Jack Gelber

Jack Gelber (April 12, 1932 – May 9, 2003) was an American playwright best known for his 1959 drama The Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of the Living Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations. Gelber continued to work and write in New York, where he also taught writing, directing and drama as a professor, chiefly at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he created the MFA program in playwriting. In 1999 he received the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievements in theatre.

Jack Gelber was born April 12, 1932 in Chicago, the first of three sons of Molly (Singer) and Harold Gelber, a Jewish couple from Russia and Romania. Harold was a sheet metal worker, a trade the younger Gelber would briefly adopt to finance his education at the University of Illinois. While at the university, he developed an interest in fiction and began to write short stories. After graduating with a B.S. in Journalism in 1953, Gelber traveled to San Francisco, where he found work as a shipfitter's helper.

In San Francisco, Gelber met Carol Westenberg, and they married on December 23, 1957, in New York City. They had two children.

In New York, Gelber first worked as a mimeograph operator at the United Nations headquarters. He began writing his first play, The Connection, in late 1957. Two years later, he offered the script to Judith Malina and Julian Beck of the Living Theatre. Malina directed the production, Beck designed it, while Gelber was part of casting, directing rehearsals, and selling tickets. Opening in July 1959, the play quickly attracted controversy. Several theatre critics, particularly those writing for the daily newspapers, objected to the play's graphic depiction of heroin addiction and its performance style. The play also attracted prominent supporters, such as the drama critics Kenneth Tynan and Henry Hewes, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Norman Mailer, director Harold Clurman, and Jerry Tallmer, who lauded what they perceived as its innovative style, authentic language, and realism.

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