| Jean Claude van Itallie | Joseph Chaikin | The Open Theater |
Jean Claude van Itallie, playwright
Jean Claude van Itallie was born in Brussels on May 25, 1936. He was raised on Long Island and graduated from Harvard University in 1958, where he wrote and directed several student productions. After graduation, van Itallie continued writing plays and editing his extant texts. As a freelance writer in 1962, van Itallie became a researcher for the Columbia Broadcasting System(CBS). Realizing that he did not want to write for the commercial theater, van Itallie drafted two plays in 1963, War and Motel, that he had originally written for himself. War premiered successfully at the Barr-Wilder-Albee Playwrights Unit at Off-Off Broadway's Vandam Theatre on December 22, 1963. Motel, written in 1962, did not premiere until April 28, 1965 at Off-Off Broadway's La Mama Experimental Theatre, yet received much critical acclaim.
Van Itallie joined the Open Theater near its inception in late 1963. Critic and Open Theater member Gordon Rogoff introduced van Itallie to director Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theater ensemble. In Gene Plunka's Jean Claude van Itallie and the Off-Broadway Theater, van Itallie describes his role in the ensemble: "My job was to take some of the acting exercises and make them comprehensible as plays to audiences, or shape them into plays to create structures." Van Itallie's early plays for the Open Theater were all derived from the troupe's workshops(see Open Theater biography for titles).
Van Itallie's role in raising the public profile of the Open Theater culminated in his popular and critically acclaimed work American Hurrah in 1966. Although American Hurrah was developed within the Open Theater and half of the cast were Open Theater members, the play was not technically an Open Theater presentation. American Hurrah received critical lauds from theater reviewers in Time, The Wall Street Journal, New Republic, The New York Post, even from notoriously challenging New York Times critic Walter Kerr. American Hurrah closed after an amazing 634 performance run, earned a three-hundred percent profit, and won the 1967 Outer Circle Critics Circle Award, the Vernon Rice Award and the Jersey Journal Award.
Van Itallie joined the The Serpent:A Ceremony two months into the play's formation, and shaped the group's explorations and improvisations into a structured dramatic work(*click on photo to hear van Itallie discuss The Serpent:A Ceremony). In 1969, van Itallie and the Open Theater ensemble received the prestigious Village Voice Obie Award and the Vernon Rice Book Award, both for The Serpent:A Ceremony's off-Broadway contributions. Van Itallie's work as a playwright was honored through a reproduction of The Serpent:A Ceremony's text in Otis L. Guernsey's The Best Plays of 1969-1970.
Van Itallie left the Open Theater in 1969, but continued to write plays. In 1972, van Itallie completed The King of the United States, both a musical and his first full-length play since The Serpent:A Ceremony. The stroke and resulting aphasia of Joseph Chaikin inspired van Itallie to write The Traveler in the mid-eighties. Since the 1970's, van Itallie has continued to write plays and to teach playwriting and drama courses at Yale, Princeton, New York University, University of Colorado, and Columbia University. He has also adapted and directed the works of Anton Chekov, Eugene Ionesco and Euripedes, and scripted from Buddhist texts a dramatic version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He has received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant(1962-1963), a Ford Foundation grant(1969), a Creative Arts Public Service grant(1973), two prestigious Guggenheim fellowships(1973, 1980), and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship(1986). In 1971, van Itallie was appointed to the Advisory Panel of the National Council of the Arts. Kent State University awarded him an honorary Ph.D., a doctorate of humane letters, in 1977.