Ira Lewis

Ira Lewis has now written ten full-length plays.

They have been produced in major American cities, including Los Angeles and New York, on Broadway and off, in regional American theatres, and in Europe, with such actors as Eli Wallach, E.G. Marshall, Al Pacino, José Ferrer, Ben Gazzara, Alec Baldwin, Richard Berry and François Berléand (in France), among others.

He has been awarded Fellowships In Literature by The National Endowment For The Arts, and the New York State Council On The Arts.

His Broadway play, CHINESE COFFEE became a film starring Al Pacino and the late Jerry Orbach, for which he wrote the screenplay.

Before becoming a playwright he was a child actor in New York, then a busy juvenile actor, having made his Broadway debut as the twelve year old boy in Arthur Miller’s drama INCIDENT AT VICHY, directed by the legendary American director-critic Harold Clurman, who subsequently encouraged him to become a dramatist.

He was one of the original members of the now famed Actors Studio _
Playwrights-Directors Unit into which he was personally invited by Elia Kazan. _
His most recent play is called CONTUSION. It is a wry semi-comic drama dealing with what remains of the artistic sensibility of the New York Theatre in conflict with the poison of the Hollywood zeitgeist, which, he believes, is devoted almost exclusively to the obsession for power and its soulmate: money. Its world premiere will be in Paris with the participation of Richard Berry.

Later this year Al Pacino will star in a new film he has written called THE TENANT, which tells the story of a celebrated but penniless Greenwich Village poet driven from his home by the money and materialist forces which, Lewis believes, have tragically become the ultimate guide to what we now very mistakenly describe as "the good life."