"Stepping from Air into Water"
"...started to read with a playwright's eye, especially after participating in an extraordinary class taught at Princeton by Jean-Claude van Itallie, himself a highly original playwright. The class was an undergraduate class in playwriting, which meant the nine of us wrote every week, dramatizing interactions from our lives, tiny scenes, baby steps, and we read them aloud and talked about what we were trying to accomplish with the writing and acting. Some of the students in the class were already accomplished actors and writers, and some had directed plays. After teaching law for more than a decade, to be in this class was a true and enlightening educational experience, a stepping from air into water.
After that class, and then another one, I wrote a couple of plays which it took me some time to realize were not very good plays, and that was useful because it bounced me right back into fiction where I was at home. The class only met once a week, but I thought about it a lot in between the meetings. I could not have gone to a similar course in beginning fiction writing. The most important thing about the class was that it disarmed me, and put me back into that part of my brain where imaginative work could begin. This gifted teacher created a protective place where art could happen, and I was able to write fiction again. And, as a side benefit, I had a new and life-long interest and appreciation for the art of the playwright and the complicated time-structured beauty of the art of the theater." Leigh Buchanan Bienen in Triquarterly Review, issue 134 (2009)