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 to the invasion of the Wehrmacht in 1940 with his parents to the United States 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 editor of the Transatlantic Review, and as a freelancer in television. 1963 started his collaboration with the Off-Off -Broadway theater group Open Theatre and the director Joseph Chaikin, which lasted until 1970. In workshops on the basis of improvisation and self-awareness training van Itallie developed his piece templates. For this characteristic was the revue form grotesquely stylized figures and content everyday American culture among socially critical gesture.
Van Itallie became known in 1965 through the performance of the surrealist act opera La MaMa Experimental Theatre in Motel Club. He expanded the piece into a trilogy titled America Hurrah, which was premiered in 1966 at the New York Pocket Theatre and also in many European countries had success, such as in the production of tungsten Mehring at the Municipal Theatre Frankfurt 1968.
In the 1970s he worked on the dramas of Chekhov 's The Seagull (1973 ), The Cherry Orchard (1977) and Three Sisters (1979). He taught at Yale University, the New School for Social Research and at Princeton University.