that for the next 10 weeks.
Future Aspirations
Prather is considering working back into this internship with the company for part of the summer but is also eager to apply to another internship as she states that it is a great way to gain more experience elsewhere with different companies and people. “Since the mentorship style in this internship was more individualized,” Prather said, this has helped Prather gain one-on-one experience with different mentors to expand her connection network for the future.
Prather has since kept in contact with most of the people that she’s worked with in the internship, from other interns to directors, and is eager to learn from them and use them as resources for her career buildup in her future career with theatre.
I don’t care what kind of theatre you do, but as long as it ties in with glorifying God, it will show even if the shows you’re doing don’t align with your beliefs and values.
Another document that ties in with this internship is Jordan Konieczny, which talks about an internship he did as a video editor at YMCA, but author James Vasquez.
Additional Work from Prather
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