Born in 1938 in Bala Cynwyd, PA, Jack was raised in Philadelphia and New York City. He earned a B.A. from Syracuse University and master’s degrees from Villanova University and University of Pennsylvania. He was professor of drama at Western Connecticut State University and drama department chair at Jersey City State College.

   Jack began his playwriting career in 1973. Early productions included Joseph Papp’s off-Broadway staging of The Time Trial in 1975 with Tommy Lee Jones. His many productions led American Theatre magazine to name him among the most produced playwrights in 1981. Jack moved to Sarasota in 1988 and married Jo Morello, a lifelong writer with theatrical experience. He encouraged her dramatic writing, gaining a writing partner as well as a life partner.

   His play Dancin’ To Calliope—winner of the festival of Southern Theatre award in 1989—ran in Miami (1993). It was previously produced for CPB radio and played throughout the '80s with John Lithgow and Christine Baranksi.

   In 1989, Gilhooley was selected as an international fellow at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland. Jack was awarded a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 for Connemara Dreaming, which was also selected for the Carnegie Mellon 1990 Showcase of New Drama. 

   Gilhooley received a development grant from The Pilgrim Project in 1993 to bring his Big Tim and Maggie (co-authored with noted historian Czitrom) to New York after it was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association as Best Play Outside of New York City for 1993.

   The Warrior, originally a one-woman play, was first presented in workshop at Culture Project in NYC as part of their anti-war Impact Festival in Sept. 2006. It was chosen from 500 entries and later went to Florida's Backlot Arts (funded by a Puffin Foundation grant) and Theatre of The First Amendment (VA) as a winner in their First Light Festival. It played NYC's Visions Of War series in 2009.

   Some 200 productions of his plays have been mounted in over 130 venues in the US, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Spain, France, Canada, and Australia. Guest artist residencies included the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Sundance Playwrights’ Lab, Ireland’s Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Mount Holyoke College and Hawthornden Castle, along with Fulbright professorships at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, and National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He was a member of New Dramatists, Dramatists Guild of America, and the James Joyce Society among others.

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   Jack died in 2023 after a long illness that also took a toll on his wife, Jo, who died two years later. This website is created and maintained by friends who believe that work of this quality deserves to be read, performed, seen and absorbed by audiences yet unticketed. Hence the no-cost license for production on the plays recently published. (We have no control over work previously published or the production licensing of those plays.)