Shantigar offers workshops and hosts theater artists, meditation masters, and healers.

Through the practice of theater, meditation, and healing, and through conservation of its natural pristine environment, Shantigar nurtures and inspires individuals to engage more profoundly with the world. In a naturally beautiful place like Shantigar, it’s easy to imagine a clean energy future, to raise consciousness about how our actions affect the universe, how to make positive choices toward taking control of our planet, and how to live taking “the soft path,” engaging in a paradigm shift toward sustainable global energy.

Shantigar’s Founder
Shantigar’s founder, Jean-Claude van Itallie, has written over thirty plays. An early LaMama playwright, his off-Broadway hit, America Hurrah, was hailed as the watershed political play of the 60s.  As playwright for the Open Theater, he wrote The Serpent.  His widely produced translations of Chekhov (Chekhov, the Major Plays) are considered by many theater folk as the most “actable.”  He’s taught theater at Yale, Princeton, Harvard (his alma mater), NYU, Amherst, U. of Colorado, Middlebury, Columbia, and other schools.  The Playwright's Workbook, his text on play writing, was published in 1997.  He performed his one man show, War Sex and Dreams, in NY and LA in 1999. 

He teaches Healing Power of Theater and Writing on Your Feet (at Naropa, Esalen, Easton Mountain, LaMama, Continuum in Santa Monica, and Shantigar.)  These workshops in creativity are open to anyone.  They seamlessly combine movement and meditation with van Itallie’s techniques of autobiographical story-telling, dream-telling, and writing-by-speaking.

In 1940, Shantigar founder Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Belgian family fled the holocaust to settle on Long Island, New York.  In 1948 van Itallie’s father bought the farm (now Shantigar) as an investment and a sanctuary. 

In the sixties van Itallie, a playwright in the revolutionary off Broadway movement, drove up to the farm with Greenwich Village theater friends on voyages of discovery and creativity.  In 1968, when his anti Vietnam war play, America Hurrah, was a hit, he bought the farm. Its been his home since.