 | This article has multiple issues. Please helpimprove it or discuss these issues on thetalk page.(Learn how and when to remove these messages) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
|
Jack Gelber (April 12, 1932 – May 9, 2003) was an American playwright best known for his 1959 dramaThe Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of theLiving Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations. Gelber continued to work and write in New York, where he also taught writing, directing and drama as a professor, chiefly atBrooklyn College,City University of New York, where he created theMFA program in playwriting. In 1999 he received theEdward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievements in theatre.
Jack Gelber was born April 12, 1932, inChicago, the first of three sons of Molly (Singer) and Harold Gelber,[1] a Jewish American couple of Russian and Romanian descent. Harold was asheet metal worker, a trade the younger Gelber would briefly adopt to finance his education at theUniversity of Illinois. While at the university, he developed an interest in fiction and began to write short stories. After graduating with a B.S. inJournalism in 1953, Gelber traveled to San Francisco, where he found work as a shipfitter's helper.
In New York, Gelber first worked as a mimeograph operator at theUnited Nations headquarters. He began writing his first play,The Connection, in late 1957. Two years later, he offered the script toJudith Malina andJulian Beck of theLiving Theatre. Malina directed the production, Beck designed it, while Gelber was part of casting, directing rehearsals, and selling tickets. Opening in July 1959, the play was then controversial. Several theatre critics, particularly those writing for the daily newspapers, objected to the play's graphic depiction ofheroin addiction and its performance style. The play also attracted prominent supporters, such as the drama criticsKenneth Tynan andHenry Hewes, the poetAllen Ginsberg, the writerNorman Mailer, directorHarold Clurman, andJerry Tallmer, who lauded what they perceived as its innovative style, authentic language, and realism.
The Connection became the Living Theatre's first great success. It brought publicity to both Gelber and the Living Theatre as significant in American theatre. It won theObie Awards of theVillage Voice for Best New Play, Best Production, and Best Actor (Warren Finnerty in the role of Leach) of the 1959–1960 season. Gelber also received theVernon Rice Award (now known as the Drama Desk Award). In 1961 the Living Theatre took its production to Europe, where it earned theGrand Prix at theThéâtre des Nations Festival in Paris. Ultimately the Living Theatre performedThe Connection a total of 722 times in the first years of the 1960s.The Connection has since been translated into five languages and performed in ten countries, as well as throughout the United States. Thefilm version of the play, produced by Lewis Allen and directed byShirley Clarke in 1961, was also controversial at the time.
Gelber never achieved the same success with his later plays, but he enjoyed a long and active career writing, directing, and teaching drama. His second play,The Apple, opened at the Living Theatre in 1961, but it was the last of Gelber's works produced by the company. Not long after that production, the company moved overseas. In 1963 theGuggenheim Foundation awarded Gelber afellowship (which it renewed three years later) to support his writing, and in 1964 he published his novelOn Ice.
In 1965 he became writer-in-residence at theCity College of New York. His third play,Square in the Eye (1965) (also known asLet's Face It) was produced by the Establishment Theatre Company at theTheatre De Lys soon after. Gelber earned his first directing credit in the 1966 production ofArnold Wesker'sThe Kitchen.
In 1967Columbia University appointed Gelber as a part-timeadjunct professor of drama. In 1968 he completed the script for, and directed a production of, his fourth playThe Cuban Thing. This work drew upon his travels as a journalist in Cuba during the 1950s, along with more recent visits in 1964 and 1967. He portrayed a middle-class family's experience of the 1959 revolution. Produced atHenry Miller's Theatre, the play was controversial for what some believed was a favorable portrayal of the communist leaderFidel Castro, when the Cold War was going strong. This interpretation sparked large and sometimes violent protests by Cuban exiles and others against the production, and the play ended its run after only one night. He appears as himself in the 1968 Cuban filmMemories of Underdevelopment.
In 1968, Gelber signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against theVietnam War.[2]
In 1972 theRockefeller Foundation awarded Gelber a fellowship for a residency at theAmerican Place Theatre, where his next play,Sleep, was performed. That same year Gelber become a full-time Professor of English atBrooklyn College of theCity University of New York. He created the college's MFA program in playwriting, which he would run until his retirement from CUNY in the late 1990s. In the roughly thirty years he spent at Brooklyn College, he balanced his teaching career with directing professional and student productions and teaching theatre workshops. He received the Obie Award for Distinguished Direction in 1973 when he oversaw the American Place Theatre's production ofThe Kid byRobert Coover.[3]
Gelber's writing was also supported by a grant from theNational Endowment for the Arts and a CBS Fellowship fromYale University. In 1973 theNew York Shakespeare Festival producedBarbary Shore, Gelber's adaptation of a 1951 novel written by Norman Mailer. His next production, entitledFarmyard and staged by theYale Repertory Theatre in 1975, was an adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz' 1971 playStallerhof.[3]
Gelber returned to creating original plays, directing a 1976 production of his dramaJack Gelber's New Play: Rehearsal at the American Place Theatre, andStarters at theEugene O'Neill Theatre Center in 1980. It was eight years before he had his tenth play,Big Shot, produced at Wildcliff Theatre by the East Coast Arts company. In the 1990s, three more of Gelber's plays were produced:Magic Valley (1990), andRio Preserved andChambers (1998).[3]
In the mid-part of the decade, he became an adjunct professor at theActors Studio Drama School at theNew School University, a position he would hold until his death. Gelber's last play to be produced wasDylan's Line. Gelber completed the script in 2000 and performed a portion of it at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference inValdez, Alaska, that same year. It premiered at theMcCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey during 2003.[3]
This was not long after Gelber died on May 9, 2003, in New York, due toWaldenström's macroglobulinemia, acancer of the blood.[3]
"I was so affected [as a young man] and energized byThe Connection", [the playwright]Edward Albee said after his death. "It was exciting, dangerous, instructive and terrifying - all things theater should be."[3]
In San Francisco, Gelber met Carol Westenberg, and they married on December 23, 1957, in New York City. They had two children.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
