At sixty-seven, van Itallie is slight and wiry, with white hair and sharp blue eyes and a manner that is both brusque and warm. He laughs easily. He is best known as the author of the important 1960’s avant-garde plays America Hurrah and The Serpent, and more recently as the author of the play The Tibetan Book of the Dead, based on traditional Buddhist teachings. He is intensely present. Later he will bark corrections during our stories, and yet, under his direction, within the safe atmosphere he creates, I will take risks I can hardly imagine.

Now he asks us to find a partner. “Without using your hands, maintain physical contact with your partner. Move in any way you want. Keep your eyes closed. Remember your breath.”

I hook up with another woman. We’ve never met before, but for the next few minutes, we nuzzle and slide around each other like puppies in slow motion. Because Jean-Claude keeps reminding us at regular intervals to come back to our bodies, it’s hard to get worked up about whether my partner might feel uncomfortable. No sooner have I begun to worry than I have to return my focus to my own body. It is an unexpected relief.

“Now break physical contact and maintain eye contact with your partner. Continue moving.”

My partner and I walk backward and forward and around, tracing a complex pattern on the floor. We wave our arms, we create a dance—not beautiful, perhaps, or particularly graceful, at least in my case, but authentic. Sometimes a smile steals over our faces and erupts into a laugh. I can imagine crying, too, but I don’t feel sad. Jean-Claude reminds us that emotions might arise but just to notice them and let them go. “It’s intimate, but it’s not personal,” he says.

We repeat this twice more with different partners. Our connections may not be personal, but they are indeed intimate. And we haven’t even introduced ourselves yet.

Shantigar is a center for theater, meditation and healing established on the land where Jean-Claude lives most of the time. (He still maintains an apartment in New York.) “What interests me,” he says, “is the way in which the creation of art, healing and spiritual practice are identical.” To this group, in this abbreviated workshop, he will not stress the role of meditation or contemplative practice. He simply incorporates its function and vocabulary.

The name Shantigar—“peaceful home” in Sanskrit—was bestowed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who did several personal retreats at Jean-Claude’s farmhouse in the 1970’s, including one of nearly a year’s length.

Jean-Claude’s parents, Belgian Jewish refugees who’d settled in Long Island, bought the 470 wooded acres on which Shantigar now stands as a lumber investment in 1948. Jean-Claude was twelve. A collapsing eighteenth-century farmhouse came with the property. In 1962, Jean-Claude, then a young playwright living in Greenwich Village, retreated to Rowe in search of a quiet place to write. He began to renovate the house. He invited his friends from the Open Theater, where he was playwright-of-the-ensemble, to visit and work. In 1966, the worldwide success of his trilogy, America Hurrah, developed with the Open Theater, enabled Jean-Claude to buy the land from his family and the friends with whom they’d owned it. Although the Open Theater would disband shortly, a pattern was established: For the next nearly forty years, culminating in the creation of Shantigar, Jean-Claude would provide a setting for artists to generate creative work, in collaboration with others or individually.

After our warm-up, we return to the circle. Now we are each to tell two stories—one of a childhood memory and one of something that happened within the last twenty-four hours. There are two rules: We must use only the present tense, and we must avoid using the word “and” to link sentences.

“The present tense is very theatrical. Theater is all about now, now, now, now, now. It’s got all the vividness of now,” says Jean-Claude. That’s first. Second, running your sentences together with “and” tends to lead to a kind of automatic, habitual speaking.

When my turn comes, I follow the instructions we have been given: I stand with my eyes closed, breathe, try to remember the centeredness I experienced during the previous hour, and consciously connect with the energies of sky and earth, above and below. “Take your time,” urges Jean-Claude. “Remember your breath. Feel your body.”

Finally, I am to signal my embrace of the others in the room by making eye contact with each one. “It is your moment of generosity,” Jean-Claude has said. I am struck by how natural—how unawkward—it feels to look at each person. I close my eyes again for the telling.

“I am six years old and I’m—”

“No and. I’m.”

“I’m six years old. I’m in a cabin in Bastrop State Park. I’m in bed with my little brother and sister and there is—”

“No and. There is.”

“There is a scratching sound at the door.”

The effect of telling a story in first person is intriguing. I do feel more present, more inside the story. On the other hand, I can’t quite get at the fear I felt about bears in the woods—perhaps because I’m thinking about the fact that it was my father making the scratching. I finish my first story and launch into my even briefer second story.

