Jack Gelber

Jack Gelber: Consider This explores the works of American playwright Jack Gelber (1932–2003), whose groundbreaking, immersive play The Connection (produced by The Living Theatre in 1959) served as the link between the Art Theatre/Beat Generation and the Off-Off-Broadway movement.

With The Connection, Gelber provided a Pirandellian framework in which actors playing junkies demonstrated what it was like to wait for a fix. This play forever cemented Gelber’s status in the American theater, and yet his subsequent works have been overlooked. This study, the first monographlength work dedicated to Gelber’s plays, will consider Jack Gelber’s theatrical works as important social humanist absurdist parables that force the audience to consider how the systems we create are flawed, to the extent that some addictions are permissible (even championed), and how we have an obligation to recognize that our social structures are upheld by, to use Gelber’s word, “phonies.” Gelber provides no easy answers. Rather, his plays attempt to shake audiences out of passive spectatorship both in the theater and (as is the hope) in their lives. The plays of Gelber will be analyzed closely, supplemented (where possible) with critical reactions to the plays as produced, while contextualizing each work within its own socioeconomic moment.

This book will appeal to scholars, professors, students, and other historians who have an interest in American playwriting.