Free for All: Joe Papp,
the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told
By Kenneth Turan
and Joseph Papp
Doubleday, 608 pages
As its title suggests, Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told, Kenneth Turan’s oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival—the most important nonprofit theatrical institution in the United States in the second half of the 20th century—is unabashedly hagiographic. The demigod here is Papp, who created the place and ran it for 36 years until his death from prostate cancer in 1991. Papp initiated the history in 1987, then killed it after Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, turned in a first draft. Given what he had learned about the mercurial Papp and his often brutal treatment of employees and temperamental artists, Turan was not entirely surprised by the decision.
Turan revived the project a few years ago, by which point many of the people to whom he had spoken had died. The collage he has created, in the manner of Jean Stein’s Edie and Peter Manso’s Mailer, is a vivid portrait of a very specific moment in the American theater and of the man responsible for a great deal of what it meant. The recollections Turan transcribes here convey, along with occasional exasperation and disappointment, the deep admiration Papp’s colleagues retain for him. In looking back on Papp’s achievement and assessing its effect on the theater and on the culture in general, however, more objectivity is required.
The book begins with Papp, born Papirovsky, describing his hardscrabble childhood in Brooklyn, reminiscences with direct parallels to the world of Michael Gold’s Stalinist agitprop Depression-era novel Jews Without Money. The parallels do not end with Gold’s title; Papp was himself a fellow traveler whose eagerness to bring the arts into the lives of the underprivileged was both a personal and an ideological mission.
Even Papp could not have imagined in 1955, when he began producing Shakespeare in a church on the Lower East Side, that his organization would attain the size and power—and wealth—it did. In 1957 he was presenting Shakespeare in an amphitheater on the East River near Alphabet City. By 1959 he had won the admiration of many people in the theater and the all-important approbation of the New York Times.
In 1962 he opened the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, a stage dedicated to his effort to bring free Shakespeare to the people. Its maiden production was, cannily, The Merchant of Venice, with the young George C. Scott—one of Papp’s many discoveries—as Shylock. The cries of anti-Semitism that greeted the production generated the kind of controversy that immediately put the Delacorte on the map (where it remains, nearly half a century later, one of the toughest tickets in town on a nice summer night). In just seven years, Papp had gone from an upstart to a major player.
Papp decided he wanted to produce contemporary drama in addition to Shakespeare. In 1966 he bought an abandoned building in Greenwich Village that had been the original Astor Library. One might say that Papp’s most lasting contribution was saving this huge, elegant building from the wrecker’s ball and turning it into a set of unusual spaces in which to create theater. It was an early instance of finding imaginative ways to use vintage architecture, a model that has been followed in every city in the country.
But at this point, Papp’s legacy begins to sour, even though it was the moment at which he began to climb to the summit of cultural influence. Papp began producing new plays and musicals. The first production to open at the Public was Hair, the “American tribal love-rock musical” whose artistic significance has not increased over the years but whose standing as a symbol of the 1960s is unsurpassed. Hair became a sensation because of its airing of hot issues of the time—like draft resistance—and its infectious rock score.
He was altogether a hot-button pusher, and there wasn’t one in the 1960s and 1970s he didn’t push—Vietnam, race, feminism, gay rights. But a list of the works he presented to riotous acclaim bears out just how dated and specific the moment of Papp’s theater was. Almost none of the plays he produced in the 1960s and 1970s—from the Pulitzer Prize winners That Championship Season and No Place to Be Somebody to David Rabe’s murderous-Vietnam-soldiers tragedies Sticks and Bones and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel—are even remotely tolerable now.
Indeed, much of what was done at the Public was even then of sociological rather than theatrical interest. Short Eyes, for example, was the work of Miguel Pinero, who, before he created it, spent seven of his 27 years in prison for what might be termed the usual things—drugs, burglary, mugging, shoplifting. His play was based on his experiences and those of his fellow ex-cons, who were also his fellow performers. In 1974 to encounter such a thing in the theater was novel and abrasive, particularly when Papp moved it to Lincoln Center, whose theaters he had taken over in 1973 in a bold move both by him, the downtown semi-avant-gardist, and by the Establishmentarians who ran the arts colossus north of Times Square. But shock value does not have staying power, and neither did Pinero, who continued to commit burglaries and shoot up heroin until his death from AIDS in 1988.
Turan devotes a great deal of space to the creation of A Chorus Line, the most successful show in the history of the Public. Papp had given Michael Bennett, already acclaimed for his choreography for the Broadway musicals Company and Follies, workshop space to develop a musical based on the experiences of chorus people. The story does not, in the end, reflect all that well on Papp. Indeed, one of the best and most interesting stories about A Chorus Line’s genesis does not appear in this book but was told to me by Bennett, and it is a very suggestive tale indeed about Papp and his judgment as a theatrical visionary and producer.
