Me: How did you get involved in your field?

Mr. Greco: When I was thinking about going to graduate school, part of the logic of getting a graduate degree was that teaching is something I would do. I decided to be a playwright, rather than an actor or rather than musical theatre performer. That was what I felt was the thing that I could do better than the other things. I had ambitions of writing plays and musicals and having them produced and seeing teaching as something I would do in addition to that and then teaching came more as kind of the main thing I was doing and then the two combined because I actually wrote plays while I was here and so I see myself kind of as an artist in that way because I still want to write and teach. I want to do the work and I want to teach what I do because I actually think I learn what I’m doing when I’m teaching.

 

Me: How did you come to faith? How does faith play a role in your life?

Mr. Greco: I was raised in a Catholic family and we were church going. I believed in God and have vivid memories from childhood connected to Good Friday and Easter but it was only in my late high school years that I felt more urgency to personalize my faith, and in making that decision I ended up not staying in the Catholic Church, but my parents remained catholic so I remained in both of those worlds.

 

Me: Do you have a favorite book or verse in the Bible that stand out to you?

Mr. Greco: If there was one verse that was really most meaningful to me and that’s going to come into play in this Psalms Project that we’re going to do is the expression in Psalm 51 about truth even unto its innermost parts, is one translation. I think that that phrase probably does speak a lot about what I care about.

 

Me: Did you have some anxieties or excitements about coming to or coming back to LCA?

Mr. Greco: Lots of anxieties! I think that coming back into the world of teaching and being older, one concern is have I lost touch, but in terms of my field, I feel a little bit like I have to come back, now, into really seeing my field as theater rather than seeing my field as the church so I’ve been in a period of time where the church was my field and I was kind of up on that and now to feel like I have to come back into what’s happening in theatre and a lot has changed in theatre and in film in those intervening years, and a lot of things that have changed I don’t like. One anxiety I have is am I an old grump who doesn’t like anything young and whatever. I don’t think that’s true. In terms of excitement I think that the Cross Center holds a lot of possibilities for the school, so I think I’m excited about that opportunity, and I’m also seeing that as something that can bless the whole region, not just the student body here. What’s happening here feels to me like it could really be a blessing to the church at large.

 

Me: What’s one of your favorite things about LCA, either from before or now, or something that has changed?

Mr. Greco: I like the commitment to really teaching and then fully embracing what does it mean to be a Christian in that discipline. I think it’s easy to water one of these down. I like the fact the LCA has continued to take both the discipline and the faith seriously, and I think there’s a possibility to actually create culture here as opposed to just doing what’s being done elsewhere. I think there’s a possibility of something new happening here, that isn’t happening in other places.

 

Me: What’s one thing you like doing in your free time?

Mr. Greco:I don’t have any free time! I like nature and I like going for walks in the woods. A lot of the things I have enjoyed doing  for fun, are now part of my job, which you would think would be the best of both worlds. It’s great because you can do the thing you love more and you can give your main energy to it, but that thing that you used to do just for fun now has this weight and this pressure on it, and it’s the thing that I need to get away from in order to really rest. I would mountain climb, if we lived near mountains. Not scary mountain climb, but I would hike because I like being outside, but I don’t have any time to do that.

 

Me: Fun Question! If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Mr. Greco: I would really like to go to Italy.  My whole family heritage is from Italy, and I’ve never been there before. Specifically I’d like to go to Florence, but I’d like to see more than that. Some of it is the art, some of it is a little bit of seeing where I come from. I think I would love to spend two weeks in London and be able to see a dozen shows. That would be a lot of fun.