In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a coterie of desperate and dedicated theater artists staged an experimental, four-hour, entirely unauthorized adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying. Its centerpiece was an enormous wooden coffin that dominated the space, leaving room for fewer audience members than actors. It ran for only eight performances, fewer than one hundred people saw it, and it changed John DeVore’s life.

Out of these inauspicious circumstances, Theatre Kids weaves a hilarious and unforgettable account of outsize ambition, artistic ingenuity, dashed hopes, and the magic of theatre in fin-de-siècle New York City. DeVore tells the story of how he—recently arrived from Texas, toiling in the salt mines of Maxim magazine, and trying unsuccessfully to quit drugs and alcohol—fell in with the rambunctious and permanently broke outcasts and misfits who comprised the Off-Off Broadway theatre scene. Maintaining only a tenuous hold on his sanity and sobriety, DeVore was cast in In a Strange Room, whose sweetly monomaniacal director—undaunted by his failure to secure rights from the Faulkner estate—spent $10,000 of his own money in pursuit of a messy, ambitious theatrical spectacle that was doomed to commercial and critical failure, but ultimately led to a kind of success: a sweaty, personal, ephemeral masterpiece.

At once a heartfelt love letter to the stage and a bemused portrait of life in the waning days of American empire, Theatre Kids is a buoyant, uproarious, and ultimately moving story that will resonate with anyone who has ever created something beautiful without regard for riches or fame.