About the Play:

America Hurrah is the collective title for a trilogy of one-act comedic dramas by Jean-Claude van Itallie. Widely hailed as the watershed dramatic play of the 1960s, the America Hurrah triptych of short satires (Interview, TV, and Motel) was called "brilliant" by Nobel-Winning Playwright Harold Pinter. Interview is especially recommended for school and contest use.

Interview is a satirical, stylized, sometimes comic and absurd look at the dehumanizing process of job hunting. Four masked hiring executives interview a floorwasher, a house painter, a banker and a lady's maid. While commonplace enough, suddenly the most innocent statements become foreboding. The questioners are trying to destroy the dignity of the four clients while the latter fight for their self-respect. The audience are thrust into awareness as the process exposes itself. It highlights the human being's deep need to connect with others and the experience of social alienation. Interview remains an ideal choice for high school drama contests and one-act festivals. (Cast: 4 female, 4 male)

TV dramatizes the menace and trivializing power of the mass media, with three employees watching television in the viewing room of a TV-ratings company. The situation comedies and mindless dramas on the television, which parallel the romantic triangle in the office, promise easy solutions to the raters' problems and entanglements. As the television offers them images of glamorous people and products, however, it also suggests the true nature of the society in which they live. Interspersed with the promises implicit in the programs and commercials are bulletins about American involvement in the Vietnam war and the inhuman destruction of civilians. In the end, the trio retreat from the complexities of the real world into the harmless world of situation comedy, allowing their own realities to be set to a laugh track. (Cast: 4 female, 4 male)

Motel is an excursion into Theater of the Absurd. Three giant colourfully styled doll-puppets, with actors inside, enact a scene in a motel on Route 66. A landlady checks in a man and a blonde woman who might be straight out of "In Cold Blood." While the landlady recites 15 minutes of platitudes about hooked rugs, self-flushing toilets and other features of the motel, the couple scrawl graffiti on the walls and smash the place. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer wrote, "It is possible Motel is the best one-act play I have ever seen." (Cast: 3 female or 3 male in "doll" masks and bodies; offstage voice).

Interview and Motel were first presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club off-off-Broadway in 1964 and 1965. That production, which cost $17,000, helped legitimize the off-off Broadway movement. When it moved to Off-Broadway TV was added and the trilogy America Hurrah: Three Views of the USA premiered in 1966 at the Pocket Theatre in the East Village of New York City and ran there for two and a half years. It was one of the first plays to make it from off-off Broadway to off-Broadway, and one of the first politically-oriented plays to be a hit with mainstream audiences and critics.

What people say:

"Jean-Claude van Itallie is a legendary figure in the downtown theater community in New York. ...his trilogy of one-acts chronicling the cacophony of American society during the Vietnam era – America Hurrah – opened in the East Village. The production, which cost $17,000 and featured puppets designed by Robert Wilson, helped legitimize the Off-Broadway movement. It ran for two years." — The New York Times

"It is an off-Broadway trip through an air-conditioned blightmare towards an icy emptiness at the core of American life... Van Itallie conveys an especially timely sensation, that of a world of fragmented experience so speeded up past human endurance that a man must either die laughing or go mad. America Hurrah is ... anguishingly funny, yet oddly poignant, and more than passing wise in the ways of today's world." — Time Magazine

"...a short but stunning masterpiece...." — The Times (London)

"We get caught up in the banter, the unfolding, as the play, like sticky strands of pasta, wraps us, twirls us, spins us around, finally leaving us entertained and satisfied, like a good al dente meal." — The New Paper

"…a comic and contemporary look at a few oddball types." — WEEI Radio

About the Playwright:

Jean-Claude van Itallie (1936-2021) was one of the most distinguished playwrights of the American avant-garde. Born in Brussels, Belgium, he was three when his family fled the Holocaust to America as refugees in 1940. He grew up on suburban Long Island, graduated Harvard in 1958, and in the 1960s was a seminal force in the explosive New York Off-Broadway theatre. He may be best-known for America Hurrah (his landmark counter-culture trilogy comprised of Interview, TV and Motel), The Serpent, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and his classic translations of Chekhov's major plays, which are prized by directors and actors for their clarity and subtle rhythms, are possibly the most performed Chekhov versions on the American stage.