Works for public television include Picasso, A Writer's Diary. van Itallie's book on playwriting, The Playwright's Workbook, is published by Applause Books, NYC, 1997. Times. Screenplays include Three Lives for Mississippi, and the musical Follies for director Harold Prince. In 1998 he performed his one person play, War, Sex and Dreams at Art Bank in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, and in 1999 at Highways, Santa Monica, CA and in NYC at LaMama, with good reviews in both the L.A. In 1996 van Itallie was one of three author/performers of Guys Dreamin' which played at Boston Center for the Arts and LaMama, NYC. He has also written a version of Medea. van Itallie's 1985 translation of Jean Genet's The Balcony was commissioned by American Repertory Theatre, directed by Joanne Akalaitis. In 1979 van Itallie's Three Sisters premiered both at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and at the Manhattan Theatre Club (with Sam Waterston and Diane Weist). van Itallie's play of Bulgakhov's Master and Margarita, premiered 1993, NYC, Theater for the New City. In 1977 Andrei Serban directed van Itallie's Cherry Orchard at Lincoln Center (with Irene Worth, Meryl Streep, Raoul Julia, Mary Beth Hurt and Priscilla Smith) and in 1983 his Uncle Vanya at LaMama, NYC (with F. The Seagull, commissioned by MacArthur Theater, Princeton, 1973, played in NYC at the Manhattan Theater Club and at the Public Theatre. Jean-Claude van Itallie's frequently-produced versions of the plays of Chekhov are published as Chekhov: the Major Plays, Applause Books, NYC, 1995. His most recent play was The Fat Lady Sings, which premiered in March 2019 at LaMama. Van Itallie's other plays include The Tibetan Book of the Dead (adapted from traditional texts, LaMama, NYC, 1983, published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud, North Atlantic Books, 1998), The Traveler (a play about recovery from stroke, 1987, Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, and Almeida Theater, London, with David Threlfall), Paradise Ghetto (about a Nazi detention camp for artists, Los Angeles, 1987), Ancient Boys (about an artist with AIDS, LaMama, NYC, 1991), Light (Voltaire, the Mathematician, and the King of Prussia), (2003), and Fear Itself, Secrets of the White House, (Theater for the New City, NYC 2006). Monologue plays include Bag Lady (NYC, 1979) and Struck Dumb (written with Joseph Chaikin, published in Best Short Plays 1991-2, Applause Books, NYC). It opened in Rome in 1967, and in New York won a Village Voice Obie. Musical plays, with composer Richard Peaslee include: King of the United States (NYC, 1972) and A Fable (NYC, 1974). The Serpent, which van Itallie wrote for the Open Theater, has been called the classic ensemble play. America Hurrah is included in an edition of van Itallie's America Hurrah and Other Plays, published in spring 2001 by Grove Atlantic. Winner of the Vernon Rice Drama Desk and other awards, America Hurrah is frequently produced around the world and in American universities. It also ran at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It opened in NYC off-Broadway in November, 1966, where it ran for two years. He was the principal playwright of the Open Theater, directed by Joseph Chaikin. van Itallie's trilogy of one-act plays, America Hurrah, is hailed as the watershed play of the theatrically revolutionary sixties. He was raised in Great Neck, Long Island, and received his bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1958. van Itallie was one of Ellen Stewart's original LaMama playwrights. Fleeing the Nazis, with his family he arrived in the United States at the age of four. The large-format materials remain on-site in Special Collections and Archives.īiographical Note: Jean-Claude van Itallie was born to Hugo Ferdinand and Marthe Mathilde Caroline Levy van Itallie on May 25, 1936, in Brussels, Belgium.
Please call or email the department with requests for this material prior to planning your visit. Storage Note: This collection is housed in a climate-controlled environment off site and requires up to three weeks for retrieval. Revised August 2010 Last Updated: November 2021Įxtent: 120 cubic feet (114 record storage boxes + 4 oversized boxes Revised and updated by Margaret Castellani. Prepared by Alex Gildzen, Alisa Gonzalez.