Leon Katz, a playwright and former professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University, died Monday at his home in California. He was 97.
In addition to teaching and writing plays, Mr. Katz had been a major figure in the local theater community and was involved in two alternative theater companies, Theatre Express and the 99 Cent Floating Theatre.
He taught at CMU from 1968 to 1977 and Pitt from 1977 to 1981. In 2004, he was awarded the Association for Theatre in Higher Education lifetime achievement award for teaching.
Mr. Katz was “the essential man of Pittsburgh theater for both practitioners and artists,” said Christopher Rawson, senior theater critic at the Post-Gazette.
“Leon was the most wonderful teacher I've ever met,” Mr. Rawson recalled. “He walked into a seminar with a can of Coke and a supply of cigarettes, sat down, and said 'What are we talking about today?' and he would launch into a series of anecdotes, insights and challenges to future work that would have your head spinning. When I was a professor at Pitt, I found it a special privilege to be able to sit in a class that he was teaching — something I thought I knew a lot about, and discovered just how much there was still to know.”
Several of Mr. Katz's former colleagues in the theater and academia had fond remembrances of Mr. Katz holding court at the Gazebo, a deli in Shadyside.
Don Marinelli, a student of Mr. Katz's who went on to be a professor of drama at CMU for 31 years, said it was normal for Mr. Katz's classes to end up at the Gazebo with Mr. Katz picking up the check.
“You could often find him there,” recalled Jed Allen Harris, who now teaches at CMU's School of Drama, joking that he got his graduate degree “from the University of Leon. I could say, 'Tell me about ‘King Lear’ and he would talk for an hour.’”
“Almost anybody who came in contact with him, said he was one of the greatest lecturers they ever encountered. He could talk brilliantly for hours about anything that ever happened in the theater,” Mr. Harris said.
Mr. Marinelli described Mr. Katz as encouraging, empathetic, always looking out for students, and like a surrogate father to him.
Mr. Katz was also known for having interviewed writer Gertrude Stein's former companion Alice B. Toklas at length in 1952 and 1953 about material in Stein's notebooks from when Stein was writing “The Making of Americans.”
He had not published the notebooks or released their interviews, which frustrated Stein scholars and was the subject of a lengthy 2005 article in The New Yorker magazine.
Mr. Katz was working on a book, “The Notebooks of Gertrude Stein,” a scholarly study of these notebooks and this time in her life right up until the time he died, said his son, Elia Katz.
In addition to teaching at Pitt, CMU and Yale, according to his website, Mr. Katz had a lengthy teaching career that included stints at Cornell University; Stanford University; Columbia University; Vassar College; Manhattanville College; Barnard College; San Francisco State University; the University of Southern California; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Giessen, Germany.
His website lists him as the author of several dozen original plays and adaptations, produced in the United States and overseas.
Mr. Katz was a native of New York City, and grew up in the Bronx where as a child he worked at the family grocery store, according to his son. He met his future wife Sadell Kasmere, at their elementary school, served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and then returned home to earn his doctorate from Columbia University, according to his son.
Mr. Katz died Monday at his home in Encino, Calif., from complications due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He is survived by his sons Elia Katz of Los Angeles and Frederick Katz of New York and three nephews.
Services will be at 1 p.m. today at the Home of Peace Funeral Home, 4334 Whittier Blvd, Los Angeles.
Kate Giammarise: kgiammarise@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3909.
First Published: January 26, 2017, 1:43 p.m.
