Biography

Joel Shatzky was born in Vancouver, Washington in 1943 but was raised in the Bronx and attended Music and Art High School (now LaGuardia), and Queens College, CUNY. He moved to upstate New York with his wife in 1968 and taught at SUNY, Cortland, for the next thirty-seven years, retiring in 2005.

His first play produced in NYC, The Day They Traded Seaver, directed by Dino Narrizano, at Soho Artists, ran in 1979. Subsequently, several one-acts of his have been produced at Thirteenth Street Rep and One Dream Theatre, and “Superspy,” a musical spoof with music by Leonard Lehrman, was presented at Theatre 22 and reviewed in the New York Times in 1990. An opera by Lehrman for which Shatzky wrote the libretto, New World, was performed at the Bruno Walter Theatre at the Lincoln Center Library in 1992. Shatzky’s first professionally produced play was actually presented in 1976 in London at the ICA Theatre, “It’s a Clean, Well-lighted Place,” directed by Victoria Bird. He’s also had plays produced in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles at the Improv Theatre. Most recently, his play, Amahlia, which was first staged in Ithaca, N.Y. in 1984, was produced this past January at Impact Theater in Brooklyn. It has presently begun a run at Thirteenth Street Rep in Manhattan where it will be playing weekends through June 2nd.

Orphans, originally written in 1984, was performed as a staged reading at Salt City Center for the Performing Arts in Syracuse, N.Y. It was subsequently revised into its present form in this production.

Shatzky, who lost his wife in 2004, is living in Brooklyn and is an adjunct at Kingsborough CC. His son, Ben, is a lawyer and lives with his wife, Betty, and new daughter, Sophia, in Bayside. Shatzky’s daughter, Judy, has recently returned from eighteen months of teaching ESL in Uruguay.