| Jeffrey Stanley | |
|---|---|
Stanley in 2005 on New York City subway platform |
|
| Born | September 3, 1967 Roanoke, Virginia |
| Occupation | playwright, screenwriter |
| Alma mater | New York University (NYU) |
| Notable work(s) | Tesla's Letters (1999) |
Jeffrey Stanley (born September 3, 1967) is a playwright born in Roanoke, Virginia. He began writing in elementary school, and graduated from New York University Tisch School of the Arts Undergraduate Film Program and Graduate Dramatic Writing Program. He was also a guest at Yaddo and a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College.
His first success came with the play Tesla's Letters (1999), a semi-autobiographical wartime drama set in the Balkans just before the Kosovo crisis, produced Off Broadway at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. The cast included Victor Slezak and Judith Roberts. The play went on to many other productions and public readings around the world.
That was followed by Medicine, Man (2003), a dark comedy inspired by his grandmother's death in an Appalachian hospital. The play was commissioned by and premiered at the Mill Mountain Theatre in Stanley's hometown and featured Janelle Schremmer (Chalk), Bev Appleton (The Answer Man) and George C. Hosmer (The Hebrew Hammer).
In New York City Stanley also wrote and performed in his autobiographical comic monologue The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy (2003–2005), and he has written and directed a number of short plays, one of which he adapted into the award-winning short film Lady in a Box, a satire loosely inspired by the Terri Schiavo case, starring Sarita Choudhury and John Lordan (The Company). He is a past president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-Futurists experimental theatre troupe.
His autobiographical comic monologue Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead premiered at the 2011 Philly Fringe Festival. He is a playwright-in-residence at Philadelphia's Plays and Players Theatre.
Stanley has written articles for Time Out New York, The New York Times, the New York Press, The Brooklyn Rail and Hemispheres. He was also a senior advisor to the editors of the nonfiction book on apocalypse movements The End That Does.
He teaches at New York University and Drexel University.