A full-circle career

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series about the 2025 inductees into the Creston High School Hall of Fame.

When Beth Litwak first went to college, she thought she’d have to choose a teaching career instead of pursuing theater. Little did she know that more than 20 years later, she’d be living the best of both worlds.

Now a successful leader in theater on the East Coast and an assistant professor in Jessup University’s theater department in California, Litwak began her life in Southwest Iowa.

A 1998 graduate of Creston High School, Litwak will be inducted Friday into the Creston Community Schools Hall of Fame as an alumni. The ceremony with the other inductee, Casey Bryant, will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at Creston High School auditorium.

Litwak was an active student while at Creston High School, CHS Band Director Michael Peters said. “She was in the colorguard, that’s how I know her, and theater and speech and all the different things. She was part of my group my very first year here.”

Litwak also spent time on the volleyball, basketball and track teams. She touts her proudest high school accomplishment as “surviving a dramatic dip in ‘The Death and Life of Sneaky Fitch’ without falling off the stage.”

After graduating from CHS in 1998, Litwak gained her teaching degree at Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny. She said teaching always seemed like the natural path for her to follow.

“My dad was an engineer, but in his heart of hearts, he always wanted to be a history teacher. My mom taught down at the elementary school on Adams and she was a special education teacher,” Litwak said. “Teaching just kind of ran in my family. I always like helping people to understand things, so I was like, ‘OK, I think I want to be a teacher.’”

While she intended to teach high school English, the school she student taught at in Nebraska invited her to create a theater program.

“The superintendent of the school came to me when my student teaching was up and he was like, ‘would you be interested in coming and teaching here?,’” Litwak said. “‘What if we created a theater department and you could teach theater and speech, maybe teach an English class on the side, and then you could launch the theater department?’”

The offer received an immediate “yes” from Litwak, who was excited to dive back into theater. She taught for three years, helping bring Lincoln Christian School’s theater program to life. However, after three years, she found herself burnt out.

“When you’re teaching high school and you’re doing extracurriculars, you tend to get very overworked very quickly,” Litwak said. “I actually gave up the theater department roles that I had and let another teacher take that on, and ultimately it broke my heart. The absence of the thing is kind of what launched me into theater professionally.”

Joining professional theater

In 2005, Litwak returned to school, earning her master’s in educational theater at Regent University. While she knew she had the passion for theater, she never expected to get any further than teaching it.

“I still hadn’t hit the point where I really believed I could do it professionally,” Litwak said. “It wasn’t until about halfway through that degree that I started to know people personally who had made a career out of doing whatever they were doing in theater.”

Litwak began making her way into the theater world, going back to get her master’s in acting in 2011. From there, she found herself doing a little bit of everything. Litwak tried stage management, the box office and mentorship programs. She got involved in the Virginia Shakespeare Festival and eventually found her love for producing.

“All those things that I did kind of led to the point where I really got interested in producing,” Litwak said. “To be a producer, you have to speak a lot of theatrical languages, you have to understand back of house, front of house, the business side of things, acting, how to lead a team, all those things I’d kind of been dabbling in.”

Though she found her love of theater through acting, it was in leadership she found her true place. Litwak worked as a teacher and mentor for programs around the east coast, including at Round House Theatre, Church of the City, Williamstown Theatre Festival and many more.

Bringing people together

In 2019, Litwak founded Theatre for Humanity.

“Theatre for Humanity was kind of birthed out of a frustration with the turn that the world had taken at that specific moment, where people can’t even sit down at a table with one another and have a conversation without cutting ties,” Litwak said. She realized it was art and storytelling that brought people together and worked to further that goal.

Theatre For Humanity’s website explains the New York-based 501(c)(3) “is designed to be the table where everyone is welcome. Our desire is to bridge the societal, cultural and political chasms that seem to separate us, creating a safe space to explore difficult topics in an effort to connect one human spirit to another by telling stories that inspire us and give us hope.”

Peters said it was hearing about this program that encouraged him to nominate Litwak for the Creston High School Hall of Fame.

