The two-act, 4-character stage play set in 1997 in the Balkans is about an American who sets out to find Nikola Tesla's doomsday device only to discover that a machine is not required. Electrical pioneer Tesla, a Croatian-born Serb, was Thomas Edison's biggest rival. Daisy Archer, a bright-eyed Ph.D. candidate, arrives in Belgrade thinking she has permission to view a certain cache of letters at the Nikola Tesla Museum. She is not prepared to face the museum's director Dragan, a Serb with family in Croatia, who has needs of his own and who strikes a dangerous bargain with Daisy. He will test her willingness to see the letters by having her enter war-torn Croatia to visit Tesla's birthplace and determine whether it has been destroyed. If she returns with photographic evidence she will be given access to Tesla's letters. Daisy learns that the bargain is much more complicated than it at first appears, and that she is a pawn in a larger agenda. The play received its world premiere in New York at The Ensemble Studio Theatre on April 6, 1999, directed by Curt Dempster and funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The cast included Keira Naughton as Daisy Archer and Victor Slezak as Dragan.
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.
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 play has gone on to numerous 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 the Mill Mountain Theatre in Stanley's hometown where it premiered before going on to other productions.
Stanley has also written and directed a number of short plays in New York, one of which he adapted into the award-winning short film "Lady in a Box" starring Sarita Choudhury. He is a past president of the board of directors of the New York Neo-Futurists experimental theatre troupe.
Stanley has written articles for Time Out New York, The New York Times, New York Press, Brooklyn Rail and Hemispheres. He was also a senior editorial advisor to the nonfiction book on apocalypse movements "The End That Does".
He teaches at New York University.
