Before Dawson’s Creek, James Van Der Beek Built His Career in Theater

Before achieving international fame for his screen work, James Van Der Beek—who died Wednesday at 48—began his career on stage, as many actors do.

A self-described theater kid at heart, Van Der Beek caught the bug after doing school productions of Grease and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He was 15 when announced his intention to become a professional performer, asking his mother to accompany him to New York City to help him find an agent.

Wasting no time, Van Der Beek made his professional debut in Edward Albee’s Finding the Sun at Signature Theatre Company, a one-act play running on a triple bill with Albee’s Box and The Sandbox. He received a glowing review in the New York Times, which read “Mr. Albee has directed this text with skill, humor and an excellent cast, most notably (if only because he really is 16) James Van Der Beek, who plays the boy with the comic ease of someone with 20 years’ experience onstage.”

Later that year, Van Der Beek costarred in the Goodspeed production of the musical Shenandoah, alongside actors like Marc Kudisch and Michael Park, who would go on to become the actor’s lifelong friends. (“At the end of that production, Mike Park said, ‘if you’re ever need a place to saay in New York, give me a call’ probably not suspecting that I would crash on his couch for 700 nights thereafter,” Van Der Beek told us in 2020. “I crashed on the couch in his studio apartment the first night that he and [wife] Laurie spent together as a married couple. There was a blizzard. I couldn’t get home.”)

Before landing the title role in Dawson’s Creek, the show that changed the trajectory of his career, he also appeared in the Vineyard Theatre’s 1997 workshop of Nicky Silver’s play My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine, which went unproduced.

After Dawson‘s Creek went off the air, Van Der Beek returned to the New York stage, once again at his home base of Signature, starring in Lanford Wilson’s Rain Dance.

Two more stage productions awaited: the Geffen Playhouse’s 2013 mounting of Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Gift, and the Kennedy Center’s Broadway Center Stage revival of Bye, Bye, Birdie. Van Der Beek was set to play Albert Peterson, though it never materialized: announced March 5, 2020, it was canceled due to the Covid shutdown.