Shantigar serves as a “peaceful home” for writers, directors, actors, visual artists, musicians, and dancers to develop and collaborate on pieces.

Shantigar offers a splendid rural setting within which to create.  It also provides, and will provide, a striking architectural context – the huge white tent, the once-and-future barn, and the eventual Cloud Mountain community building – in which artists may create productions to send out into the world.

Van Itallie has written many plays at Shantigar, including America Hurrah, "the watershed play of the sixties."  He brought the Open Theater ensemble and its director, Joseph Chaikin, to Shantigar to collaborate on the Obie-winning Serpent.  In the late 90s Shantigar's van Itallie wrote his one man show, War, Sex and Dreams, here, and recently his play, Light which will have a major production in Paris in 2008. 

Van Itallie is currently at work on a new musical with composer Steve Gorn and lyricist Lois Walden.
  
In the 1970s, legendary British theater director Peter Brook met at Shantigar with Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, to explore their mutual interest in performance techniques as a means of spiritual growth. 

Theater groups who’ve worked on pieces with spiritual and political themes at Shantigar include the Open Theater, Pilgrim Theater, members of the Roy Hart Theater, and Theater-in-the-Open.

In the past few summers several plays were performed and read in the Shantigar tent, including Ronald Rand’s play on his teacher, Harold Clurman; Libby Skala playing her grandmother the actress Lelia Skala.; June Gross and her daughter Viyesha performing their play about a mother and daughter confronting the daughter’s fight with mental illness; Van Itallie’s play Fear Itself, Secrets of the White House; and Carol Fox Prescott and van Itallie reading excerpts of Chekhov.