“She was at some [Creston] event and she came to visit me,” Peters said. “I asked her what she was doing now, and she just started talking about all these things that she was doing in New York for her Theatre for Humanity. I was fascinated by this. I was like, this is absolutely incredible what this woman is doing with her life now.”

However, this isn’t the only thing Litwak is actively working on. She is also a new work scout on Broadway for In Fine Company, the theater company that produced shows like “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” and “The Outsiders.”

“That’s kind of an on-the-side thing that I love to do. I have some friends in New York that have a company called In Fine Company,” Litwak said. Larry Rogowsky, a friend and producer at In Fine, said he needed help going through the various shows sent to him to see if In Fine would be interested in producing them.

“I started going and scouting all these stage readings of these productions that were hoping for a Broadway run,” Litwak said. “I would basically do my write-up and send my opinion along with a lot of details on the show over to Larry and Sue [Gilad] at In Fine, and then they would decide or determine [if they want to get involved.]”

Going bicoastal

Despite all her work on the east coast, Litwak has still found time to utilize her teaching degree. In the last year, Litwak began a new career as a full-time assistant professor in theater at Jessup University in Rocklin, California.

“I’ve come full circle at this point,” Litwak said. “It’s going from teaching in the beginning to getting back to teaching 20 years later? Holy cow, it’s been a while.”

Along with teaching classes, Litwak serves as the theater production manager for theater productions at Jessup University.

“I keep all of the departments, set and lighting and sound and costume, moving forward and on track and meeting their deadlines and staying in budget, doing all that kind of stuff, which is leaning more into the producer side of what I’ve done in the past,” Litwak said. “And then, I’m also the stage management and directing mentor for the students.”

Litwak has been involved in a number of Jessup productions already, including “Cyrano de Bergerac, ”A Streetcar Named Desire," “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Mary Poppins.” Litwak is also a board member for The Classic Theatre and an associate member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

Between her many roles around the U.S., Litwak certainly stays busy, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. Looking back, she never expected this was the path her life would take.

“I got a lot of supporting roles in high school and I was very involved in the theater department, but I had this idea in my head that I had to be the single best person and always get cast as lead and always do that kind of stuff in order to make it a career,” Litwak said. “So when I saw people that I could identify with, I was like, ‘that could be me!’ And then I became the person that people started to identify with and I was like, this could be you!’”

Local recognition

Despite all this, Litwak said she was astonished when Peters let it slip that he was nominating her for the hall of fame.

“I think when you’re living your life, like me, I’m living my life, it feels very mundane and normal,” Litwak said. “I was just so struck. I told him, what an honor just to be nominated, thank you so much. And even just being thought of, Mike thinking of me, how amazing to know you’re still in a former teacher’s thoughts.”

While Litwak might have had her doubts, Peters had none.

“This is an extraordinarily well-deserved recognition for this incredible woman who had done incredible things and we as Creston people should be proud that she came from here, because she has done amazing things,” Peters said.

Despite getting a heads-up from Peters, months later when she had a missed call from Creston High School Principal Bill Messerole, she had completely forgotten.

“And then he left me a message and he was like, ‘would you please call me back? There’s something I need to discuss with you,’” Litwak said. “I was like, is it possible for someone to revoke your high school diploma? What could he possibly be calling about? My mind started wandering into all the recesses of like, did I miss something, were my grades not good enough, are all my degrees out the window now? I had no idea.”

As she comes back to Creston for the induction ceremony Friday, she’s excited to be added to a group the high school students look up to.

“The first thing that I tell high schoolers who are looking into colleges, look at their alumni. Where are their alumni, what are their alumni doing?” Litwak said. “In high school, what a great point to start looking and being like, where are my high school alumni, what are they doing.”

For students who are interested in following her line of work, she encourages them to be curious and try everything.

“Follow your curiosity. The next thing that you’re curious about, just follow that,” Litwak said. “How many times was I told, make a five-year plan and stick to the structure of that five-year plan? All of this stuff that feels very linear and that’s not what my life has been, it’s not what a lot of lives are. You just follow the thing that pricks your interest, and you might not see why at the time, but there’s a purpose for it.”