Did you know that Joe Fox ’27 is actually an athlete? If you don’t, then you probably haven’t met them.
Their Troy Bolton shirt is apt — they occupy the space between the worlds of theater and swim. Unlike Bolton, they don’t spontaneously break out into song (though they did joyfully sing and dance while committing acts of police brutality in “The Threepenny Opera”). Like Bolton, however, Joe notes how their work at the pool reflects their work on the stage.
For both swimming and theater, Joe values collaborative work. In fact, it was Joe’s social aptitude which introduced them to the Swarthmore Theater department in the first place. During Seattle’s Swattie Send-off (an event wherein current Swarthmore students meet up with incoming first-years from their city), Joe happened to meet Rose Palmieri ’24, with whom Joe shared a love of Shakespeare. This interaction led Palmieri to enthusiastically encourage Joe to audition for her thesis project: a production of the bard’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” This production would introduce Joe not only to the department (it served as the impetus for their taking Acting I and II with Assistant Professor Jude Sandy, a choice which heavily influenced their choice to major in Theater), but arguably more importantly, theater allowed Joe to meet the people who would make their tenure at Swarthmore what it would become: Palmeri, Ivy Hoffman ’27, and Daniel Sun ’27 notable among them.
For Joe, such relationships on and off stage are a key part of theater’s purpose. Befitting of their Honors Peace & Conflict Studies major, Joe understands interpersonal relationships as a microcosm of larger conflicts, and thus theater as a mediated space where such conflicts can be presented before an audience. Referencing the 2025 Peace and Justice Studies Association keynote speaker Kazu Haga, Joe says that “if you can practice forgiveness and get an individual relationship then there is a world in which you can scale that up.”
The work of theater isn’t just to show the audience an entertaining product, but also to reflect larger conflicts through the interpersonal. As a result, relationships between actors become extremely important. For Joe, the important work of theater doesn’t end in Kuharski Studio during rehearsals, but extends to Sci getting “second dinners” and laughing with friends.
“Am I laughing because it’s awkward and I feel weird about [what I’m doing on stage]?” Joe elaborated, “Yeah, I am. And maybe it’s because I’m a little shy or embarrassed about what I’m doing, but I also feel like it can be used as a way to loosen up a bit and that can bring out things that are more interesting than if I just keep my head down all the time.” Joe remarked that laughter is a point of breath which lies very close to crying, and that this intimacy provides an “in” to their work.
This capacity for fun and collaboration is key to their work as an actor and enacting their creative vision. Throughout their time at Swarthmore, Joe has only ever been an actor, and has thus been subject to a number of directorial visions.
“You can definitely tell how each director works with their actors so differently,” Joe remarked, listing their experience working with student and faculty directors. “I remember with Sophia [Pereda-Echevery ’25] I had never done Viewpoints [Anne Bogart’s devising technique] before, and Sophia loved Viewpoints … and I did not like it ever.”
Despite rubbing against devising work, it provided Joe the opportunity to exercise extreme control over their creative work and gave the tools necessary for more fruitful collaboration with directors during their later productions of “Circle Mirror Transformation” and “Uncle Vanya.” “I feel like [for Uncle Vanya] I’ve gotten to suggest more things, not just for myself but for other people [who] are on stage too. Actually, tonight at rehearsal, I was helping Joanna [Hong ’27] with one of her monologues and I suggested some blocking for Joanna and Lucia [Pachynski-Hoopes ’27] in one of their scenes.”
Toward the end of our conversation, we moved to the concept of failure. “I feel like, for me, failure in acting is something that I’ve had a hard time separating from other people’s interpretations of my work … I feel like this with swimming too. I’m in the slower half of people on my team and I’m not even dropping time, so there’s this constant redefinition of what it means for you to fail and what success looks like in the pool.”
While Joe emphasizes the role of others as collaborators and partners, they have done a lot of work recently to define for themselves what success looks like and the value of failure. “[Success] should be a very personal thing … I guess from the perspective of the audience, like [Professor] Elizabeth [Stevens] was saying, there’s a lot of bad theater out there.”
Joe doesn’t view that statement as discouraging, but as an invitation, saying, “It’s awesome that I get to contribute to [bad theater] sometimes. Because that’s half the fun, you know? And I feel like without really putting yourself out there and trying something new … I won’t be able to get there without failing a couple times first.”
For Joe, the awesome thing about theater is not being rebuffed by making so-called “bad theater,” but working through what is bad so that it may become something wonderful.
