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Joe Papp: the Man Who Made Theater for the Public

Authors who want to take their unpublished works to the grave do not always get what they wish for. Franz Kafka famously ordered his manuscripts to be burned after his death, and his order was defied by the very friend he entrusted with the task. Vladimir Nabokov expressed the same wish for an unfinished novel, “The Original of Laura,” which is now being published more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death under the authority of his son.
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December 2, 2009

Authors who want to take their unpublished works to the grave do not always get what they wish for. Franz Kafka famously ordered his manuscripts to be burned after his death, and his order was defied by the very friend he entrusted with the task. Vladimir Nabokov expressed the same wish for an unfinished novel, “The Original of Laura,” which is now being published more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death under the authority of his son.

The tale behind the publication of “Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told” by Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp (Doubleday; $39.95, 593 pps.) is somewhat more nuanced. Turan, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, collaborated with theatrical impresario Papp in the late 1980s on an oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater. Once Turan turned in the manuscript, however, Papp abruptly changed his mind and decreed that the book should not be published at all.  Papp died of prostate cancer in 1991, and only recently did Turan succeed in resurrecting the project with the blessing of Papp’s widow, Gail Merrifield Papp.

The book Turan wrote so long ago turns out to be a rich banquet of reminiscence about the American theatre, and the authorship owes as much to the 160 men and women Turan interviewed for the project as it does to Papp himself.  Turan deftly turns from Papp’s musings and recollections to those of the people who knew him and worked with him over the years, a kind of Greek chorus that includes Morris Carnovsky, Lee Grant, James Earl Jones, George C. Scott,  Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep, among many others. Indeed, nothing quite defines Papp’s unique role in American culture better than the roster of famous writers, actors and directors who worked in his productions.

Papp recalls how, at the age of 12, he was recruited to sing in the choir of the Sephardic synagogue on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, but “[t]here was some dispute about whether to charge [my father] to watch me sing because we didn’t have the money for High Holidays tickets.”  Later, Papp insisted on offering free performances of Shakespeare in Central Park: “Even today, I’m still pursuing the goal with which I started,” he says. “I don’t feel very good when I have just the people who can afford to pay inside my theaters.”

But we also see that Papp was not always a wholly benign figure.  “Joe wants to be immortal,” observes Jason Miller, author of “That Companionship Season.” “The theater’s not so much a profession to Joe, it’s a vocation, all his Hebraic spiritualism is put into this.”  Yet Papp was not shy about taking advantage of those who sought his tutelage, as when actress Elsa Raven asked Papp (who was then still using his family name) for a job: “Mr. Papirofsky, I’d like to volunteer my services as an actress for your free Shakespeare.”  To which he replied: “Actresses I don’t need. What else can you do?” Raven found herself at work as the only full-time employee in the busy production office: “It was a job that meant doing everything, everything.”

The whole point of public theatre, of course, is to reach across the ethnic, racial and cultural divides that are the stress-lines of the urban America and introduce new audiences to the experience of live performance. George C. Scott, for example, remembers how the teenagers in the audience at a production of Richard III cheered the battle scene: “And at the end, when I was mobbed and killed, they booed,”  he recalled. “They thought that was unfair gang warfare.”

The long arc of Papp’s life and career gives us a unique perspective on recent American history.  Papp was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 50s, and he was threatened by Robert Moses with cancellation of his permit to operate the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park unless he started charging admission.  “It was a complete turnaround,” recalls Papp, “like getting a hit in the kishkes.”  But Papp was capable of spotting and launching hit plays, too, and he took a chance on a funky rock musical to open his new venue, the Public Theatre, in 1967.  The play was “Hair,” and the rest is history.

“For a show to open a new theater, if God had come and taken me by the hand and said, ‘I have a great miracle I want to show you,’” Papp told Turan, “it would have been this.”

Perhaps the single most telling passage in “Free for All” is the story of a surprise party that his friends and colleagues at the Shakespeare Festival organized on the occasion of his 57th birthday, in 1978.  “It was a beautiful, beautiful event,” allowed Papp, “but as the evening wore on, I began to think, ‘Wait a second – I wonder how much this cost? And how come I didn’t know about it at all?’” To Papp, the elaborate staging of the tribute was somehow subversive: “I thought, ‘That’s the way revolutions are made or governments are overthrown.’” And he later fired the executive whom he blamed for allowing the preparations to go forward without letting him know.

Papp’s reasoning strikes me as purely Stalinesque, and that may be one of the reasons Papp sought to suppress the book when it was first written.  It is to Turan’s credit, and our considerable enrichment and entertainment, that Joseph Papp’s orders, too, were disobeyed.

Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. His book blog, 12:12, appears at www.jewishjournal.com/twelvetwelve.

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