After graduating from Harvard, van Itallie moved to
Greenwich Village, studied acting at The Neighborhood Playhouse and film editing at
New York University, and wrote for the
CBS television program Look Up and Live. In 1963, van Itallie's short play,
War, was produced at the Barr Albee Wilder Playwrights Unit on
Vandam Street, featuring
Gerome Ragni and Jane Lowry and directed by
Michael Kahn.
War was later produced alongside
John Guare's
Muzeeka at the
Dallas Theater Center. Van Itallie joined director-actor Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater as Playwright-of-the Ensemble. Van Itallie's early plays were also produced at
Ellen Stewart's
Café La MaMa, and at
Joe Cino's
Caffe Cino, "birthplace of gay theater." His 1966 anti-war trilogy,
America Hurrah (
Interview,
TV, and
Motel), ran for almost two years at the Pocket Theater
Off-Broadway and at the
Royal Court Theater in
London. Two of the one-acts were first presented at
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1964 and 1965.
Interview was directed by Peter Feldman, and
Motel was directed by
Michael Kahn.
Motel was revived at La MaMa in 1981, again directed by Kahn, for the theater's 20th anniversary. In 1972, he wrote the script for a
gay pornographic film
America Creams under a pseudonym, one of the first well-known writers to write a
hardcore pornographic film. Van Itallie has written over thirty plays. He wrote the ensemble play
The Serpent with Chaikin's Open Theater.
The Serpent premiered at
Rome's Teatro dell'Arte in 1968. Van Itallie's
Tibetan Book of the Dead, or How Not to Do It Again, based on the
Bardo Thodol and with music by
Steven Gorn, premiered at La MaMa in 1983. Other van Itallie plays include: •
Dream (produced at La MaMa in 1965) •
King of the United States (a
musical written with composer
Richard Peaslee; premiered at
Theater for the New City, 1972) •
Bag Lady (premiered at Theater for the New City, 1979) •
Naropa (produced at La MaMa in 1982 with music by Steven Gorn) •
The Traveler (about a composer struck with
aphasia; premiered at
Mark Taper Forum in
Los Angeles, 1987 produced at
Almeida Theater in London with
David Threlfall, 1988) •
Struck Dumb (written for and with
Joseph Chaikin, premiered at Taper Too in Los Angeles, 1989; anthologized in
Best American Short Plays, 1991–92) •
Light (about
Voltaire,
Emilie du Chatelet, and
Frederick the Great; premiered at Boston Court Theater in
Pasadena, 2003; received several Los Angeles critics awards) •
Fear Itself, Secrets of the White House (premiered at Theater for the New City, 2006) In January 1967, van Itallie's
Pavane was broadcast along with
Sam Shepard's
Fourteen Hundred Thousand and
Paul Foster's
The Recluse as "La MaMa Playwrights" on
NET Playhouse. The program was re-broadcast on
NET in 1969 along with footage from the opening of La MaMa's new theater space. Van Itallie's translation of Chekhov's
The Seagull was first produced at the McCarter Theater in
Princeton in 1973. It then premiered at the
Manhattan Theater Club and the
American Repertory Theatre in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His translation of
The Cherry Orchard premiered at
Lincoln Center, featuring
Irene Worth and
Meryl Streep and directed by
Andrei Serban, in 1977. His translation of
Three Sisters premiered both at the American Repertory Theatre and at the Manhattan Theatre Club, featuring
Sam Waterston and
Dianne Wiest, in 1979. His translation of
Uncle Vanya premiered at La MaMa, featuring
F. Murray Abraham and Chaikin and directed by Serban, in 1983. In 1997, van Itallie performed with co-creators Kermit Dunkelberg and Court Dorsey in
Guys Dreamin, as directed by Kim Mancuso and Joel Gluck. In 1999 and 2000, van Itallie performed his
one-man show War, Sex, and Dreams at Highways in
Santa Monica and at La MaMa. In 2012, he performed his one-man show
Confessions and Conversation at La MaMa, as directed by Rosemary Quinn. His 2016 book,
Tea with Demons – Games of Transformation, includes
memoir and forty-nine
self-development games for the reader to play. He taught writing and performance workshops, and has taught at
Princeton University,
New York University,
Harvard University,
Yale University,
Amherst College,
Columbia University,
Middlebury College, the
University of Colorado,
Smith College, the
New School for Social Research,
Naropa University, the
Esalen Institute, the
Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the New York Open Center, Rowe Conference Center, and Easton Mountain, among other universities and retreat centers. He lived on a farm in
western Massachusetts, where he taught and directed the Shantigar Foundation for theatre and
meditation, and in
Greenwich Village and
NoHo. His
papers are held in Kent State University
Special Collections. The papers cover van Itallie's full career, and he would regularly deposit additional items to the collection. ==Selected plays==