As Lynn Jackson sees it, everything that has happened so far in her roller coaster life, from plane crash survivor to business guru, helped prepare her for her later-in-life new career as a director of plays on Vero Beach’s amateur theater scene.

Jackson is the director of the current production of Neil Simon’s hilarious comedy “Rumors,” which has been running before packed houses at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild and will continue with four shows this weekend.

A Michigan native, Jackson was almost born into show business because both her parents were active in summer stock theater; her father was an accomplished saxophonist and her mother was a solo vocalist and church organist. At age 8 in third grade, Lynn helped run a community talent show and she later directed high school musicals. 

But the job of amateur theater director probably won’t be the main focus of the story when her obituary is eventually written after a rich and varied life.

In 1992, Jackson barely survived a horrific airplane crash in Evansville, IN, when a Kentucky Air National Guard C130 transport plane from a nearby Kentucky airbase crashed into the Drury Inn hotel where she and her future husband, Bill Capodagli, were teaching a business seminar to employees of a local company.

When the aircraft, laden with 6,000 gallons of airplane fuel, burst into flames, all five crew members and 11 people on the ground were killed.

Both Capodagli, then 48, and Jackson, then 36, were seriously injured – her injuries were worse than his because she was wearing heels and a business suit and couldn’t run away fast enough. She suffered serious burns to over 35 percent of her body and spent months in hospitals, undergoing several operations.

Looking back on those grim times, Jackson says she feels like she had “been given a new lease on life and I needed to make it as fulfilling as possible.” And she proceeded to do just that.

Capodagli and Jackson at the time had a career giving business seminars highlighting the Disney company’s extraordinary emphasis on and success in customer service and quality control. They bundled their teachings in a best-selling book they co-wrote, “The Disney Way,” which Fortune magazine named the best business book of the year in 1998. The book, which has been re-printed and re-issued several times in new editions, is still selling.

Capodagli is still doing the seminars but these days, Jackson stays home and does her husband’s bookings as his agent and the marketing for his seminars, which allows her to work from home on her other passion, the theater.

“Rumors” is the third show Jackson has directed at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild, after “Calendar Girl” and “Murder on the Nile.”

Jackson has also acted on stage, but she much prefers directing, which allows her to apply some of the same team-building principles she used in her business seminars.

“Running a show is not that different from running a business, when you come to think about it,” Jackson says. “Business is about developing a chemistry between your staff, getting your employees to trust each other. And unless you can develop that chemistry between your actors, you don’t have a show.

“Preparing a show is like building a team from the get-go. You have to develop that camaraderie that allows the cast to absorb the story.”

Jackson says she is blessed to have a great cast for “Rumors,” the current play at the Theatre Guild. Jackson says that because of the camaraderie developed among the cast, the actors pull timing and the snappy repartees off flawlessly. “You can tell the actors themselves are having fun along with the audience,” she says.

Jackson and Capodagli relocated from the Midwest first to the Orlando area, and then to Vero Beach in 2017 after being hired by the Indian River Estates retirement complex for a staff training seminar. “We simply fell in love with Vero Beach and its small-town charm,” Jackson says.

“Rumors” runs at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild, 2020 San Juan Ave., through Sept. 21.