“I am in Jean-Claude’s kitchen. He has just told me the workshop is in the tent. Oh, no! I think. There will be mosquitoes. I am afraid of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes like me.”

Jean-Claude interrupts. “Show us the mosquitoes.”

With my eyes closed, I become mosquitoes. I feel furious and aggressive. I buzz angrily, jabbing at the air. My face is pinched. In my raging mosquito dance I knock over my chair, and open my eyes.

Linda Hoffman, a successful sculptor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose work also combines elements of painting and poetry, volunteers. Jean-Claude asks whether she would like someone to write down her words as she speaks—the next step in the process that allows one to take a piece further in the direction of writing. She does. Sean O’Clair, a participant who teaches a workshop at Shantigar called “Hug an Angry Man,” agrees.

“Take your time,” Jean-Claude says as she begins to center herself. “Feel your breath.” He notes that she did the Continuum work brilliantly. “Go into that slowed-down place. When you do, use it to good effect. Ask yourself, ‘What are my senses telling me?’”

After a moment, Linda begins to walk. “I am walking, and—”

“No and,” says Jean-Claude.

The Magic and Mystery of Shantigar by John A. Adams © October 2007

I’ve discovered a magical place in the Berkshires of northwestern Massachusetts near the small time-frozen towns of Charlemont and Rowe. It 's north of Rt 2, past a covered bridge, and up a mountain. I came to this alpine-like retreat, once a farm, to learn how to be a better writer through a process Jean-Claude van Itallie, the workshop leader, calls“Writing on Your Feet.”  That first visit was over two years ago, and though I’ve traveled far and wide since, part of me has never really left this magical, mysterious place called Shantigar.

I arrived at Shantigar in August without the aid of my directions, soon finding my way to the old Davis Mine Road. It was spectacularly beautiful. This part of Massachusetts, next to the Vermont border, has always delighted me. The land, the flowers... green pastures surrounded by tall, strong oak and pine, laced with white birch, creating a canopy over a carpet of leaves and needles. There’s a touch of wilderness here, a remote quietness.

My initiation to Shantigar came through its life-long owner and guardian. Jean-Claude is a small, slender, solid giant of a man in his early 70s who moves and speaks with the confidence of a performer and dedicated artist. I realized immediately that some high voltage crackles through this man. He dressed the part too with steel blue loose pants, a long-sleeve silky blue-patterned shirt with contrasting vest, and often a captain’s cap.

We met in a big white tent with sides that roll up to let in the fresh mountain air and a netted view of  wild flowers. (Jean-Claude says, “Let the flowers look at you.”)

The first thing Jean-Claude had us do was move – first alone, then in physical contact with a partner, then with a partner maintaining eye contact. We moved in these ways with everyone in turn. When we’d finished, Jean-Claude asked, “Can you taste the energetic difference in the room from before we started?” The difference was palpable.  I felt more relaxed.  The others too looked more at ease.

We sat in a circle on the floor as Jean-Claude, standing, demonstrated how he wanted each of us to prepare ourselves to speak when it was our turn to relate an autobiographical moment. “In order to have your whole body available to you, stand.  Start by centering your energy in your belly.” He slowly lowered his fist from above his head down to his navel, making, as he called it, “a vertical gesture, linking heaven and earth.”  “Then,” he went on, “having anchored my own energy, I take responsibility for the group, embracing it, affirming it.”  He made eye contact with each person in the circle. “Then close your eyes and begin moving, slowly. Take a long time just moving. When you do speak, let your moving body inform you, not merely your mind.” 

I’d never done this process before. I went last. I became my 11 year old self curled into a fetal position in the big empty cabin at Munter House where I grew up, praying to a God who didn’t answer. Hunched over, I felt as if I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I did. I felt responsible for the well-being of my mother and siblings. I wanted to protect them from the monster of the house but I was too small and helpless to do that. So I turned to God, as I was taught to do in Sunday School, but He didn’t answer. Later the circle of other workshop participants said I’d prayed to Him without seeming to have any belief in that God.

Jean-Claude asks that in our work, we speak in the present tense, and not use the word “and” to link thoughts. “Breathe instead,” he enjoins, “and slow down.” When we speak breathlessly fast, he calls out, “Slow down. Speak for your senses. What do you hear, taste, see, smell, feel in this moment?  This moment is a pearl. Stay with it. Let the audience be responsible for stringing the pearls together.”

