JEFFREY

Jones is a playwright and essayist whose principal work has explored alternatives to representational, narrative dramatic forms. Two early plays, Nightcoil (1978) and 70 Scenes Of Halloween (1980), introduced techniques—respectively, simultaneous action; and discontinuous action and stylistic variation—that he has since reworked and redeployed in various ways.

From 1984 to 1990, Jones completely abandoned conventional authorship in favor of appropriated texts and collage assembly, culminating in The Crazy Plays, a series of tiny, interrelated plays with repeated dialog, loops, and interchangeable characters. Three subsequent plays were investigations of puppetry, in which a principal character was represented by a stuffed animal, manipulated by an onstage actor. 

His most recent work, A Letter From Omdurman (2012), was an exercise in potted history: a personal response to the photographs of Abu Ghraib in which the (ghost-written, deeply bogus) reminiscences of Wyatt Earp were tweaked to place him in the culminating battle of the Anglo-Sudan war of 1899, where he toppled the regime of the Mahdi, founder of the first modern fundamentalist Muslim state—the battle itself described in overwrought prose by a young lieutenant of the 21st Lancers named Winston Churchill, in his first bestseller.

Jones also wrote the book and lyrics for a musical with Jonathan Larson, JP Morgan Saves The Nation (1995), that was performed on the steps of Federal Hall.

He has variously been manager of The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman and John Jesurun (at Performing ArtServices); Executive Director of Real Art Ways (Hartford) and President of the Board of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York; taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama; and from 2000 to 2022, co-curated of the OBIE-winning Little Theatre series at Dixon Place.

He has received NEA, NYSCA and NYFA Playwriting fellowships, Bay Area Playwrights Festival and Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowships, and support from the NEA Opera/Music Theatre & InterArts Programs, The Rockefeller Foundation, ArtMatters and the Peg Santvoord Foundation. He was a member of New Dramatists from 1980 to 1987, and a MacDowell colonist in 1991 and 2000.