After reconnecting with alumni in recent years, theater teacher Jake Dreiling has published “Theatrical Journey,” a podcast in which he interviews past students to see how they have incorporated theater into their adult lives.
The idea for a podcast came to Dreiling when he attended Comic-Con, a pop-culture entertainment convention in San Diego, over a decade ago, a time when not many podcasters were on the scene.
“I think it was in 2011, and I was in Hall H and Kevin Smith was there,” Dreiling said. “I remember him going, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m really into right now is podcasting,’ and everybody was like, ‘What?’ In 2011, there was nobody podcasting … I started listening to his podcast – I’ve listened to him for a long time – and I just thought, ‘If I did a podcast, what would it look like?’”
The idea to incorporate alumni in the podcast came when Dreiling heard from a group of past students who had found ways to keep theater a part of their lives.
“I had no idea what I was going to do until about two or three years ago when maybe three or four former students reached out and let me know about things they had been doing,” Dreiling said. “I realized I sort of talk about those things every once in a while with students, but I thought it would be really cool if people knew what the heck they’ve been doing, and that’s when the podcast kind of came into being.”
Alumna Jill Calderon, who graduated in 2020, said she first reached out to Dreiling to update him on her career in film production.
“At one point, I was updating him on how my college and graduation things were going, and he was just like, ‘Hey, I’m doing this podcast, would you just like to update me on how things are going?’” Calderon said. “We went through every production I had been a part of, which was really awesome because when you’re in high school, you’re kind of just doing the thing, but looking back, you’re just like, ‘Woah, I was a part of so much.’”
Having experience working for the college radio station while attending Georgia Southern University, Dreiling said he was comfortable with the recording aspect of having a podcast.
“I didn’t do a lot of interviews, but I did a few with some pretty crazy people,” Dreiling said. “I played music, and we had to do public service announcements, so being on the radio isn’t that weird; It feels a little like that with podcasting since it’s sort of the same idea, but it isn’t quite the same because that’s live and this is very edited.”
Dreiling said the recording process is simple in comparison to the editing process, which may take several hours, depending on the person and the discussion.
“I have to edit them all, and there’s so much stuff I have to take out,” Dreiling said. “We record probably about an hour and a half on average, which I have to distill into about a 40-minute show. Most of it is places where I’m rambling; we go off topic, or I’ll go into detail about our program that nobody else really wants to hear. There’s a lot of editing, so I listen to the whole thing many times over and over again.”
With multiple theater classes to balance, Dreiling said he will do his best during the school year to devote time to his podcast.
“When I started, the first podcast I recorded was last January, and I just found time in between,” Dreiling said. “The recording is easy, but I did a lot of the editing in the summer. I’m going to try to do this as much as I can, but things get busy, so I’ll have to find the time.”
Interviewing past students has been an enjoyable experience for Dreiling. He said working on the podcast has enabled him to reflect on how his relationships with his students have evolved.
“When I started teaching, I was closer to my students’ age than their parents,’ but obviously, as I got older, that shifted,” Dreiling said. “Now, I’m sometimes older than the parents; I have former students who have students who are in high school. Once they graduate, some of them hang out or talk or come back. It’s an easy shift, but it’s weird when it’s been a few years, and I haven’t talked to them since high school.”
Calderon said that being a guest on the podcast gave her the ability to reconnect with a past teacher as well as with herself.
“I definitely think it was incredibly validating in terms of how I was being interviewed, and I actually had stuff to talk about,” Calderon said. “I also gained an appreciation for the work I put in; it didn’t feel like too much when I was in high school, but looking back through it all, I was really proud of myself.”
After reconnecting with multiple alumni, Dreiling said his perspective on the various paths students can take has changed.
“It’s cool to see how people have not gone on a direct path of what you’d expect,” Dreiling said. “Some of them may have gone to college, then tried to make it and then became Broadway stars, but very few. Most people have found something that incorporates theater into their lives, but it’s not the thing that makes or breaks their existence.”
Although he may not have been the primary cause of multiple alumni pursuing theater, Dreiling said he finds it rewarding to hear he has influenced past students to incorporate theater into their adult lives.
“The podcast is called ‘Theatrical Journey’ because it’s all about that journey that everyone is taking, and I like the idea that I was part of the journey and not the whole reason they’re where they’re at,” Dreiling said. “I wasn’t the car, but I was definitely a stop along the way; in some cases, I was a really big stop, but in some cases, I was just a quick bathroom break. They’re going on their own journey and just to be a part of it and to see how I’ve helped them out is really awesome.”