Later during the weekend I act out the memory of sleeping next to a frigid girlfriend, and of zapping my kindergarten class with my Buck Rogers talcum powder-filled ray gun. I begin to understand what Jean-Claude means when he says, “Just as the victim of the tiger lives within you, so does the tiger.” I’ve been mauled by a tiger that later became my rage.  Jean-Claude teaches that, “The creative act, spiritual practice, and healing are all one.” From within me came forth  forgotten stories, and with them a release from my self-judgement and shame.

I never expect to return from a workshop with what I came looking for. I came to learn to be a better writer and left that first Shantigar experience discovering a hidden part of me. I came away with tools to be a better speaker, and methods of resolving some of my mental blocks. I returned home exhausted, hopeful and renewed. I felt as if something wonderful had happened. The peacefulness and clarity I experienced at Shantigar have kept calling me back to it.

I returned for the same workshop the next summer, and stayed in the farmhouse, Jean-Claude’s home. He’s made it available since the big barn burned down. The barn had been remodeled to house and feed visitors as well as be a performance and workshop space. The farmhouse is like a book with each of many rooms a different chapter.  Art is everywhere: an ancient wooden statuette on my bedroom bureau, mirrors on the slant of bedroom ceilings, barn board layered on the den wall, and flat on another wall. The ancient aliveness of a wood door, a table, or a chair penetrates the soul. There’s a new discovery every step you take: family pictures stacked from floor to ceiling in the hall, watercolors and paintings from lifelong friends. There’s an abundance of perfection in design and Feng Shui.

I got to know Jean-Claude better this second visit, and returned again in the late summer to enjoy solo performances by Libby Skala and Ronald Rand. We all had dinner together and made breakfast in the big kitchen where the oval eating table is always decorated with brightly colored flowers in many small antique bottles. I discovered Jean-Claude to be a private, complex person of great talent and drive. In the intricacy of his character is a passion that’s gentle but direct, loving yet firm. While the house spells ease, the master of it is demanding, mostly of himself. He’s on a mission to create a lasting legacy, a living gift of the land, landscaping, art, and of all the creativity that happens at Shantigar and will happen.

With each visit I discovered more about Shantigar. Everything there is art, and a reflection of our connection to protective Mother Earth. Everything is designed with the natural beauty of the land in mind: the varied colors and textures of the wood on the walls, the choice of ancient Asian carvings and statuettes, the old furniture strong and bold from a world of travel and experiences, quilts that glow with the essence of their creators, each square a work of devotion. In the movement room walls, statues are enshrined in lighted niches, and the textured plaster ceiling meets tall arched windows framing the ever changing view. Each detail is thought out and perfectly fashioned into a statement of harmony, comfort and contentment.

Each small grove of bushes and trees, and each bed of flowers, is a place of meditation and creation beckoning you to come sit and feel the presence of God. Renewal flows from the sloping pastures, refreshing your mind. On the hill above the farmhouse there’s a sacred circle of low rock walls, with a thousand-year-old Chinese white marble column inscribed with sixty-four Buddhas and two cats. At the back of the circle is the entrance to the meditation path through the woods. On the path the moss is greener than I’d ever imagined.  Sunlight filters through the trees as if sent directly from Heaven. Along the path are stone meditation benches where I sat and experienced a deep quiet, along with the sounds of nature: a leaf falling, a bird calling, crickets making music. Other subtle surprises: a carved stone rat and stone monkey created lifetimes ago, transplanted here to remind me of how brief and precious is my visit on earth.

I returned to Shantigar for my private New Year’s retreat, and experienced a winter wonderland replete with fresh blanket of snow. I keep coming back to Shantigar for workshops, renewal and friendship. I’m telling you about this secret, magical place – real, not a dream – so you can come and experience it yourself.

At Shantigar you may feel a peace, clarity, and awareness that opens your heart to your own creativity. Time expands there, allowing the Universe and you to hear your inner voice. I’ll see you where meadow meets woods, and a hidden farm –  castle of surprises –  awaits your song.

©October 2007
John A. Adams is an entrepreneur, business guide, and author of Miracles at Work: Building Your Business from the Soul Up. Visit miraclesatwork.com.

