Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway

James Beard Award winner DeVore debuts with a wry and boisterous account of his life in the theater. Bitten by “the acting bug” in his first school play, the author passed his high school years in a whirl of exhilarating school performances and late-night screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with his “theatre tribe.” In the 1990s, he entered the BFA acting program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he did some acting and a lot of partying (“I had found something I was good at—carousing”), kicking off a destructive relationship with alcohol that has persisted through his life. His postcollege years in New York City saw DeVore bouncing from one temp job to the next before finding his way back to his first love as a critic at Off, a zine dedicated to Off-Off Broadway. Later, he acted in such productions as an adaptation of the William Faulkner novel As I Lay Dying staged entirely in a large box resembling a coffin. Painting a buzzy portrait of the late 1990s and aughts New York City theater scene, DeVore blends barbed wit, painful honesty (including about his worsening alcohol struggles), and a genuine love for the “warm, awkward closeness” of the acting world. “I often think about all the times I declared theatre dead over glasses of cheap whiskey, and how I was wrong each time,” he muses. “The theatre will always exist so long as one person is willing to dance in the ruins.” Electric prose elevates this homage to an enduring art form. (June)