From the Deep Archives: Coda to "Rocking the House That Papp Built"
"Papp's Rising Sons"
Last week I republished my 1990 Village Voice cover story on Joseph Papp when he named JoAnne Akalaitis to succeed him in running the New York Shakespeare Festival. It seems only fitting to republish the sidebar about the three directors he chose to produce a season of plays at the Public Theater that year: David Greenspan, George C. Wolfe, and Michael Greif. Good call on Papp’s part! It’s sweet to look back and see where these guys were 35 years ago and to witness how they’re all going strong.
Greenspan is giving yet another virtuosic performance at Atlantic Theater’s Stage 2 in Mona Pirsot’s hilarious meta-theatrical play I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan. Greif is currently represented on Broadway with Hell’s Kitchen, whose star Maleah Joi Moon won a Tony Award under his direction. And Audra McDonald stands a good chance of winning yet another Tony for her performance in Gypsy, directed by Wolfe.
“PAPP’S RISING SONS”
DAVID GREENSPAN
Résumé: Wrote, directed, and/or performed in Beautiful Fish, Recent Hemispheres, The Horizontal and the Vertical, Dig and Hole and Bury Your Father, Jack, Doing the Beast, Too Much in the Sun, Principia, The Closet Piece, 2 Samuel 11, etc. all at HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art; directed Kate’s Diary at Playwrights Horizons and the Public, Nicky Silver’s Wanking ’Tards at HOME, and Sexual Perversity in Chicago at ATA.
Season: Chikamatsu’s Gonza the Lancer (begins performances October 9); his own play, Dead Mother (January 8); Congreve’s The Way of the World (April 16). Greenspan: “Superficially, at least, they all deal with marriage and infidelity.”
Initial introduction to the Public Theater: Gail Merrifield Papp saw Principia at HOME.
Papp on Greenspan: “I think he’s a genius. I think he’s the most extraordinary writer-director-actor I’ve seen in a long time. He’s unafraid and has no prejudice whatsoever. Clear-headed, stubborn in a good way, a consummate artist who has no aspiration to become a big commercial success. The only comparable experience I’ve had to seeing his plays was when Jean-Claude van Itallie did his…that play Joe Chaikin directed, with scrawlings on the wall….”
America Hurrah ?
“America Hurrah. That was so liberating at the time. I felt like I was freed of enormous shackles after seeing that play, because it was so open. Well, he has that kind of freedom.”
Greenspan on Papp: “Joe mentioned his interest in Jacobean and Restoration theater, periods he wasn’t as familiar with or as fond of as Elizabethan. But they left the choice of plays pretty much open to me. I think if I’d come in wanting to do Carousel they might have wondered if they could afford it.”
Response to being offered the job: “I was pretty excited.”
GEORGE C. WOLFE
Résumé: Wrote The Colored Museum and directed the forthcoming TV version; wrote the book and lyrics for Paradise!; wrote the libretto for Duke Ellington’s street opera Queenie Pie at the Kennedy Center; adapted and directed Spunk; is currently directing his own play about Jelly Roll Morton, Jelly Lord, at the Mark Taper Forum.
Season: Because he’s in the midst of writing and directing Jelly Lord, Wolfe will direct two rather than three plays this season: Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (November 13), adapted by Wolfe with Thulani Davis and set in Haiti (“We were thinking about where a peasant class and a chic class coexist, two centuries walking next to each other down the road”); and his own play, Black Out (April 30). Wolfe on Black Out: “It’s inspired by a series of events: the Stuart case in Boston, the boycott in Brooklyn of Korean markets, the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities. If you really think about it, the generator that was created to power most urban centers was there for a few, and the people on the periphery caught the afterglow. But now with more and more people and more intensity, the generator’s about to explode, or it’s got to adapt. It’s about the madness that we’re all teetering toward.”
Initial introduction to the Public Theater: Morgan Jenness saw The Colored Museum at Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick and recommended it for production.
Papp on Wolfe: “I call him the Seawolf. One of a kind. He’s not there because he’s black. It’s good that he’s black. I consider that a plus. But that’s not the reason he’s running a theater. He has a very original mind, and I think he has a great future even in the commercial world.”
Wolfe on Papp: “Mr. Papp didn’t give me a whole series of rules or expectations other than this is a place you should consider your working home. There were certain parameters: doing three shows, X amount of money, he would like one to be something I’d written. He said, ‘You should do Restoration.’ I said, ‘I love Restoration comedy, because it’s language as a means of seduction, and language as a means of assault.’ At one point I was calling my season ‘Cultural Assault.’ The whole thing about non-traditional casting is that when people of color are used in traditionally white roles, the feeling is that there has to be some justification for it. Whereas in fact people of color have been everywhere in the world doing everything.”
Response on being offered the job: “Initially I was amazed. Then I got excited. Then I became overwhelmed. Shortly thereafter I tried to figure out why I should do it. I’m still in the process of trying to figure that out.”
MICHAEL GREIF
Résumé: Assisted Des McAnuff on the Broadway production of Big River; directed touring companies of Big River for the U.S., Japan, and Australia; codirected (with Bill Irwin) The Three Cuckolds at the La Jolla Playhouse; directed Cloud 9 and The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Berkshire Theater Festival, Laughing Wild at Dallas Theater Center, Wendy MacLeod’s The Lost Colony at Manhattan Class Company.
Season: Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal (September 25); Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day (November 20); Constance Congdon’s Casanova (April 2). Papp on Casanova: “A real NEA no-no.”
Initial introduction to the Public Theater: Des McAnuff introduced him to Joe Papp – “Hi, how are ya?” – and then David Warren and Michael Engler, fellow directors, recommended to Papp that he see Greif’s production of Machinal for the Naked Angels company.
Papp on Greif: “I saw one of his plays at a very small Off-Broadway theater, something called Machinal. It was done with no money and about 50 people. Brilliantly done. If I were to evaluate his chances of making a living in the theater aside from here, I think he has a very good chance. He’s very smart, he’s fast, he has some of the best attributes of the good commercial directors, and he has a good intellect. And he’s eager and young and very rich in feeling and so forth.”
Greif on Papp: “I don’t know if I’m being groomed as a producer. It’s more like curator. That’s the part I feel comfortable with and excited about, bringing other people in. Of the three of us, I feel my work is the most accessible. Something I feel I’m there to create a balance. Machinal was a straightforward production of a class play. I think of myself as in the Deborah Warner school.”
Response on being offered the job: “I’d been to plenty of meetings about directing showcases, and I’d frequently been asked, What would you do in a season of plays? – it’s a way of making conversation. So I walked out of that meeting with Papp and thought, ‘Is this me? Is this my life?’ I guess it is conceivable that this would happen to me. I guess I’m supposed to have a good year. It was done so offhandedly, you think, ‘Did that really happen?’ ”
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Postscript: When I interviewed Morgan Jenness about Papp’s choice, I made a joke about the group including one black, one Jew, and one gay – riffing on both The Mod Squad (“one white, one black, one blonde”) and August Darnell’s disco hit “There But For the Grace of God Go I” about a prejudiced couple fleeing the Bronx (“Let's find a place they say, somewhere far away/ With no blacks, no Jews, and no gays”). Morgan, who knew everybody and everything, pointed out that Greenspan and Greif are both Jewish, and that all of them were gay. Wolfe wasn’t out at that point, and when I asked him about it he got flustered so I dropped the subject.
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