A Theater of Sacred Intent by Jean-Claude van Itallie
(drawn in part from "War, Sex and Dreams, a playwright’s memoir," published in "The Soul of the American Actor" winter2006/spring 2007

In the early seventies In Greenwich Village at a party in my long narrow apartment in Westbeth Artists Housing, standing near the door, I introduce my father to Trungpa, Rinpoche. My father, himself a Belgian expatriate, asks Rinpoche, “Do you miss Tibet?” Rinpoche, smiling, replies, “No, it’s like going from a place where there’s bright light to another in which there’s total darkness – or vice versa. There’s no room for regret or sadness. It’s just completely different.”

Not long after, in Vermont at Tail of the Tiger (now Karme Choling) as Rinpoche speaks to hundreds in a large tent , I’m aware of how he plays artfully with the English language, omitting articles like “an” and “the.” I’m sure that’s not due merely to his unfamiliarity with English. His refreshing grammar cuts through our habits of thought.

Driving Rinpoche back to his lodgings, I marvel, “Rinpoche, an empire has grown up around you so fast. It’s amazing.” Rinpoche responds coolly in his high voice, “Feels perfectly natural to me.”

That evening in a small country restaurant, with Rinpoche and some of his students, we talk about possible links between theater and meditation. I remark that meditators and actors both strive to be fully present in the moment, and both use awareness of breath as a technique. Someone suggests, “So why not explore all that in a conference?” Agreeing, Rinpoche immediately decrees that a theater and meditators conference shall be held in Colorado where he lives, and that I’m to raise money for it and put it together. Flattered, I nod dumbly, yes. I’m stunned and exhilarated. Rinpoche has dramatically turned a suggestion into a project. Though he knows I’m a vegetarian at the time, Rinpoche transfers some steak from his plate to mine, ordering, “Eat this. You’ll need the strength.” The meat tastes good.

Being on the theater panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and the board of the Theater Communications Group, I ask both these groups to contribute to a theater event that doesn’t include even one public performance, that’s purely for the benefit of the participants. Miraculously, they give ten thousand dollars. The International Theater Institute loans me an able assistant, Maurice McClellan. I invite innovative theater people that I know. (The avant-garde theater community isn’t huge. Most of us know each other.)

Among those invited who didn’t come was the famed Polish director, Jerzi Grotowsky. He announced, “One guru at a conference is enough.” I was disappointed because in my first interview with Rinpoche, in 1968 at Samye Ling, his center in Eskdalemuir, Scotland, I’d described to him Grotowsky’s intense production, The Constant Prince, and Rinpoche had been extremely interested.

I’d also described the psychological/philosophical explorations we were engaged in at the Open Theater. Rinpoche was interested in them too. But when I invited Joe Chaikin, the director of the Open Theater, to the conference in Boulder, he proclaimed, “I don’t like organized religion.”

The conference takes place in February,1973. It’s my first visit to Boulder. I have a room on the top floor of the Boulderado Hotel with an inspiring view of snow-capped mountain peaks. In a public talk, Rinpoche explained that the pointy white continental divide is the backbone of the United States, with Boulder at its coccyx.

The conference, which Rinpoche dubbed The Mudra Workshop, took place in a rented fraternity house near the University. About eighty meditators and some twenty-five theater people were gathered.

Among the theater people who flew in were actor/director Nancy Cooperstein, playwright Maria Irene Fornes, director Andre Gregory, director John Lion, video artist and designer Kozuko Oshima, critic Gordon Rogoff, director Robert Wilson with some of his troupe, and actor Lee Worley, formerly with the Open Theater, who eventually stayed on in Boulder to run Naropa’s theater training program.

The theater people held panel discussions. We talked about certain new acting techniques that excited us, and speculated how these might relate to meditation. Some meditators objected. They refused any idea that theater could be related to meditation, as, they said, meditation must always be without a goal and theater was meant to entertain. I gave a play writing workshop. Some actors performed.

Bob Wilson rehearsed his troupe for several days behind closed doors. On the evening of his performance he kept the audience of meditators waiting for several hours. (Rinpoche himself was famous for keeping lecture audiences waiting for hours.) When the audience was finally allowed upstairs to watch Bob’s piece, they were shocked. They didn’t know what to make of the slow-moving visually elegant spectacle devoid of story. Some giggled. A few booed. But Rinpoche was respectful of the work. If he was angry at his students, he didn’t reprimand them publicly. The following day he gave a general talk about ego.

