In the wee hours of the morning, during the final week of his first year at the College, Jack Allen Greenfield ’27 found himself standing shirtless by a campfire. Covered in temporary tattoos and smeared with vegetable oil to mimic the appearance of sweat, he waved around a BB gun as a swarm of flies buzzed around him.
“I just remember thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing right now?’” he said.
Greenfield was on set for All That Remains, the first short film by Purple Valley Productions (PVP), the College’s student film club, which he had co-founded that May. In the film, Greenfield played a deranged cult leader who believed he was Jesus.
For Greenfield, chaotic moments like these are some of the best parts of the artistic process.
“Making art is fun, man,” he said. “That’s my favorite part about any art — the scenarios, the ‘remember-whens,’ the cutaway gags.”
Greenfield, who is triple majoring in theatre, psychology, and comparative literature, has enthusiastically jumped into the performing arts scene at the College. As a playwright, actor, director, and filmmaker, Greenfield often leads multiple projects at once. Currently, he is both directing a film he wrote and producing another film through PVP. He also serves as the artistic director of Cap & Bells, the College’s student-run theatre group.
Greenfield’s path into the arts started early. He wrote his first play when he was three years old, as a Hanukkah gift for his parents. It featured a scientist at the North Pole who befriends a penguin and a polar bear. “Unfortunately, I didn’t know any other actors, so my parents had to [act] in my gift to them,” Greenfield said.
Theatre played a big role in Greenfield’s early life. His mother is a performance artist and teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Greenfield attended school, and his father is a theatre professor at Fordham University. As a child, he appeared in several of his father’s plays, and, at 7 years old, he performed in an Off-Broadway production of The Good Person of Szechwan — a play about a benevolent prostitute — at The Public Theater in New York City.
“Growing up, theatre was all around me,” he said. “It was just sort of osmotic. It was in my blood, in my home. My environment was theatre.”
That environment has led Greenfield to explore many roles in theatre production, even gaining some brief experience in fight choreography.
Greenfield emphasized that the collaborative nature of the medium is what continues to draw him in. “You can’t make a play by yourself,” Greenfield said. “There is no [one] person who can be the lighting designer and the sound designer and the actor and the writer and director. It’s impossible. That’s kind of the beauty of it. It’s a constant act of brainstorming.”
While theatre felt inevitable for Greenfield because of his parents’ jobs, filmmaking was something he discovered on his own.
Growing up, he made short movies on his iPad, sometimes with the help of his neighbor, who happened to be the granddaughter of Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets. In middle school, he took a filmmaking class. When he came to the College, he took actress Jessica Hecht’s Winter Study course, “A Filmmaker’s Workshop.” At the time, in spring 2025, there were few opportunities for student film at the College, aside from Hecht’s course and a screenwriting class. That’s when Greenfield and JohnCarl McGrady ’25 created PVP. The group has since maintained their goal of producing and screening at least one film per semester. The films are typically screened at Images Cinema at a festival at the end of the year and submitted to student film competitions. They can also be viewed on the PVP website.
Members of the club rotate through roles as writers, directors, actors, and editors. Much like with theatre, Greenfield appreciates the collaborative aspect of the art form. “Film brings together a wide range of people,” Greenfield said. “With film, you might have someone from a cappella, someone who plays football, someone who’s a theatre person. It’s open to anyone.”
This year, the group is producing three films, including The Double Date, a dark comedy exploring incel culture, written and directed by Greenfield. The plot follows a man who runs into a high school crush and asks her on a double date. When he realizes he has no friends to invite, he decides to bring a mannequin.
Greenfield’s writing often leans into the bizarre. Of all the plays he’s written, his favorite is The Stomach, which was produced by Cap & Bells in his first year at the College. The play follows a lonely truck driver who believes he has discovered a terrifying truth about the universe. “He discovers, or believes, that the whole world is one giant stomach and everyone is just a microorganism part of this stomach,” he said. “It’s about his mental breakdown … and every other characters’ reaction to that. A lot of the play is a political allegory.”
Much of Greenfield’s writing process is shaped by music. He often makes playlists capturing the mood and pacing he wants for his work.
“I used to call listening to music my number one hobby,” Greenfield said. “When I’m writing, I listen to music. I think it helps me create atmosphere and emotionality and a sense of pace and rhythm as well.”
Outside of theatre and film, Greenfield leads sunrise hikes for the Williams Outing Club, DJs for WCFM, and works as a teaching assistant.
Greenfield has several ideas for what he wants to do after graduating, ranging from pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts in playwriting to earning a doctorate in psychology and becoming a child therapist. Regardless of what he does, he hopes to continue using art as an outlet. “I think you have to allow your soul to flourish, and that sometimes occurs when you’re doing art,” he said.
For now, though, Greenfield is content with creating bizarre, ambitious projects, even if they include post-midnight filming and vegetable oil.
“If you’re an artist, you should be proud of yourself,” Greenfield said. “What you do is incredibly difficult and often in the short term, not very rewarding, but it’s worth it.”
