Reading List/From the Deep Archives: Joseph Papp, PUBLIC/Private
Several books and hundreds of articles have been written about the very public career of Joseph Papp, the theatrical impresario who founded the New York Shakespeare Festival and spent his life championing both theater and social justice. In addition to producing landmark shows such as Hair, A Chorus Line, and The Normal Heart, Papp went up against power baron Robert Moses to guarantee free Shakespeare in the Park, and he could be counted on to show up for liberal political causes.
Much less has been published about his day-to-day existence offstage, at least until Gail Merrifield Papp wrote her memoir Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater, which came out in early 2023. Gail was Joe’s right-hand person for the entire history of the NYSF, starting out as his all-purpose assistant, then running the play department, and eventually becoming his fourth wife. In other words, she has alllllllll the receipts (as the kids say these days) and gives an entertaining account of the life she shared with Joe.
She tells good stories about the artists and shows that Papp produced at the Public Theater (and on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, and in Central Park), some of them familiar but many of them new and fascinating to theater insiders. It’s not especially dishy. I found most touching the sweet glimpses of the private Joe Papp, what it was like to conduct a secret love affair with him, the things they talked about on early dates, their shared jokes and vocabulary. Gail writes about his complicated relationship with his children and the behind-the-scenes drama of his health challenges, which he denied to the press (as I can attest – more on that later) but which preoccupied his family and his theater’s staff for many years.
I started attending shows at the Public Theater in 1977 so I tracked Papp’s progress almost the entire time and gobbled up every tidbit Gail’s book had to offer. I was intrigued to learn, for instance, that Bill Gunn – the writer and filmmaker whose play The Forbidden City opened two days after he died of AIDS in 1989 – was the longtime partner of Nina Simone’s brother, Sam Waymon. Nina Simone had a gay brother – who knew?
I encountered Joe Papp numerous times in my career as a theater journalist. One of those times involved Mandy Patinkin, a story I’ll tell another time. I had the most exposure to Papp in 1990, when I wrote a cover story for the Village Voice called “Rocking the House That Papp Built.” The occasion was the announcement of Joe’s first official succession plan, when he named JoAnne Akalaitis (a fiercely talented director and co-founder of the Mabou Mines theater collective) the new artistic leader of the New York Shakespeare Festival and brought on three younger directors as artistic associates — Michael Greif (pre-Rent), David Greenspan, and George C. Wolfe, who would succeed Akalaitis at the Public Theater.
Papp was a real character – opinionated, mercurial, maddening, sentimental, egotistical, generous, funny, visionary. I always admired him for his willingness to speak up on social issues, to take a stand, to exert true leadership when it was needed.
I’m reprinting my Village Voice article in two chunks. This part focuses on Joe Papp; the second part centers on JoAnne Akalaitis. They’re both pretty long but quite entertaining. Enjoy!
“ROCKING THE HOUSE THAT PAPP BUILT”
Theater history is being made right this moment on Lafayette Street: the Mabou Mines production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Through the Leaves is being revived at the Public Theater. Doesn't sound like much? Maybe not, but the seeds of change are often tiny. The Obie-award-winning production, which stars Ruth Maleczech and Fred Neumann under the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis, premiered in the winter of 1984 at the Interart Theatre. An attic on far West 52nd Street is exactly the sort of out-of-the-mainstream location where you'd imagine a famous but still struggling avant-garde theater troupe to do a distinctly uncommercial work like Kroetz's brutal, working-class romance about a middle-aged specialty butcher and her construction- worker boyfriend.
Now Through the Leaves is opening a new season -- the first of a new decade -- playing at the Newman, the largest space in the Public Theater. And its 52-year-old director is no longer just a brainy cult figure, no longer a member of Mabou Mines (after 20 years with the company, she resigned in June), but Joseph Papp's handpicked choice to succeed him as the head of the New York Shakespeare Festival, the largest not-for-profit theater institution in the country.
The announcement in the New York Times on May 29 rocked the theater world. Not only was Papp taking on Akalaitis as "artistic associate," but he was also giving three young directors -- 35-year-old George C. Wolfe (whose plays The Colored Museum and Spunk were among the Public's few popular successes in recent years), 34-year-old David Greenspan (who directed Kathleen Tolan's Kate's Diary at the Public last fall), and 30-year-old Michael Greif -- each a theater at the Public to do a season of plays of his own choosing. As the news sank in, the same question echoed on phone lines across town and coast to coast:
Is Papp really handing over the reins to JoAnne Akalaitis? What does this new arrangement mean for the future of the New York Shakespeare Festival? For the future of Joe Papp? Of New York theater? Of American theater?