Toward the end of the week-long conference, I wrote an impromptu parody of the proceedings which theater artists and meditators together read aloud. In the parody, a tall young Asian woman meditator who’d originally shouted in anger, “I sing my own melody,” repeated that refrain again and again – “I sing my own melody.” – until she and everyone were laughing at this expression of individual ego.

On the last day Rinpoche himself appeared in a “happening.” He sat in an armchair in the center of a maze created with newspaper walls. People didn’t expect to see him there. He was a surprise, a fortune-teller ready to answer anything anyone asked. But you had to ask. Most, too shy, passed through the newspaper room respectfully, asking nothing.

After the conference Rinpoche told me kindly, You looked tense. I thought a couple of times we were losing you but I’m glad to see we didn't. Rinpoche also said he was founding an institute in Boulder called Naropa, and wanted me to teach theater there.

Later when Rinpoche did one of his personal retreats at my home, a farm house in Western Massachusetts, there was a manuscript on the kitchen table which Rinpoche asked me to read. It was his play, The Kingdom of Philosophy. “I was inspired by you,” Rinpoche offered. Reading the play, I was shocked that The Kingdom of Philosophy used so many words, violating the theater dictum, “Show, don’t tell.” The Kingdom of Philosophy may be a drawn-out spoof on abstract thinking, but my generation of theater people distrusts too many words. In our downtown theater we used them sparingly. Rinpoche used theatricality effectively in every aspect of his teaching, so I assumed (at the time at least) that what I saw as dramaturgical flaws in The Kingdom of Philosophy were flaws in my perception.

In Boulder, watching a production of Rinpoche’s play Water Festival, I felt Rinpoche expected too much of his actors. The play requires that they embody or “be” pure energetic qualities so the audience can see those qualities incarnated. Rinpoche himself, of course, taught in great part by “being.” But to “be” an unobstructed conductor of universal energies, to “be” a wisdom being, requires extraordinary openness. Rinpoche’s students, the actors in Water Festival, still early on the path, had egoistic obstructions.

Even in ancient Greek theater when an actor portrayed a god, the actor was masked. The Tibetan sacred dancer too is masked. Being masked seems to confer a freedom to incarnate the divine or demonic. Our contemporary Western theater, not usually masked, is based on conflicts of individual personalities. A theater of the divine (for lack of a better word) is new for us, its forms yet to be discovered.

The great British director Peter Brook is always exploring the boundary between theater and spirituality. In the seventies he and Rinpoche traveled to my farm house to meet each other. Rinpoche came from Vermont, Peter Brook from New York. I felt it was the meeting of the Kings of France and England on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Peter Brook wanted to land in a private plane on one of the fields but none are flat enough. Both kings were five hours late but Rinpoche, fifteen minutes later than Brook, “won.” As I left the two alone on the front porch to get acquainted, I heard Rinpoche ask, “How old are you?” “Fifty-eight,” Brook replied quietly. Not much substance was discussed on that visit. But Rinpoche and Brook met again in New York where, with actors from Brook’s The Conference of the Birds, they experimented a few hours with concepts of “space.”

Rinpoche founded Mudra Theater Group in Boulder. He invited me to watch them work. Peter Goldfarb, Craig Smith and Lee Worley were there. Carrying long poles, the actors looked medieval, as if carrying wands from the Tarot deck. Balancing poles were an idea Rinpoche got from Peter Brook, and possibly Brook from Grotowski who was inspired by Balinese trance dancers.

Another time with the Mudra group I participated in Rinpoche’s “intensification” exercise. Aware of the rigorous training of Tibetan sacred dancers, Rinpoche wanted to translate the written and verbal teachings of Buddhism into physical experience. He wanted his students to not only hear teachings, but to feel the actual present moment, even if the feeling was painful. But I believe that for Rinpoche’s students the experience remained mostly mental, an idea rather than a trust in the wisdom of one’s own moving body.

Antonin Artaud rediscovered and wrote excitedly about non-Western theater and dance. Inspired by what Artaud wrote, theater directors Grotowski, Brook, and Chaikin developed acting techniques for what I call a Western theater of sacred intent.

Yes, the techniques of a theater of sacred intent are for performers. But we’re all performers in life. Anyone can learn and practice these techniques (just as anyone can learn and practice meditation). Practicing certain techniques of a theater of sacred intent can lead to being more fully present – in life as well as on stage.

