Jerome Kass
Jerome Kass was born in Chicago in 1937. In 1940 he moved with his family to the Bronx, where he remained (except for two years away in graduate school in Massachusetts) for the next twenty-one years. When he was five years old he dreamed of a career as a singer. When he was eleven, his voice changed, and he decided upon teaching as the next best choice. When he was nineteen and at NYU in the Bronx, he tried his hand at playwriting, collaborating on a musical with a pre-med student who composed original music for his book and lyrics and, although he was realistic enough to think of himself still as a future teacher, not a playwright, his success as a musical-comedy writer was sufficient to plant a seed in his still-youthful brain. When he was twenty-two, with a Master of Arts in Literature from NYU and a teaching assistantship from Brandeis University, he began his study for a Ph.D. in literature, fully intending to spend his life as a scholar and teacher. Soon after, he taught his first class at Brandeis. One day, a year or more away from the Ph.D. and a settled academic life, he decided that he would have to spend his life writing plays. He left Brandeis, married, moved with his wife to Queens, took a part-time teaching job at Queens College, and began an apprenticeship in playwriting that later blossomed into a full-time career. In December 1962, he was given a $180 production of a one-act play called IN GLASS HOUSES in an apartment over an East Village coffee house. The venture was financed by a young man who served as actor and director as well as producer. After two months' time, the play attracted so little notice and audiences, numbering on some nights only one viewer, that Kass was angered enough to write an article on the state of the theatre which subsequently appeared in the now-defunct Theatre Arts magazine. The article was noticed by Herbert Berghof, who called Kass and invited him to attend his newly formed playwriting seminar which Berghof himself ran at his studio in Greenwich Village. After two years with Berghof, the young author had a collection of short plays that attracted the attention of an agent and of director Daniel Petrie. Petrie directed one of the plays, YOUNG MARRIEDS AT PLAY, at the Actors Studio. Its success convinced the director to seek a production. The Establishment Theatre Co., Inc., optioned twelve of Kass plays from which four were eventually chosen for production Off-Broadway, PRINCESS REBECCA BIRNBAUM, MAKE LIKE A DOG, SUBURBAN TRAGEDY, and YOUNG MARRIEDS AT PLAY. In 1979, Kass was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for Best Book for his play BALLROOM.