Zack Powell
Zack Powell graduated from WSU in 2009 with a BFA in Theatre Performance. After graduating, he got a full ride to pursue his MFA in Classical Theatre at Illinois State University, where he also spent a summer studying at the Globe in London. ISU has an affiliation with the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, where he spent the summers of 2011-2012 performing in Othello, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale.
After he graduated ISU in 2012, he briefly pursued Fight Direction as well as acting. He met his now husband, Joe Smelser, at the Shakespeare Theatre Co. in DC, working on a production of Two Gentleman of Verona as an Assistant Fight Director. That fall, Zack booked Godspell at Off-Square Theatre Co. in Wyoming, where he would go on to star in Cabaret and The Cherry Orchard in subsequent years. After Godspell, he went straight into a production of Altar Boyz in DC. This experience solidified that DC was where he wanted to establish his career and a life with Joe. Immediately after Altar Boyz, however, he booked a tour of Romeo and Juliet through the Utah Shakespeare Festival that ended up landing him with their company from 2013-2015. At USF he played such roles as Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Claudio in Measure for Measure, and was also in South Pacific, Sherlock Holmes, Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, King John, and Henry IV Pt. 2. After his last contract ended in 2015, he and Joe were married at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in the Fall.
In 2016, he performed in four plays in rep over 7 months at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA. After this contract, Zack was lucky enough to land a part in the longest running play in America at the Kennedy Center in DC—Shear Madness. Shear has been running for 36 years at the Kennedy Center and is an improv-based murder mystery with lots of crowd input and multiple endings. Zack has been in and out of the long running show for many years where he has played three of the six characters and has done over 600 performances! Up until this point, Zack would occasionally take day jobs as a barista at various DC coffee shops to help make ends meet. However, Shear Madness allowed Zack to act full time for a living, and the managers were generous enough to let him come and go to work at other theatres in the city. Since then, Zack has become a well-known actor of the DC area and played major roles at Round House, Theatre J, Rep Stage, The Folger, Shakespeare Theatre Co., and other terrific houses. He still occasionally leaves town for particularly exciting jobs, and in 2019, he had the opportunity to play Robin Hood in Ken Ludwig’s Sherwood at The Cleveland Playhouse.
In 2020 when the pandemic hit and closed all the theatres, Zack turned his focus to on-camera work. He booked two commercial spots for the gas station chain Royal Farms, three commercial spots for a furniture store (that are still airing in Chicago as of ’24) and landed a small role in the feature film Tapawingo, starring John Heder (Napolean Dynamite), Billy Zane, John Ratzenberger (of Cheers’ fame) and others. Tapawingo has been in three large film festivals and is aiming for a limited release fall of ’24.
In 2021, Zack’s theatre career took off again and he booked 5 different plays in one season. Macbeth at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Red Velvet at the Shakespeare Theatre Co., Sylvain at the Kennedy Center and The Skin of Our Teeth and Sense and Sensibility at Everyman Theatre. After performing those two shows at Everyman Theatre (Lort-D), Zack got another break when they offered him a position in their Resident Acting Company to do two shows a year with them in perpetuity. He was thrilled to find an artistic home with such incredible people and considers them family. In 2022-2023 he starred in The Lion in Winter, the two person Broadway drama The Sound Inside, and in ’23-’24 The Book Club Play and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
During the ’23-’24 season Zack also returned to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) to do a different production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and he played the lead in Arms and The Man at Washington Stage Guild in downtown DC. Next season he is headed back to ASF for A Christmas Carol and will be starring in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and the wild two-person comedy The Mystery of Irma Vep at Everyman Theatre in the spring of ’25.
