Jean-Claude van Itallie
| Jean-Claude van Itallie | |
|---|---|
| Born | 25 May 1936 Brussels, Belgium |
| Citizenship | American |
| Education |
|
| Occupation | Playwright, educator |
| Organization | The Open Theatre |
| Notable work |
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Jean-Claude van Itallie, the Belgian-born American playwright, performer, and theatre workshop teacher may be best-known for his 1966 anti Viet Nam war play America Hurrah, The Serpent, the ensemble play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin’s The Open Theatre his play of Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his translations of Chekhov’s major plays.
Jean-Claude van Itallie was born in Brussels, Belgium on May 25, 1936, son of Hugo Ferdinand van Itallie (an investment banker) and Marthe Mathilde Caroline Levy van Itallie. In 1940, when the Nazis invaded Brussels with his family he fled first to France, where the family received visas to Portugal from the Portuguese Consul Aristides de Sousa Mendez. The family sailed from Lisbon aboard the Japanese liner Hakozaki Maru and arrived in New York City in the fall of 1940. Van Itallie grew up in Great Neck, New York, studied at Great Neck High School and Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, MA, and graduated from Harvard University in 1958. He has one sibling, his brother Michael van Itallie.
After Harvard van Itallie moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, studied acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse, studied film editing at New York University, and wrote for the CBS TV Public Affairs show, Look Up and Live. In 1963 van Itallie’s short play, War, was produced at the Barr Albee Wilder Playwrights Unit on Vandam Street, with Gerry Ragni and Jane Lowry, directed by Michael Kahn. He joined director-actor Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater as Playwright-of-the Ensemble. Van Itallie’s early plays were also produced at Ellen Stewart’s Café La MaMa, and at the Caffe Cino, “birthplace of gay theater.”
Van Itallie has written over thirty plays. His 1966 anti-war trilogy of one-acts America Hurrah (Interview, TV, and Motel) ran for almost two years at the Pocket Theater Off Broadway and at the Royal Court Theater in London. Van Itallie wrote the ensemble play The Serpent with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater. The Serpent premiered at Rome’s Teatro dell’Arte in 1968. Van Itallie’s play, Tibetan Book of the Dead, or How Not to Do It Again, based on traditional texts premiered at La MaMa in NYC in 1983.
Other van Itallie plays include King of the United States a musical play written with composer Richard Peaslee, premiered Theater for the New City, NYC, 1972; Bag Lady, premiered Theater for the New City, 1979; The Traveler, (a play about a composer struck with aphasia) premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, 1987 then produced at Almeida Theater, London with David Threlfall, 1988; Struck Dumb written for and with Joseph Chaikin, premiered at Taper Too, Los Angeles, 1989 (anthologized in Best American Short Plays, 1991–92); Light, about Voltaire, Emilie du Chatelet, and Frederick the Great, premiered 2003 at Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, CA, received several L.A. critics awards; Fear Itself, Secrets of the White House, premiered 2006 at Theater for the New City, NYC.
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