In recent decades more Western teachers of performance are learning and teaching that an awareness of breath (and the conscious use of sound and movement) leads to a heightened awareness of the world, and a more effective communication of feeling.

Rinpoche was an explorer into many realms. Wherever he went exploring, including in the theater, he translated Buddhist teachings into the local language and vice versa. He cross-pollinated, planting seeds in the minds of his students. Those seeds may take many years to germinate. But ultimately a few blossom in unexpected places.

This collection of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s plays represents a generous overview of a twenty-five-year span in the career of one the foremost and most original American playwrights of the last half-century. His dramatic themes and forms are unusually distinctive, ranging from intense monologues that uncover the dark comedy of American consumer culture, to panoramic explorations of ancient biblical stories and Easter wisdom. He is preoccupied with multiple levels of experience-the mask behind the mask-and states of awareness that lend a different optic to our everyday personal, political, and spiritual lives. We might think of him as a champion of late-twentieth-century American surrealism, a master of the dynamic clash of word and image.
  From the start of his life, van Itallie has often been positioned to witness and record the twentieth century’s complex realities. Born in 1936 into a nonpracticing Jewish family in Brussels, he fled with his family from the Nazi invasion of Belgium, disembarking in New York City in late 1940. Surely, the intense awareness of mortality that lies at the heart of nearly every van Itallie play is born of this experience.
   Van Itallie grew up during the forties and fifties in the safe, prosperous, and, as he calls it, “death-denying suburb” of Great Neck, Long Island. The future playwright spoke French at home and English at school, which he says honed his interest in words and led him to understand that “reality is not contained in any single language.”
   Van Itallie attended Harvard, where he acted in, wrote, and directed plays, and where he came out. Then, in 1958, van Itallie came to Greenwich Village. There he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse and film at NYU, wrote plays including War and Motel, and supported himself by writing cultural and religious programs for commercial television.
   In the early 1960s the exciting Village, “downtown theater scene” was coalescing. Rejecting fifties values and received theatrical form, it was to blossom into the seminal off-off Broadway movement. This theatrical revolution was in fact occurring in all the arts, and we can look back on the 1960s as a kind of Golden Age of American theater. The explosion of themes and forms, with each art igniting the other, led to the invention of “happenings,”  “ensemble pieces,” and “experimental theater.” The creative anarchy in the arts of this period, heralded by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, reflected the social turbulence of its time-a time of radical hope  (the civil rights victories, the sexual revolution) and radical darkness (the political assassinations). It was also a time of radical struggle, when the United States seemed to want to own the world and went to war in Vietnam to get it.
   The deepest sources for American theatrical expression of this time can be found in the avant-garde drama of post-World War Two Europe-the “existential,” or, as some say, “absurdist” French theater of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet-and in the epic theater of Brecht. The cinema was a strong force too: the experiments of Godard and Truffaut, and the dreamworks of Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman. Later in the decade came the appearance on Broadway of Peter Brook’s epochal production of Marat/Sade and the startling Laboratory Theater of Jerzy Grotowski.
   The year 1963 holds a special significance for van Itallie: it was the year he became ensemble playwright with Joseph Chaikin’s newly founded Opera Theater; and the year that saw his first produced play, War, on the boards at the Barr-Albee-Wilder Workshop Theater on Vandam Street in the West Village. Van Itallie describes War as “a formal war game, a duel” between two male actors-one older, one younger-who sometimes change into father and son. There is competition and sexual tension between them. During their theatrical improvisations in the elder actor’s loft, they are interrupted by a charming lady in Edwardian dress who addresses them as her children and takes them for a walk in a European park in May. At the end the kneeling men, punching each other rhythmically, form the emblem of a two-headed eagle of war, the lady blithely twirling her parasol behind them. Here, at the very beginning of his career, we can observe the roots of van Itallie’s preoccupation with personal origins of social conflict.
   War was next performed off-off Broadway at the Caffe Cino, and several van Itallie plays premiered at Ellen Stewart’s Café LaMama. The plays van Itallie developed and wrote for the Open Theater were performed in downtown theaters on Monday nights. These early van Itallie plays, in terms of their brevity, wit, and social commentary, resemble the early one-acts of Ionesco, or, better, Chekhov. Van Itallie’s crystalline perceptions give rise to complex modes of characterization, a concern with time, and sometimes a montage approach to dramatic activity and language.