As Bennett oversaw the musical’s gestation, Papp found himself in a knotty situation. His experiment at Lincoln Center was not working. Its subscribers were not happy with the fare he presented them in the fall of 1974—Mert and Phil, an unpleasant play about the then little-discussed topic of mastectomies, and a production of Richard III, with Michael Moriarty suggesting, in a manner that made a hash out of the play, that Richard was gay. (In the cast was Marsha Mason, whose then husband, Neil Simon, used this catastrophic gimmick to great comic effect in The Goodbye Girl.)
With subscriber disaffection running high, Papp felt a need to give his uptown audience something more entertaining. A Chorus Line was already generating enormous buzz and enthusiasm even before its opening downtown at the Public. Papp decided to move A Chorus Line to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, which has a huge thrust stage, meaning that the performers are surrounded on three sides by the audience.
Bennett knew it would be catastrophic to present a show with “line” in the title anywhere except on a conventional proscenium stage. Papp was adamant. Unless Bennett could come up with $200,000, and quickly, he claimed he could not open A Chorus Line at the Public, where it was working beautifully. It would have to go to the Beaumont. Bennett frantically contacted every high roller he knew and came up with the money. It was no small business to raise $200,000 in 1975 for an off-Broadway musical.
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This story is a useful counterpoint to the many told in Free for All that stress Papp’s supposedly infallible ability to make shrewd artistic decisions. For here what mattered to Papp was his own economic self-preservation, and he was not going to let Bennett’s artistic qualms get in the way. The smallest details can change the audience’s perception of a work. Had Bennett not challenged Papp, A Chorus Line might not have become the legendary success it did.
Turan estimates that the Public received $30 million from the show—but in 1982, when Bennett spoke to me, he estimated that the Public’s share of the profits had already exceeded $30 million, and the show had another eight years to run on Broadway (and recently spent another three years on the Broadway boards in a successful revival). Papp figured out a way to be an impresario in a time of theatrical decline by using a nonprofit venue to generate profit-making enterprises (once they transferred to Broadway) that could then continue to support his other efforts. This, too, is a model that has been duplicated across the country.
But what is Papp’s legacy besides the Public itself? A problematic one. Papp began his career presenting Shakespeare. He claimed Shakespeare was his avocation, the reason he did what he did. But over the years, Shakespeare’s work became a prime casualty of the New York Shakespeare Festival. In his earliest productions, Papp allowed great actors like George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Charles Durning, and Roscoe Lee Browne to bring their skills to bear on the greatest of English playwrights. But as part of his missionary zeal, Papp decided to bring a different perspective to Shakespeare—a revolutionary one that attempted to bring Shakespeare in line with contemporary politics.
The most interesting chapter in the book describes Papp’s production in 1967 of what came to be known as the “Naked Hamlet.” Papp said Hamlet was the play he loved above all others. And so he set about to destroy it, hacking the play to bits and reshaping it according to his own whims. Martin Sheen, who played Hamlet, recalls to Turan: “During the rehearsals, something would happen. You’d be eating a sandwich and Joe would say, ‘Play a scene while you’re eating the sandwich.’ And why not? I love to play golf, and one day I was swinging a broomstick like a golf club, rehearsing the lines, and Joe said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s do the scene that way.’ Anything was allowed to happen, and it did happen. It was the time of my life, the time of my life.’”
Sheen’s father was from Spain. His son could affect an impeccable Spanish accent. When the mobile unit brought Hamlet to East Harlem, Sheen began “To be or not to be” in a Puerto Rican accent that initially drew laughter from the audience. But, Sheen claims, it forced them to listen to the succeeding speech: “You began to see who was suffering the whips and scorns of time. It was the Puerto Rican in the community, who did all the dirty work behind the scenes and took all the blame and didn’t get any credit.”
Ultimately it is condescending to the Hispanic audience to assume they wouldn’t connect with Shakespeare without such gimmickry. But gimmickry became the hallmark of Papp Shakespeare. If you present Beethoven Symphonies on the kazoo, do you really build an audience for Beethoven? No one looking at the level of Shakespeare performance in New York would say that it is higher or more enlightened than it was 50 years ago. Nor did Papp’s groundbreaking efforts in this regard do much to enlighten theatergoers across the country, who have been served up Shakespeare through the funnel of contemporary sexual and racial politics for decades, in part as a result of Papp’s artistic leadership. In that respect, as in many others, he was indeed a paradigmatic figure of the arts in America in our time.
