In addition to writing plays, Jack Gelber translated Franz Xaver Kroetz’s play Farmyard, with Michael Roloff. The work was produced at the Yale Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 22, 1975, and published by Urizen the following year. In addition, the film version of The Connection, released in 1962, was based on Gelber’s screenplay adaptation. The movie, directed by Shirley Clarke, was screened at the Cannes Festival (1961) and banned as obscene by New York state, though the New York State Supreme Court later found the language in the movie not to be obscene. Gelber’s only nontheatrical literary endeavor was a novel, On Ice (1964). Some of the concepts that he deals with in this prose work reappear in Sleep.

Whether fairly or not, Jack Gelber is primarily known for The Connection. The drama was popular enough to be made into a motion picture, and it achieved critical success as well, bringing the playwright the Obie, the Vernon Rice Award, and the New York Drama Critics Poll Award for most promising playwright of the 1959-1960 season. There were three reasons for the startling success of the dramatist’s first play. First, and most obvious, are the nontraditional characters, setting, subject matter, and plot line. Gelber did in the American theater what John Osborne had done in the British theater with Look Back in Anger three years earlier; he exposed the theatergoing public to a new world, in this case, that of skid-row junkies waiting for their heroin connection to arrive with a fix. Second, the play’s thematic content is important; it goes far beyond the dreary, desolate, frustrated life of the characters portrayed, for the addicts are really metaphors for modern humankind, much as Vladimir and Estragon are in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954). Finally, Gelber’s emphasis on improvisation has had a major impact on contemporary drama. Just as free verse has a special appeal to bad poets and is easily misused by them, this approach to playwriting can lead to horrendous results, but when used by someone with Gelber’s ability, the improvisational ingredient reinforces one of the theater’s basic strengths, its immediacy, and enhances the participatory nature of drama, involving the audience in a way that recalls, indeed reincarnates, the origins of the genre in public ceremonies.

Much of Gelber’s writing after The Connection was intended to broaden the theater’s possibilities even further; it should never be forgotten that drama, even when based on a text and literary conventions, is essentially rooted in performance. Some of Gelber’s subsequent efforts extended the innovative strategies of The Connection, and others moved in new directions.