   Van Itallie’s most important and successful contribution as the “revolutionary playwright of the 1960s” came with the award-winning off-Broadway production of his trilogy of one-act plays (Interview, TV, and Motel) entitled America Hurrah, which opened at the Pocket Theatre on lower Third Avenue in November 1966. America Hurrah, despite or partly because of its anti-Vietnam war stance and innovative dramatic forms, was a huge, unprecedented (and unexpected by van Itallie) critical and commercial off-Broadway success. It became a cultural landmark, the watershed play of the sixties. In his New York Times review Walter Kerr wrote: “I think you’ll be neglecting a whisper in the wind if you don’t look in on America Hurrah, three views of the USA. There is something afoot here….Mr. van Itallie treads gently across the sorrowing inattentive earth.” Robert Brustein wrote in Plays and Players: “The American theater takes three giant steps toward maturity…..[van Itallie] has discovered the truest poetic function of the theatre….to invent metaphors which can poignantly suggest a nation’s nightmares and afflictions.” And Norman Mailer wrote, “It is possible Motel is the best one-act play I have ever seen.” America Hurrah ran for two years off-Broadway and was acclaimed at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In Sydney, Australia, after the play’s first performance a cheering audience formed a barricade to prevent vice officers from arresting the actors (because of the graffiti in Motel).
   Interview, a fugue for eight actors, originally written for the Open Theater and first performed at Café LaMama, is a rhythmic weaving of ritualized daily behavior and speech that starts and concludes in the anonymous offices of an employment agency where all the applicants are named Smith.
   TV dramatizes the menace and trivializing power of the mass media, with a trio watching television in the viewing room of a television-ratings company. The television images progressively break free of the set and eventually the trio of onstage viewers.
   Motel, a masque for three dolls, unfolds within a tacky Midwest motel room. (The puppets for the original LaMama production and at the Pocket Theatre were made by Robert Wilson.) A larger-than-life Motel-Keeper Doll spews forth an increasingly staccato monologue about the room and its furnishing, which are the mail-order-catalogue surface of a violent America. As she talks, the larger-than-life Man Doll and Woman Doll enter the motel room, scrawl graffiti on the walls, tear the room apart, tear the Motel-Keeper Doll apart, and march out through the audience, brandishing the Motel Keeper’s limbs, while a siren wails loudly.
  The culmination of the van Itallie/Chaikin Open Theater collaborations was The Serpent. Working with the Open Theater gave van Itallie the opportunity to discover and develop his talent as playwright for an ensemble. In director Joseph Chaikin’s creative use of the workshop process to express his philosophical and political concepts, he challenged van Itallie to create new forms of play and test the limits of theatrical representation.
   In creating The Serpent, the actors, writer, and director (helped by other artists, including Joseph Campbell who gave a lecture to the Open Theater on the mythology of the serpent) explored what myths most deeply influenced their lives. The Serpent opened to critical acclaim in Rome in 1967, followed by successful performances elsewhere in Europe, in New York, and throughout the United States. In The Serpent’s sophisticated  interplay of layered actions, contemporary violence is linked to its ancient sources and seen as a central aspect of the human condition. As it simultaneously presents and confronts the values in its story, this “ceremony” for actors explores the themes and events of Genesis. The Tree of Life is a tangle of men who embody the serpent. God’s fixing of limits upon Adam and Eve is humanity’s projection of its own need for limits. The self-consciousness that results from the Fall leads to Cain murdering Able, and to the unending human battle in which each of us is “caught between the beginning and the end,” unable to remake the past. In a review of the downtown scene in 1971, Harold Clurman called The Serpent “perhaps the best single [ensemble] piece that the avant-garde theater has as yet produced in the U.S.”
   Since 1946, van Itallie’s father had owned an old farm in western Massachusetts and in the sixties van Itallie started to go there, sometimes with the Open Theater troupe, to write plays. In 1968, with the success of America Hurrah, van Itallie purchased the farm, which remains his home. It is here that in the seventies he translated his luminous and frequently produced versions of the four masterpiece dramas of Anton Chekhov. “I did my work as a playwright backwards,” van Itallie said, “creating new theatrical forms in the sixties, and in the seventies going back to study masters like Chekhov.” Perhaps because in his work methods van Itallie practices his belief that “the theater is more about the spoken than the written word,” the clear and poetic language of his Chekhov versions have inspired many directors and actors to use them. On his farm too, van Itallie wrote, with Marat/Sade composer Richard Peaslee, the musical King of the United States, which van Itallie directed.
