He studied English and theater. He joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. He was, by his own account and the accounts of people who knew him at Hanover, recognizable as a person of considerable social facility — the charm that he would describe years later in his father was present in the son, operating in the specific register of a young man in college in the early 1980s. He made friends who mattered. One of them, Mike Pence — the future Governor of Indiana, Vice President of the United States, and Republican presidential candidate — has described Woody warmly in their shared Hanover years: two very different people who found each other interesting, which is one of the specific gifts that small college environments provide.
## New York and the Years of Understudy Work
After Hanover, he moved to New York. This is the standard biography of an American actor of his generation: college in the Midwest or South, move to New York in the early to mid-1980s, years of auditions and small parts and survival jobs and the constant negotiation between the career you are building and the practical necessities of keeping yourself alive in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
He worked as an understudy in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues on Broadway. The understudy role is a specific kind of existence in the theatrical world: you know the part, you are paid to know the part, you attend rehearsals and performances, and you prepare for a possibility that, in most cases, does not materialize. The actor in the role performs; you watch and wait and maintain your readiness. It is work that requires discipline without providing performance, and it requires the specific psychological fortitude of someone who is genuinely committed to the craft rather than to the attention the craft provides.