Theater Director

Before he was producing the musical hits of our generation, Jeffrey was just a kid coming to terms with his adoption, trying to understand his sexuality, and determined to escape his dysfunctional household in a poor neighborhood just outside Detroit. We see him find his voice through musical theater and move to New York, where he is determined to shed his past and make a name for himself on Broadway. But moving to the big city is never easy—especially not at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis—and Jeffrey learns to survive and thrive in the colorful and cutthroat world of commercial theatre.

Peter Brook's seminal book, The Empty Space, sets out many of the ideas about theater which have informed his lifelong work as a theater director, from his iconic "white box" production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and his groundbreaking adaptation of The Mahabharata, to his ongoing work at the International Centre for Theatre Research. More than 50 years on from its first publication in 1968, The Empty Space remains a cornerstone of thinking about theater.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience. The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances.

Chelsea’s backstage crush on her older brother’s best friend was an epic, embarrassing fiasco. She'd thought that Dean Riley was the man of her dreams back then. But she was wrong. Now, she'd rather break a leg than risk handing him her heart again.