Founder of The Public Theater
Papp spent years of entrepreneurial zeal and dogged persistence promoting his idea of free Shakespeare in New York City. Papp's 1956 production of Taming of the Shrew, outdoors in the East River Amphitheatre on New York's Lower East Side, was pivotal for Papp, primarily because Brooks Atkinson, known as the dean of American theatre critics, went downtown to see it and endorsed Papp's vision in The New York Times. Actress Colleen Dewhurst, who played Kate the shrew, recalled the beginning of the shift in fortune (in an autobiography published posthumously as a collaboration with Tom Viola): "With Brooks Atkinson's blessing, our world changed overnight. Suddenly in our audience of neighbors in T-shirts and jeans appeared men in white shirts, jackets and ties, and ladies in summer dresses. Suddenly we were 'the play to see,' and everything changed. We were in a hit that would have a positive effect on my career, as well as Joe's, but I missed the shouting. I missed the feeling of not knowing what might happen next or how that play would that night move an audience unafraid of talking back."
By age 41, after Papp had established a permanent base for his free Summer Shakespeare performances in Central Park's Delacorte Theater, an open-air amphi-theatre, Papp looked for an all-year theater he could make his own. After looking at other locations, he fell in love with the location and the character of Lafayette Street’s Astor Library. Papp got it, in 1967, at a reported one dollar yearly rental from the City. It was the first building saved from demolition under the New York City landmarks preservation law. After massive renovations, Papp moved his staff to the newly named Public Theater, hoping to attract a newer, less conventional audience to new and innovative playwrights.
At the Public Theater, Papp's focus moved away from the Shakespearean classics and toward new work. Notable Public productions included Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody (the first off-Broadway show, and the first play by an African American, to win the Pulitzer Prize) and the plays of David Rabe, Tom Babe, and Jason Miller. Papp called his productions of Rabe's plays "the most important thing I did at the Public. Papp managed to produce plays that spoke to their own time. Just as Rabe's work reflected the concerns of its time (Vietnam and American imperialism), Papp's production in 1985 of Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart dared to address, in its time, the prejudicial political system which was turning its back on the AIDS crisis and the gay community.
As festival designer Ming Cho Lee put it, “With the new playwrights, the whole direction of the theater changed. Joe changed direction and none of us realized for a while that he had changed direction. The Public Theater became more important than the Delacorte. The new playwrights became more interesting to Joe than Shakespeare."
Among the myriad plays and musicals Papp produced, Papp is perhaps best known for four productions which transferred to commercial Broadway runs: the original version of Galt MacDermot's Hair, a star-studded production of The Pirates of Penzance, self-proclaimed black feminist Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf and the anomaly that was A Chorus Line.
A Chorus Line originated with a series of taped interviews of dancers' reminiscences, down at the Public, overseen by director/choreographer Michael Bennett. Papp had given Bennett the kind of entrepreneurial support for which he was known, trusting Bennett with the time and space to flesh out his dream. Previously, Papp had not kept his producer's hands on the rights to Hair and did not gain from its Broadway transfer. Not so with this one. After this ground-breaking musical (which theatricalized its performers' true-life stories) transferred to a highly lucrative Broadway run, the show's earnings became a continuous financial support for Papp's work. The show received 12 Tony Award nominations and won nine of them, in addition to the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It ran for 6,137 performances, becoming the longest-running production in Broadway history up to that time. Its Tony Award for the Best Musical of the Year 1975 went to Papp, its producer. Its workshop system for developing musicals, which Bennett and Papp had pioneered, revolutionized the way Broadway musicals were created thereafter, and many of the precedents for workshops' aesthetics and contract agreements were set by Papp, Bennett and "A Chorus Line."
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