Bryson Petersen
Age: 24
The Wichita Theatre
Once upon a time, 13-year-old actor Bryson Petersen got his nose broken during a sword fight scene in his first Wichita Theatre play.
Eleven years later, Petersen is assistant arts education director at the Wichita Theatre and is presently starring as Tarzan in its current production.
A Burkburnett native, the home-schooled Petersen is a Midwestern State University junior majoring in English.
Petersen started building at the Wichita Theatre after graduating from high school in addition to acting and directing plays. He’s played many different roles, some evil, but mostly good. “The bad guys are so fun to play like the goofy bad guy I did in ‘Sister Act’ and the more serious one in ‘Oliver.’”
For the 2018 Wichita Theatre season, he will direct all of the children’s shows.
In 2014, Petersen began the “Acting Out in Class!” program with Chance Harmon. The idea began as an in-house workshop at the Wichita Theatre to help children better audition for roles.
Theatre producer and co-owner Dwayne Jackson suggested taking a modified version of that new class to area schools, and with a grant from the Priddy Foundation, Petersen and Harmon began teaching in elementary schools in 2014-15.
“The first year we went to 13 schools, and now we do 26, which includes every elementary and middle school in Wichita Falls and Burkburnett, Iowa Park, Seymour and Throckmorton.”
The two meet with fifth- and sixth-graders in the WFISD and some seventh- and eighth-graders in the outer areas. “We meet with a class for three separate class periods, and we can travel from one to four or five schools a day,” he said.
“We talk about arts organizations and arts opportunities in the area and then we have them introduce themselves before thee class. For some, that’s a big deal to stand up and speak.”
For their next two sessions, they have the students on script doing scene work (and do more music with the sixth graders) and finally a student audition before them with a informal critique.
“I love working with the kids. I use theater to work on their public presentation skills and social skills,” Petersen said. “I benefited so much from being in the Wichita Theatre program, but I didn’t realize it until I was older. So many kids in my MSU speech class, when they were asked to talk, were terrified.”
Not all of the kids in “Acting Out!” want to go into theater, he said, but everyone benefits from the skills they learn. Those skills are applicable to auditions, sports tryouts, job interviews or even running for city council, he said.
In 2016, Petersen was one of the first eight area artists hired as a teaching artist by the Wichita Falls Alliance of Arts and Culture for its summer Teaching Artist Learning Lab (TALL) program. In Summer 2017, he was one of two Master Teaching Artists flown to New York City to study for 10 days at the Lincoln Center Education Teaching Artist Development Labs and then to share what he learned with other teachers.
Petersen also teaches homeschool classes at the Wichita Theatre in the afternoon and sometimes on Saturdays. He’s has also judged middle school one-act-plays and done acting workshops.
Petersen danced in the 2016 Dancing for the Stars and hosted the benefit in 2017.