When he was a young teenager, Greg Jackson saw his very first play. It was a production of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park performed at the Moore Theatre in Seattle and taped for broadcast on HBO. The play—and movie—starred Richard Thomas in the lead.

Today, Greg is amazed to be acting in the touring Broadway production of To Kill A Mockingbird alongside Richard Thomas, and marvels at the synchronicity that brought him here.

“To be working with him now is crazy,” said Greg, who earned a BA in theatre at the University of Iowa in 1990. “I feel a strong and strange kinship with him, because we both played the lead role in Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July and the lead role in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens—both of which are fairly odd and rare roles for any actor. We even have the same birthday.”

“TV’s John Boy is my destiny,” Greg laughed.

Greg grew up moving around Nebraska, Colorado, and Iowa, where he attended high school in Council Bluffs.

“Iowa was where I got started in the arts. In the other public schools I went to before then, I really didn’t have any exposure to theatre or the arts,” he said.

“I joined the concert choir my freshman year of high school because a couple of cute girls asked me to. I thought they liked me, but the choir teacher had bribed the girls to recruit boys to the choir,” he recalled with a laugh. “Mr. Fuller said they could throw a pie in his face for each boy they got to join the choir.”

After Greg performed a small role in the school musical that year, English and Drama teacher Mr. Maddux gave him his pick of roles in that year’s play and became an important mentor, fostering Greg’s dreams of becoming a professional actor.

The encouragement continued at the University of Iowa, where he expanded his knowledge and training exponentially in the Department of Theatre Arts.

“The theatre department at Iowa was an amazing program for a kid who really had no concept of what acting training was, what it means to be a professional actor. At Iowa, I learned about acting, movement, combat, playwriting, directing, script analysis—and everything in between.”

Professor Cosmo Catalano (then the department director, and a 1976 UI theatre grad) cast Jackson in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night alongside much more experienced graduate and professional actors. The cast included Kate Burke, who was a faculty member and Greg’s voice teacher, and Todd Ristau, who founded No Shame Theatre and now heads the playwriting program at Hollins University.

Greg recalled, “It was a thrilling experience to work on such an incredible classic and difficult play when I was so young. I remember feeling the pressure and floundering a bit, and Cosmo was such a profoundly supportive mentor, like so many of my teachers at Iowa who reassured me, shepherded me into the profession, and helped give me confidence.”

He was there for the birth of No Shame Theatre his freshman year, too—presented in the bed of a green Dodge pickup truck in the Theatre Building parking lot, using a motorcycle headlight for the spotlight.

“It’s an experience I’d liken to the first Sex Pistols gig—only for theatre,” he said, and remembers being “an enthusiastic participant and contributor” from that point forward.

During his time studying at Iowa, Jackson also dabbled in playwriting and acted in numerous productions including David Mamet’s Revenge of the Space Pandas, Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 and Vinegar Tom, Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo and Beyond Therapy, and Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July.

“It’s not the kind of arts training you would expect in Iowa. It’s a real gift what was available to me here at the time. I was amazed, even then, to find how many ideas were being generated here, how experimental and progressive the program is. Iowa isn’t waiting for trends to seep in from the coasts—they are actually pushing boundaries from the middle of the country.”

Looking back now, Greg deeply appreciates the importance of studying theatre within the context of a broad liberal arts education.

“So many young actors just want to be a star, but what makes you interesting as a performer is being interesting as a person. What makes a person interesting is a depth and breadth of knowledge and experience. At Iowa, it was so wonderful to be able to explore so many subjects. It rounded me out as a person, helped me challenge some preconceived notions that I grew up with, and helped me start thinking for myself.”

During his senior year at Iowa, Professor Robert Hedley (who also had directed the department and led the Iowa Playwrights Workshop) suggested that Greg audition for NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

“I was pretty naïve,” Greg admitted. “I had no idea until after the fact how difficult it was to get in. The truth is, my experience and training here at Iowa prepared me and gave me the skills I needed to succeed alongside actors who came from more well-known or bigger, more prestigious programs.” He did get in, and he earned an MFA from NYU.

“When I got to New York I was surprised at how staid it felt. I appreciated the regimented instruction on technique that I got at NYU but I feel so lucky to have begun forming my identity as an artist in the wildly creative soil of the theatre department at Iowa.”

After getting an MFA, he struggled at times, as many actors do, to find work.

“When I couldn’t get work in NYC, I started writing and creating work for myself. I worked with my Iowa classmate Erin Quinn Purcell—who I knew since freshman orientation in the theatre department—to develop a sketch that we had first created in No Shame Theatre at Iowa.”

The resulting off-Broadway production of Duet!: A Romantic Fable at the Adobe Theatre Company garnered a positive half-page review in The New York Times. Jackson and Purcell’s joint credits also include The Fiona Apple Kwanzaa Explosion (PSNBC), the musical A Fish Story (for which they received a grant from the Jonathan Larson Foundation), and Go-Go Kitty, Go! (Outstanding Play, 2005 New York Fringe Festival).

“I learned from Iowa that you can make your own work. It was such an affirmation and buoyed me during times when I felt like the industry didn’t want me. I could just do my own thing. I owe that self-sufficiency and creative mindset to Iowa.”

The diversity of Jackson’s educational experience has given him remarkable range as an actor and creator, and that helps him stay steadily and happily employed.

His range is on full display as a member of the ensemble cast for the national Broadway tour of To Kill A Mockingbird. Jackson and a troupe of fellow ensemble actors essentially create an entire town of characters, taking turns with each part and playing roles interchangeably. During the tour, he has played the roles of a court stenographer, a member of an angry mob, and a kindly doctor. He understudies multiple characters including Boo Radley, Judge Taylor, and Link Deas, the town drunk—which is the role he will be playing when To Kill A Mockingbird is presented at Hancher Auditorium.

Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork has been praised as “one of the greatest plays in history” (NPR) and will be presented at Hancher January 19-21, 2024.