As Melissa Center belts out songs, dances playfully and confidently, and questions personal and cultural choices around sex and relationships, we hear whispers of Gloria Steinem’s famous line – ‘Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.’
Melissa Center presents a fascinatingly flawed character. the depiction of contemporary relationships is unsparingly modern…a complex show that, while full of humour, addresses also the darker, obsessional aspects of love.
Center’s show is like a memoir unfolding on stage where the particulars of her life are laid bare and the universal themes reverberate. Intensely relatable, Center exposes mother-daughter relationships, gender, sexuality, harassment and trauma, love and longing and trust in ourselves and our deepest instincts and desires.
What if you were destined to marry a movie star? And not just any movie star…Jake Gyllenhaal
Sounds crazy, right?
But what if the universe (and your mom) INSISTED, and despite your attempts to dismiss the signs, everywhere you turned there was…Jake Gyllenhaal
Fate?
What if you finally gave in – and went ALL IN!
You summon a sage. You concoct a scheme.
You embark on a madcap adventure to meet and marry Jake Gyllenhaal –
And then…
What if he’s just like allllllll the others?
In Marrying Jake Gyllenhaal we ask – how far is too far to chase after “The One,” and when do we say times up to celebrity worship and idealized love?
ACTOR. PLAYWRIGHT. LYRICIST. PRODUCER
TV: Chicago Fire (NBC), FBI (CBS), This is Us (NBC), Grey’s Anatomy (ABC), Masters of Sex (SHO), True Detective (HBO), Grimm (NBC) SELECTED THEATER: Maggie – A Chorus Line (Dir. Mitzi Hamilton), Olivia – Sex with Strangers (Hollywood Fringe), & Jan – 50 Words (The Lab Creative, LA). She originated the stage adaptation of Lois Lowry’s The Giver, directed by the late Wynn Handman of The American Place Theater.
FILMMAKING ACCOLADES: She is the producer, co-writer, and star of feature film All I Want (Prime, Vudu, TubiTV, itunes), & the co-director, writer, & star of award-winning short film R.v, a narrative that anticipated the overturn of Roe vs Wade.
COMPOSER
FILM: MY FIRST START (Amazon Prime) co-written & directed by Tony winner Victoria Clark
THEATRE: QUILLÉN, a Chilean fantasy musical with composer Pablo Concha; MARRYING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, Edinburgh Festival Fringe; THE FOX, mini-musical based on the D.H. Lawrence novella with composer Lucy O’Brien, Bishopsgate Institute in London
BOOKS: FIFTY KEY STAGE MUSICALS, Routledge Press, 2022 (chapter author: JERSEY BOYS).
Buxton holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU and is Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre at Milligan University.
DIRECTOR
OFF-BROADWAY: That Parenting Musical (TheatreRow), FIVE (Theater 555), Dog Man: The Musical (New World Stages), Retraction (TheatreRow), Less Than 50% (59E59)
TOURS: Dog Man: The Musical (US National, Canada, and Australia); Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Asolo Repertory Theatre)
Education: B.A. Vassar College, M.F.A. Yale School of Drama.
jenwineman.com IG: @winemanjen
