C. Drew Vidal
Associate Professor of Theatre
Additional Information
Teaching Areas: Acting, Movement
Tenure Track faculty
Date of Hire: August 2008
Biography
Drew is the Coordinator of the BFA Acting Option, and his teaching responsibilities focus on coursework in the areas of acting, movement, combat, and devising. He is also active in the BFA Senior Showcase Program, and serves as the Resident Fight Director for the Production Season. Shows directed at Ball State include: Macbeth (co-directed with former colleague Wendy Saver), Steven Berkoff’s Greek, Shogo Ohta’s slow-tempo opus The Water Station, Luigi Pirandello’s classic Six Characters in Search of an Author (self-authored adaptation), Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0, an award-winning, original production of Frankenstein (devised Physical Theatre), colleague Tom Horan’s new play Giantmaker, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime (co-directed with colleague David Little, Spring 2021).
Professionally, much of his career was based in Chicago, where he worked as an actor, movement coach, and fight director, both locally and regionally. Acting credits in the city include roles with The Hypocrites, Famous Door, Red Hen, Defiant, Collaboraction, Tin Fish, and Boxer Rebellion, among others, while regional work took him to Madison Rep, New American Theatre, and the Illinois Shakespeare Festival. Recent roles include Wessex in the Illinois Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare in Love, Johan Holst in Off Square Theatre Company’s staged reading of Oslo, Jim O’Connor in Human Race’s The Glass Menagerie, Rob in Kansas University Repertory Theatre’s The Book Club Play, and Thomas Kinnear in Rivendell Theatre Company’s world premiere of Alias Grace.
As a fight director, he has choreographed over one hundred professional and academic productions, including A Red Orchid Theatre’s Solstice, Off Square Theatre Company’s Water by the Spoonful, Richmond Shakespeare’s Henry IV Pt. 1, Illinois Shakespeare’s Richard III, Henley Street Theatre’s The Spanish Tragedy, Indiana Repertory Theatre’s Holes, and the US premier of Boxer Rebellion’s The Ressurectionsists in Chicago. In Washington DC, he assisted veteran Broadway Fight Director David Leong on the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Richard III, and then alongside veteran Broadway Fight Director Rick Sordelet, he acted as Associate Fight Director for the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s productions of Taming of the Shrew, Tamburlaine the Great, and Edward II.
Drew holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Acting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Movement Pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University. His research interests include the intersections of martial arts and actor training, physical theatre, and contemporary devising practice. He is currently working on a book examining how devising can benefit both actor training and more traditional rehearsal rooms.