Wes Seals
MFA in Theatre with a concentration in pedagogy/performance, 2018
sealsws@vcu.edu
Within one week of graduating from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2006, Wes was offered an acting apprenticeship at Actors Theatre of Louisville and was offered a role in the 25th Anniversary International tour of Cats. He also had an agent who encouraged him to move to LA. He decided instead to join the Cats tour and performed as Plato/Macavity for six months. His tour was cut short after a hamstring injury, so he moved to NYC to keep pursuing acting.
Wes is from a small town called Clay outside Birmingham, Alabama. He describes himself as an imaginative kid who was athletic, but hated sports. As a result, he got into dance at age six and traveled to dance competitions from Tennessee to Florida. Wes started acting in community theater and at age 16, he apprenticed at the Red Mountain Theatre Company in Birmingham. He loved the communal aspect of theater and “how you can create a community of people who are all working towards the same goal.”
Wes attended the prestigious Alabama School of Fine Arts which had an intense performance program. His goal was to be a professional actor, but he also started directing and doing choreography.
While earning his BA in Acting and Directing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one highlight was working with Gypsee Yo, an Albanian refugee and slam poet. She created a one woman show and asked Wes to do the movement. He ended up choreographing 10 of her poem monologues and the resulting show toured Albania and the Balkans.
After the Cats injury, Wes was back in New York and trying to make it as an actor in musical theater, but “the way I looked didn’t match how I sounded as a bass baritone…they didn’t know what to do with me.” He started a theater company with restaurant coworkers, Wind Up Productions. One of his favorite memories is a 10 minute play festival of new works they organized with pieces from all over the world.
After years of acting and working in New York, Wes realized, “I love theater, I love art, but I have to have more of a balance,” so he took a break from acting. He volunteered as an acting coach for friends, wrote and produced two plays, and acted as Director of Theatre for Camp Eagle Hill in upstate New York for a summer. Teaching came to the forefront, “seeing kids totally transform, it was absolutely astonishing.”
His roommate Brandon Carter (now Head of American Shakespeare Center) told Wes about VCU and the pedagogy program in his hometown of Richmond. Wes applied and attended a two day audition on campus with David Leong (former Chair) and Noreen Barnes (former Graduate Program Director). He remembers, “I stepped out of the bus station and went, ‘this is going to happen.’” Wes loved the program at VCU and calls his experience with faculty “incredibly influential and challenging.” He graduated in 2018 and began teaching full time at VCU in Fall 2019.
When asked about department changes, he says “Our department has certainly become more diverse as far as who is in the room and how they are represented… we’re getting students who really have interests in theatre as a tool for change.”
Header image by Aaron Sutten: Wes as director for VCU’s “Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach“
Compiled by Liz Hopper (professor emeritus), Jerry Williams (BFA ’71), and VCUarts Theatre for the August 2023 Theatre Alumni newsletter