Joey Del Santo ’25 takes on leading roles
Rising senior works at professional theater, wrote and produced original play
Joey Del Santo ’25, got his first role in a play when he was in preschool, playing Medusa the jellyfish in an adaption of the children’s book Swimmy. He credits that experience for his start of his love of theater.
“It really helped me gain some confidence,” Del Santo said. “I was very shy when I was young. And so my parents then put me in a couple of different theater camps and programs during the summers.”
That’s how he found his way to the Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket, R.I., where he has grown up taking acting classes and attending camps throughout the years. He has interned here and now works in a paid position as the education administrator, which he loves. In June, he also produced Disney’s “The Lion King, Jr.” at the Stadium.
“I go there to work every Saturday, and I run the education department. And that’s been a really beautiful time. It’s just wonderful to get to be leading the program that I grew up in and seeing the next generation come up,” Del Santo said.
At Wheaton College, Del Santo is a theater and music double major and president of the Kresge Theatre Company. During the spring semester, the company presented his original play, “Definitive,” to a packed house in the Kresge Experimental Theatre in Watson Fine Arts.
He got the idea for “Definitive” during the COVID-19 lockdown. Like most people, he spent a lot of time watching Netflix.
“During the summer of 2020, ‘West Wing’ was like, my thing. I watched the entire series and I just loved it,” he said.
Unlike most people, his time in front of the television led to him writing and producing a play. His creation was inspired by political dramas like “The West Wing,” “Madam Secretary” and “Designated Survivor.”
He wrote one scene of what eventually would become “Definitive” in a playwriting class at Stadium Theatre. He then forgot about it until he was preparing to take “Advanced Playwriting” at Wheaton, where he completed the script.
The play examines the intersection of ambition and love. It tells the story of a married couple, a journalist and politician, at pivotal points in their careers. When one takes a job as a foreign correspondent and the other joins the president’s cabinet, they find themselves facing “a crisis of identity” and struggling to pick up the pieces of a marriage that seems doomed to fail.
Del Santo relates to the theme of ambition that is so central to his play, considering that has co-produced full plays with the Wheaton Theatre and Dance Department and helped get the Kresge Theatre Company off the ground after seeing a need for it.
“I was interested in being an artistic director and running a theater company. So, I evolved Cafe Theatre, which was the Student Theatre Club prior into Kresge Theatre Company,” said Del Santo, calling the experience “one of the highlights of my Wheaton career.”
Another theme central to “Definitive” is LGBTQ+ rights, as the journalism of the main character focuses on homophobia in Belarus, where he is reporting.
Professor of Theatre and Dance Stephanie Burlington Daniels described Del Santo as a dedicated student, and said that “‘Definitive’ asks audiences to think about what happens to us when we push away who we really are and ignore our personal stories, valuing the stories of others instead.”
“This is a gift that Joey gives to us, to encourage us to value the diversity of our stories and to have pride in the telling of them,” Burlington Daniels said.
Del Santo said that one of the most meaningful parts of staging of the play was how many queer students were involved with the production. “As a gay man, to see this story come to life and see so many queer students be a part of it has been really good,” he said.
All this would not be possible without the Wheaton Theatre and Dance Department and “the collaborative atmosphere that is created here,” he said. “That’s just something that happens at Wheaton in general, everyone wants to help everyone, everyone wants to see art come to life.”
—By Elsie Carson-Holt ’24