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On his 10th birthday, at a time when most boys his age would have jumped at a matinee of Superman III, Will Frears chose instead to sit through back-to-back productions of Hamlet and Richard III. "I was such a little nerd," he says. So it wasn't a surprise to anyone who knew him when he opted for a career in the theater.

"I grew up in a chatty world, where lots of people came to supper," says Frears, 34, the son of director Stephen Frears and London Review of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. "I was expected to have an opinion and to be clever."

Those skills have served him well in the New York theater world, where Frears has begun to make a ...