As a young boy growing up a half-block away from the Little Theatre of Alexandria, Tom Wiggin had dreams of one day being a star. He acted in a play at the theater and was hooked; he went on to do two more.
“I got a good foundation in the theater from the Little Theatre,” he says. “I got good training, and I got a good sense of what theater was really like, even though it’s a small theater. It’s a community theater.”
That foundation would serve him well after he dropped out of Columbia University to pursue acting full time. He eventually found fame as Danny Zuko in a national tour of “Grease”; he’d go on to join the Broadway production as Kenickie.
Soon, Wiggin decided to try his hand at acting behind the camera. After guest starring in episodes of St. Elsewhere and Hotel, he landed the part of Kirk Anderson on As the World Turns; Wiggin played the role for 10 years.
But after nearly 40 years in New York, Wiggin has returned to his native Alexandria to act in back-to-back plays at Arena Stage: The City of Conversation and All the Way.
“As many of us have discovered who have left Alexandria, it remains a really special place, so I eventually wanted to come back here and live,” Wiggin says.
After moving around the country a few times, Wiggin returned to the area for a friend’s wedding. It was then that he felt the pull of his native Alexandria and chose to try his hand at the local scene.
“It’s just been great coming back here. I’ve connected with old friends, and it’s been wonderful,” he says.
Wiggins speaks with an actor’s grace; he answers in paragraphs. He’s more than willing to talk about his childhood in Alexandria, attending Robert E. Lee Elementary School in what was then a “sleepy Southern town.”
“It was still a great place to live because on any given day [you could] hang out with the son or daughter of some diplomat and just regular folks. So we had a real melting pot here. I learned later on what a boon that was to be exposed to different folks [of] different races, different ethnicities [and] different socioeconomic backgrounds,” Wiggin says.
He attended Minnie Howard Middle School for a year before transferring to St. Paul’s School, a boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire.
Wiggin’s father, John Wiggin, worked at the Voice of America, the official broadcast station of the U.S. government and established the station’s content evaluation process. His mother, Rachel Wiggin, helped found the Washington Services Bureau to courier documents to lawyers up and down the East Coast; she later sold the bureau to Commerce Clearing House.
Returning to his native Alexandria has given Wiggin a change of pace.
In New York, “everything’s more intense. The competition’s more intense; the pace of life and the pace of the work is more intense. The potential rewards are really great, and so too is the heartbreak when you don’t achieve those rewards. So everything is just more intense,” he says.
Not that he’s complaining:
“I can be more patient. I can be a little less driven. I’m at a time in my life when I want to … smell the roses. I want to appreciate what’s right there in front of me. I’m not always sort of looking across the water to what’s over there. I can really be where my feet are and enjoy it,” Wiggin says.
In The City of Conversation, Wiggin plays Sen. Chandler Harris, a democrat and longtime boyfriend of Georgetown liberal Hester Ferris, who is shocked when her son, Colin, falls in love with Anna, a conservative. The play moves through three decades’ worth of deep-rooted political tension.
Wiggin keenly notes the parallels between art and life.
“No one knows how to talk about politics with each other. [The play is] about what happens when we cannot figure out a way to talk about politics with people who disagree with us. It’s proven to be paralyzing in our political system,” he says.
After City wraps, Wiggin will play two more politicians in All the Way. He plays both Stanley Levinson, an advisor the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Seymour Trammel, an advisor to pro-segregation Alabama Gov. George Wallace. The play follows President Lyndon B. Johnson’s efforts to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“I’ve finally gotten a chance to work at Arena Stage, which has really been a bucket list situation for me, because I grew up—I saw shows at Arena when I was a teenager, and it was really one of the seminal experiences that propelled me into the business,” Wiggin says.
