Oakley "Tad" Hall III (May 26, 1950 – February 13, 2011) was an American playwright, director, and author. In 1978, after a very promising beginning to his career, he suffered massive head injuries in a fall from a bridge, and spent decades in recovery and in the process of creating a new life. Early Life and Education Hall was the eldest child of novelist Oakley Hall and photographer Barbara E. Hall, and the brother of Sands Hall. In 1963 he enrolled at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he first became involved in theatre. After being expelled, he returned to Los Angeles to live with his father, where he enrolled in the newly formed University of California Irvine. At Irvine, Hall met future collaborators Bruce Bouchard and Michael Van Landingham. He acted in numerous productions as part of the prestigious Irvine Repertory Theater, including a minor role in Clayton Garrison’s production of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, alongside lead actors Bob Gunton and Robert Cohen as well as Dark of the Moon by Howard Richardson and William Berney. In fall of 1968, Hall, Bouchard, and Steven Nesbit (another future Lexington collaborator) received scholarships to study at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. In 1969, at age 18, Hall made national news in refusing the draft, mailing back his draft card and citing US war crimes in Vietnam for his reason in doing so. In 1970, he starred in a short film ‘’Dionysus and the Maenads’’, conceived by writer Blair Fuller. In 1974, he completed an MFA in writing from Boston University, studying under John Cheever. Career By age 28, he was a rising star in the New York theatre scene. In 1977, his play Mike Fink was optioned by Peter Clough and Mandy Patinkin, with a reading starring Patinkin and William Hurt produced for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater. Oakley founded and was the artistic director of the Lexington Conservatory Theatre in upstate New York, where his plays Grinder's Stand and Beatrice (Cenci) and the Old Man, and his stage adaptation of Frankenstein, enjoyed their première productions. In 1976–1977 Hall translated and adapted Alfred Jarry's bizarrely comic and revolutionary 1896 French play Ubu Roi (called Ubu Rex) and its sequels, and directed them in New York City Off-Off-Broadway and at the Lexington Conservatory Theatre. The adaptations starred Richard Zobel, who also produced the play and created the masks for it. The