Humans of AFS: Seth Schmitt-Hall, Mentorship, and Technical Theatre

Seth Schmitt-Hall started his technical theatre career in high school, inspired by a particularly wonderful teacher. Later, 11 years ago, he got picked to be AFS’s new technical theatre director. Since then, he’s taught students during the production of around 27 shows , including Songs for a New World, Three Sisters, and The Diary of Anne Frank.

When I spoke with Schmitt-Hall, it was in his dimly lit office, which he admitted he’d not entered in quite a while. The door was adorned with cutouts of SpongeBob characters from around when The SpongeBob Musical was put on, some pieces of tape from previous shows, and more. As I entered the room, there were some bits of scrap from The Wiz on the couch that he quickly moved out of the way.

Since when he was eight years old, Schmitt-Hall said, he has been learning all sorts of things from teachers in his life.

“I would say one of my core teachers… that I think about a lot is my choir director for many years, Richard Webster. Close friends with him now. He taught me [from when] I was eight years old until I graduated high school, and he instilled… I think the biggest value, which is punctuality, a good work ethic, and professionalism, even at a young age.”

Elaborating, Schmitt-Hall said, “I mean, I was an eight-year-old, but he expected professionalism out of that, and I expect that out of high schoolers.”

Now, Schmitt-Hall pays what he learned forward, mentoring students with both high expectations and support.

When I asked about Seth as a teacher and mentor, Axel Oravec ‘26 said, “What I’ve learned from him is to lean on the people around you, and don’t think you can do things alone. It’s really hard, and that’s why you have a team.” 

Schmitt-Hall’s passion for technical theatre started in high school, thanks to a particularly great teacher.

There, he said, “I had a teacher named Mark VanDerZee… and he was awesome. He ran the improv club. He was also a founding member of Company One, which is a professional theatre company in Boston. And he just kind of made things possible. He was also a trained vocalist… and I just thought, ‘if I can be a TD (technical director) of a school…then that’s what I want to do.’” 

Thus, Schmitt-Hall’s path was chosen. He went to college, and then graduate school, where he made a sloped wall for Everyman (which looks quite familiar to anyone who’s seen the set of Alice by Heart).

At one point, Schmitt-Hall mentioned a college professor named Andrew Lane, who taught him structural engineering at Temple University. 

Interestingly, as Schmitt-Hall said, “Lane was the TD at AFS two TDs before me. So, I think 2003 to 2007 or so.”

In graduate school at Villanova University, Schmitt-Hall was taught by Michael Hollinger.

Importantly, Lane and Hollinger both later recommended Schmitt-Hall to AFS. As Schmitt-Hall said, “There are two big [recommendations] from Villanova and Temple, that said, ‘you should hire this guy,’ and here I am.”

His technical theatre work goes beyond AFS. One of his favorite non-AFS productions was Love Unpunished: a play about the 9/11 attacks that takes place entirely on a staircase in the World Trade Center.

Love Unpunished is a very unique show. Schmitt-Hall painted a picture of it being a quiet, and much less bombastic show.

As Schmitt-Hall described it, “There were not really many words to it, but it was basically this Escher staircase. The entire show was just watching what’s happening in this staircase, the morning of the attacks. They don’t physically say everything there, so it’s a very physical piece.” 

This one he considered a favorite for a couple of reasons. One of which was the set designer: Tony-winner Mimi Lien was in charge of that, and Schmitt-Hall said she “was super cool to work with in terms of her priorities of the show.”

Additionally, Schmitt-Hall described how they got actors up and down the staircase: a 27ft-tall fire pole. 

At the time of writing, Schmitt-Hall and JMASS are hard at work on Alice by Heart, this year’s musical at AFS.

When asked about production, he said, “The creative process is like, ‘this is going to be good. This is going to be okay. This sucks. I suck. This is okay. This is pretty great. Disbursement of T-shirts.’ That’s the creative process.”

This show is certainly a complicated one, more complicated than there’s space for in this article. But rest assured, all the moving parts seem to be coming together wonderfully.

Near the end of our conversation, Schmitt-Hall said, “Being someone whose job it is to shine lights on people and turn on microphones to make sure their message is heard resonates with me in terms of my goal in life. To make sure student voices are heard. I take pride in anything from a simple assembly to a full-form production.”