Jean-Claude van Itallie
Jean-Claude van Itallie (born May 25, 1936 in Brussels ) is an American writer .
Life
The son of a stockbroker emigrated with his parents to the USA after the invasion of the Wehrmacht in 1940 and spent his childhood and youth in New York City . He studied at Harvard University and graduated in 1958 with a doctorate.
He then worked in New York as an editor for the Transatlantic Review and as a freelancer for television. In 1963 he began working with the off-off Broadway theater group Open Theater and director Joseph Chaikin , which lasted until 1970. In workshops based on improvisation and self-awareness training, van Itallie developed his piece templates. Characteristic for this was the revue form with grotesquely stylized figures and the content of everyday American culture under socially critical gestures.
Van Itallie became known in 1965 for the performance of the surrealist one-act play Motel in the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club. He expanded the play into a trilogy entitled America Hurray, which was premiered in 1966 at the Pocket Theater in New York and was also successful in numerous European countries, for example in the production by Wolfram Mehring at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt in 1968.
In the 1970s he worked on the Chekhov dramas Die Möwe (1973), Der Kirschgarten (1977) and Three Sisters (1979). He has taught at Yale University , the New School for Social Research, and Princeton University .
Works
- 1963: Was
- 1964: I'm really here
- 1964: The Hunter and the Bird
- 1964: Almost Like Being
- 1966: Motel
- 1966: America Hurray
- 1968: The Serpent (German: Die Schlange. Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1973)
- 1972: King of the United States
- 1973: Mystery Play
- 1975: The Fable
- 1979: Naropa
- 1980: The Bag Lady
- 1982: Tibetan Book of the Dead
- 1983: Early Warning
literature
- C. Bernd Sucher (Ed.): Theater Lexikon. Authors, directors, actors, dramaturges, stage designers, critics. By Christine Dössel and Marietta Piekenbrock with the assistance of Jean-Claude Kuner and C. Bernd Sucher. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2nd edition 1999, ISBN 3-423-03322-3 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Jean-Claude van Itallie in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Itallie, Jean-Claude van |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 25, 1936 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brussels |