The following year, he returned to school entering the acting program in the Department of Drama at the University of Virginia. At UVA he met and worked with his first and most dynamic acting teacher, Spencer Golub, who would go on to head the Drama Department at Brown University. Golub’s emphasis on physically liberating the imagination through extensive guided improvisation became the foundation for Sudduth’s approach to acting. Sudduth acted extensively during his time at UVA playing leading roles in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (opposite Nip/Tuck’s Dylan Walsh), and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which featured the first full male and female nudity ever allowed on stage in a production at UVA. Sudduth received his Masters of Fine Arts degree in acting from UVA in 1985.

Sudduth moved to Chicago in December 1985 aspiring to work with the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theater Company. During his four and a half years in Chicago, Sudduth played in many stage productions including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice, and Nebraska (by screenwriter John Logan, who penned The Aviator). He has appeared in stage adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Waterfront and A Clockwork Orange, and acted in the 1999 Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh (alongside Kevin Spacey) and the 2003 debut performance of Woody Allen’s play Riverside Drive (starring with Paul Reiser). He also appeared in Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center (with Helen Hunt).

In 2008, Sudduth created the role of Captain George Brackett in the Tony-Award-winning revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific at Lincoln Center. Sudduth finished the year appearing in the New York premiere of Prayer for My Enemy, a play by Craig Lucas. The play was the second time Sudduth worked with director Bartlett Sher who had also directed South Pacific. The production ran at the off-Broadway theater Playwright’s Horizons from November 14 to December 21 and also featured Victoria Clark, Michele Pawk, and Jonathan Groff. In the play, Sudduth played a recovering alcoholic coping with his son’s return from the Iraq War.