Indiana native, JIM LEONARD, JR. gained notoriety while he was a student at Hanover College by penning The Diviners, which went on to win the American College Theatre Festival’s award for best play.  Since then he has written many other successful plays and screenplays.  Other works include They Dance Real Slow in Jackson and Crow and Weasel.  His film work includes Close to Home (2005-2007) Night Visions (2001), My Own Country (1998) and The Marshal (1995).

STACI COBB is a Jacksonville, FL native and graduate of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts (dance) and Jacksonville University (theatre).  After eight years spent in New York City, Staci returned home March of 2003.  She made her TJ directing debut with last season’s heart-warming comedy Moon Over the Brewery.  Previous directing credits include Annie (Cultural Arts Playhouse; NY), Jesus Christ, Superstar, The Boy Who Stole the Stars, and Planet of the Perfectly Awful People.  As a performer, Staci has sung back up for Phoebe Snow, played a lead in an Indian feature film (The Inscrutable Americans), performed with Tony Award winner Donna McKechnie (Happily Red 2006), sung in a master class held at TJ with the incomparable Amanda McBroom and Joel Silberman (Happily Red 2007), and played lots of quirky characters throughout.  Some of her Jacksonville favorites include the sassy Yorkshire maid, Martha in The Secret Garden and the flashy Mayzie LaBird in Seussical (TJ Outstanding Supporting Actress Awards), socialite Lady Caroline Bramble in Enchanted April, crazy Sara Jane Moore in Assassins (also co-produced) and disturbed Meredith Parker in Bat Boy at Players by the Sea (PBTS Pelican Award for Best Actress - Mainstage).  This holiday season, Staci has the honor of performing as a featured soloist (also singing with the fabulous Josh Waller) in the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra’s Home for the Holidays offering December 12-14!

Plays come from mysterious places – at least for me. Here’s how this one came to be: First, I learned that my dear friend John Geter, for whom I’d written the role of Buddy in a play of mine called The Diviners, had a disease called AIDS. Like me, John grew up in a small town in Indiana. Some in his childhood community did not react well to the news of John’s illness. The dying they cold deal with. The truly frightening part was John being gay. Gay equaled damnation: therefore AIDS, therefore death. The irony is that John left acting to become a minister and baptized my sons. But that’s how folks thought in the early 90’s.

At the same time this illness was happening to John, Dr. Henry I. Schvey came to New York’s Circle Repertory Theatre seeking to commission a play to celebrate the centennial of Washington University’s medical school. I needed the money. I deposited his check and proceeded to panic, having no idea what to write about. Then I had a thought: “What would happen if it was only the Christians who got AIDS?” I love Jesus, but that’s where I started: The godly get ill, complications ensue. It’s easy to judge the righteous-it’s hard to tell a good story.

For the next two-and-a-half years, I wrote and rewrote Anatomy of Gray. Dr. Schvey bravely staged the premiere with a cast of talented students. I rewrote. Rob Bundy mounted a beautiful and simple production in Circle Rep’s Laboratory Theatre. I rewrote. I staged it in Arizona. It was staged in San Francisco. I rewrote. My friend Steven Deitz directed a stunning production at A contemporary Theatre in Seattle. The audience seemed happy, but I knew something was profoundly wrong with the story, and I didn’t know how to fix it. So I put it away.

For ten years.

Now. Time passes, but time heals nothing – it just lets us grow numb to loss. Years after John’s ashes were spread on the water, I was in a very dark place. I was depressed, I was angry, and I didn’t even know I was grieving. Then one night, I had a dream about John…and when I woke up, I know how to tell the story.

This is the truth: Craig Slaight called from A.C.T. in San Francisco a week later; I told him about my dream; he dared me to write it; and then he staged it. This time, the play was the river and I was the raft. I combined and complicated characters, and I put a young woman at the center. Her father had died, and she wouldn’t shut up about loss and love and grief and sex and longing and landscape and weather. I didn’t find the story, the story found me.

- Jim Leonard, Jr.