   Van Itallie’s other plays from the seventies include Eat Cake, and absurdist duet on consumerism for attractive housewife and a suave fantasy TV salesman who violates her by forcing her to eat ever more cake.
   In the seventies, too, when it seemed contact between people was fragmented by paranoia, van Itallie, along with other playwrights of his generation, found the monologue form the most congenial to indepth exploration of a character’s truth. His monologue Bag Lady, van Itallie has written, “takes place on the streets of New York city which Clara, born in pre-Holocaust Europe, calls home…She ruminates on past and present, proclaiming her sovereignty as the quintessential urbanite. She’s like the city itself with all its terrors. Sometimes like a crazy Zen monk, she imagines the nuclear end of New York.” (Bag Lady is yet another example of van Itallie’s gift for the monologue. Actor Jordan Charney reflects the enthusiasm of many contemporary performers when he says, “He writes the best monologues, the best.”)
   In 1968 during the European tour of The Serpent, van Itallie went to Scotland, where he met the late Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who became his Buddhist teacher (as well as Allen Ginsberg’s). Trungpa was in a large part responsible for the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in America, and founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where van Itallie has often taught. Trungpa spent several long retreats on van Itallie’s farm, which he renamed Shantigar, meaning “peaceful home” in Sanskrit. Van Itallie has since transformed the farm into a nonprofit foundation for theater, meditation, and healing – Shantigar Village.
   Desiring to bring together his spiritual and theater work, van Itallie wrote The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or How Not to Do It Again, which premiered at the LaMama Annex in 1983. In its spare poetic language, its debt to ancient text, and its use of an acting ensemble, this play resembles The Serpent, but its landscape lies beyond history. The Tibetan Book of the Dead constitutes instructions on how to live fearlessly and die the same way. The joyous LaMama production featured vigorous Tibetan-style music by Steve Gorn and Jun Maeda’s brightly lit two-story-high skull out of whose eyes the multiracial, multinational ensemble cast could fall like tears. The play has become a beautifully illustrated book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Reading Aloud, and an opera with music by Ricky Ian Gordon.
   The Traveler, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1987 and played in London at the Almeida, marks van Itallie’s bringing together of his innate experimental impulses with a more Chekhovian realism. The play is inspired by van Itallie’s experience as friend to Joseph Chaikin, during Chaikin’s recovery from a stroke suffered during a heart operation. In the play the love and struggle between two gay men is dramatized as part of the larger canvas of life, including illness, dream, artistic creation, and everyday family drama.
   In the wide-embracing vision and technique of The Traveler, one can also fathom portents of the drama to come in the generation of playwrights who follow van Itallie, playwrights who have taken up the playwrighting landscape pioneered by van Itallie and his peers. For the younger writers the self-consciously histrionic play with form, identity, and mask that once announced a revolution has now permanently expanded the palette of dramatic possibilities. On the cover of van Itallie’s book on playwrighting, The Playwright’s Workbook, Tony Kushner pays tribute to van Itallie as “the only playwrighting teacher I ever had.”
   Van Itallie himself now combines performance and writing in his teaching and in his plays. He teaches Healing Power of Theater workshops around the country. Since 1998 he has performed in plays he has written: in Guys Dreamin’ and in his solo autobiographical piece War, Sex and Dreams. His current process of playwrighting is to speak the characters aloud, dictating the script rather than first writing it down-further evidence of fresh directions in his art.
   The whole of van Itallie’s dramatic universe is dedicated to a process of vital experimentation through the counterpoint of language, mask, and gesture. His is a philosophy of theatrical play underscored with social critique. Central to his vision is the knowledge of exile, and above all the knowledge of the brutalities that are visited upon the self as it seeks to make its way in a world almost willfully estranged from organic life.  
   In its American surrealistic way, van Itallie’s drama takes us back to playwrights as various as Ionesco and Chekhov, and to the classical mission of comedy: laughter, which helps us to sort ourselves out morally and to open the book of our unexpected inner complexity, whatever its darkness, and whatever measure it might bring us of hope. 

Bill Coco
New York City
October 2000