Jean-Claude van Itallie's theatre is naturalized American theatre. Like its author, its roots are anchored in the European tradition, but its metaphors and rhetoric are bound to the American experience. Emerging in the mid-1960s as a major young playwright associated with a significantly innovative theatre collaborative, the Open Theatre, under Joseph Chaikin's leadership, van Itallie created with his pieces a kaleidoscope of American images cast in European forms. The poetic vision belongs to a writer reared in the mid-twentieth-century world of pervasive displacement. Van Itallie straddles continents, languages, cultures; thus he is attuned to the patchwork nature of American culture while being suspicious of its panacea, the American dream, manifest in the notion of an American paradise preserved and everyone's inalienable right to pursue happiness. Van Itallie perceived that the theatre can provide potentially the sharpest depiction of the gap between the dream and immediate reality; the...