Oakley Hall III
[4] The co-founder and first artistic director of Lexington Conservatory Theatre, in 1978 he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a fall from a bridge; he spent decades in recovery and in the process of creating a new life.
After being expelled, he returned to Los Angeles to live with his father, where he enrolled in the newly formed University of California, Irvine.
In fall of 1968, Hall, Bouchard, and Steven Nisbet (another future Lexington collaborator) received scholarships to study at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater.
It starred Mandy Patinkin, William Hurt and Glenn Close among others, and was directed by future Capital Repertory Theatre producing artistic director Peter Clough.
[19] Hall's 1978 play Beatrice (Cenci) and the Old Man, with its challenging, dark humor and incestual subtext, received mostly positive reviews but has not been produced again.
"[20] In 1979, Lexington Conservatory premiered his play Grinder's Stand, a historical drama written in blank verse exploring the mysterious death of Meriwether Lewis.
"I also can't remember who at the National Endowment I'm supposed to send a copy of this play as part of the grant requirement...I'm a full time playwright, but it looks like this fall I'll have to find some kind of job.
[25] Richard Ades of The Other Paper described it as "a clever and gleefully perverse black comedy," noting that "it's well-served by Dee Shepherd's intense direction, and set designer Chris Jones's crumbling wall backdrop is more than adequate for a play too self-consciously theatrical to be mistaken for real life.
[27] In 2002, Foothill Theatre Company in Nevada City, California received a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the development of Hall's 1979 play Grinder's Stand.
[28] Director Bill Rose, a friend of Hall's brother in law, heard about the production and began documenting it, a project which grew into the award-winning documentary The Loss of Nameless Things.
[29] In 2008, he moved to Albany, New York to live with Hadiya Wilborn, who fostered a collaboration with acclaimed puppeteer Ed Atkeson.
[34] The 2004 documentary led to increased interest in Hall and his work, including revivals of some of his plays in Kansas, Ohio, Connecticut, North Dakota and upstate New York.
In 2009, writer and director Fred Dekker said in an interview that he had been approached to write and direct a feature film about Hall, based upon the documentary by Bill Rose.
