Jonathan Levy Papers

Dr. Jonathan Levy, award-winning playwright, university professor, theatre for youth historian and author, was born in 1936. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in New York City. His dissertation titled Carlo Gozzi: Three Fables for the Theatre includes translations from the Italian for the following Gozzi plays: Turandot, The Little Green Bird and The Serpent Queen.

He has numerous published monographs and articles in the fields of theatre for youth history, criticism and theory; arts assessment; and aesthetics. He has written plays for adults and for young audiences.

Levy has written over forty theatrical pieces for adults, which include full-length and one-act plays; monologues; a commedia; concert pieces for symphony orchestra and actors; an adaptation of an operetta; an opera; and a cantata for tenor, tape and chamber orchestra. His plays have been produced in New York City Off-Broadway by groups, such as The Impossible Ragtime Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club, the HB Studio and the New York Stageworks; in Los Angeles by the Theatre East; and in Westport, Connecticut by the Theatre Artists Workshop. His playwriting honors include playwright-in-residences with the Albee-Barr Playwrights Unit, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. His plays have been published in The Best Short Plays of 1983 and 1996, in New England Review, in Charlie the Chicken and Other Plays, and by Dramatists Play Service. His translation of Carlo Gozzi's Turandot appeared in The Genius of the Italian Theatre, which was edited by Eric Bentley.

His plays for young audiences include Louise: The Rhinoceros Who Was Born to Dance (1995); Dragonetti (1983); The King's Shilling (1976); Marco Polo: A Fantasy for Children (1976); The Kennedys (1972); The Marvelous Adventures of Tyl (1971); The War Between the Amazons and the Baboons (1968); and The Play of Innocence and Change (1967). In 1979 he received AATE's (American Alliance for Theatre & Education) Charlotte B. Chorpenning Playwright Award for his body of outstanding plays for children.

Levy is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY Stony Brook. As a former Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Levy worked with ARTS PROPEL, a cooperative research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and led by personnel from the Pittsburgh Public Schools, Harvard's Project Zero and the Educational Testing Service. Levy helped to develop the curriculum for the playwriting program for junior and senior high school students.

As a theatre arts educator, Levy worked with the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) to develop theatre curricula that is used by secondary school students internationally. He also initiated and coordinated similar programs in the fields of film and dance. As Chief Examiner in Theatre Arts, he reviewed and evaluated students work and teacher practices and regularly participated in symposia sponsored by IBO on international issues in education.

Part of Levy's theatre for youth historical research included collaborating on a bibliography of early printed children's plays written in English from 1780-1919. A Preliminary Checklist from 1780-1855 created by Levy and Martha Mahard, Assistant Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, was published in 1987 by the Theatre Library Association in Performing Arts Resources . Both Levy and Mahard received the AATE Research Award in 1986 for this publication. The bibliographic sequel with plays from 1856 to 1919 was created in collaboration with Floraine Kay and is available for searching on the Jonathan Levy Collection website.

Other publications include a chapter titled The Dramatic Dialogues of Charles Stearns in Spotlight on the Child: Studies in the History of American Children's Theatre; Practical Education for the Unimaginable: Essays on Theatre and the Liberal Arts; A Theatre of the Imagination: Reflections on Children and the Theatre; and The Gymnasium of the Imagination: A Collection of Children's Plays in English, 1780-1860.

Levy received the Judith Kase-Cooper Honorary Research Award from AATE in 2003. This award is given to honor distinguished scholars who have contributed significantly to the development of theory and research in the field of drama/theatre and education. Those nominated must be long-standing members of AATE. The focus is on cumulative work accomplished over a number of years rather than on one study.

Levy began collecting books on theatre for youth in the 1960s. According to Levy, building his library started almost by accident while he was working on his doctoral degree and beginning his teaching career. ... I was also writing plays, some of which were plays for children. I got interested in who had written plays for children before me, why they did it and what good they thought could come of it. I looked for a standard general history of the field and found, to my surprise, that none existed. From then on, I began to buy books for my own use, out of curiosity. Over the years I got increasingly serious about my collection and worked with antiquarian booksellers in America and Europe to build the collection. Also, when I was traveling, I spent a good deal of time looking through piles of old books in second-hand shops, barns, flea markets and so on, occasionally finding some treasure that had been previously overlooked. That was, as any collector will tell you, the most satisfactory of all.

Levy's monograph and periodical donation chronologically supplemented the theatre for youth scholarly resources in the Child Drama Collection. Previously this Collection documented the history of the field from 1900 onward. The Levy collection expanded research possibilities back to the 17th century. This helped to make the Child Drama Collection the largest repository in the world documenting the international history of theatre for youth.

Since 1999, Levy has served as Distinguished Bibliographer for ASU Libraries. In this capacity, he consults with the Child Drama Collection Curator and identifies new acquisitions, especially monographs published before 1900, to be added to his ASU book collection. He is in residence at ASU for one week yearly and meets with graduate students and faculty in the Department of Theatre on these visits.

Jonathan Levy passed away at his home in Patterson, New York on January 22, 2013 after a long battle with congestive heart failure. A memorial service was held for him at Faculty House, Columbia University on January 31, 2013.