Why Akalaitis of all people? Yes, she has worked at the Public Theater for years, but usually in the context of Mabou Mines, the theater collaborative she cofounded in 1970 with Maleczech, Lee Breur, and her ex-husband, Philip Glass. Some of the work was well-received, most notably Dead End Kids, her multimedia, Faust-goes-to-Three- Mile-Island history of nuclear power that had a long run in 1980-81. But a lot of it was pretty arcane. (The press had a field day yukking it up over sculptor Michael Hurson's play Red and Blue, a dialogue between light bulbs.) And her last show at the Public was Cymbeline, her first Shakespeare, which got savaged by the critics -- and everybody knows how important good reviews are, even to a cynic like Joe Papp. Besides, Akalaitis is an avant-garde director. Does she really want to be a producer? When it comes right down to it, how much autonomy is Papp willing to give her and the other three directors? How long is this arrangement really going to last? And who the hell is Michael Greif, anyway?
The grapevine certainly had plenty to buzz about all summer. Reactions ranged from admiration and giddy approval to deep suspicion and cynicism, much of it based on extended exposure to the mercurial ways of Joseph Papp. "I think it's a good move, a bold move," says the literary manager for a major American theater, "and I'm willing to place a bet in a sealed envelope that they'll all be gone by next June."
"I think she's a terrorist," says an American theater VIP. "She's destructive of institutions. When she directed Leon and Lena at the Guthrie, she discovered that Honeywell was one of the backers, and she dressed the villains in white workclothes with the name Moneywell written on the back. She wanted the Guthrie to dedicate their production of The Screens to the PLO. The Guthrie decided they wouldn't, so she put the dedication in her bio in the program. She looks for what's going to provoke and bring difficulty to the organization."
"The good thing is that they know each other, JoAnne and Joe. It's not a case of some idiot board bringing in Anne Bogart or Peter Sellars and then wondering why they're doing what they're doing," says critic and dramaturg James Leverett. "But it's nothing that's going to solidify in one year."
"I was surprised, though not because I thought JoAnne was an unusual choice," says Garland Wright, who took a similar flying leap four years ago when he went from being a fine freelance director to running the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. "She's got all the cliche qualities that people assume artistic directors have to have -- organization, administrative skill, leadership abilities, the ability to bring it all together in time. But the real fact is that organizations are personal things, and the chief quality you bring is personality. Hers is unique and individual, and that's what qualifies her to do it.
"Actually, I was impressed with Joe, to be honest," Wright adds mildly, setting a new standard for understatement. "He's always had the capacity to surprise."
The most surprising thing about the turn of events at the Public Theater is that Papp has addressed the issue of succession at all. It's difficult enough, both emotionally and practically, for the head of any organization to face the task of naming or at least cultivating a successor. But Joe Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival himself 36 years ago, in a Lower East Side church basement. He fought its famous battles by himself: going nose-to-nose with Robert Moses over keeping Shakespeare in the Park free, getting the city to buy the Astor Library building and lease it back to him for $1 a year as the Public Theater, etc. And he has made himself virtually synonymous with the organization, using his personality to sell the Shakespeare Festival and its productions. Not only that, but through his outspoken advocacy of various social and political causes he has made himself the individual most identified in the public mind with theater in America.
For Papp to contemplate a life for the New York Shakespeare Festival beyond himself would require a great amount of honest, soul-searching selflessness. So for him to say, as he did when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, "The direction we're going in now is preparing for JoAnne Akalaitis, at some point when I'm no longer the head of this theater, to actually become the artistic leader" -- well, it's a major landmark.
The decision to hire three directors and give each of them a theater is, Papp says, a more recent development in his long-term planning than naming a successor. But it also contributes to the sense that he's in rehearsal for retirement. In some ways, it's an even more immediate indication of his willingness to relinquish (some) control and to welcome the exercise of somebody else's taste besides his own.
Why make these changes now? It's no secret that the New York Shakespeare Festival has been undergoing an identity crisis in recent years. What made Papp the most exciting theater producer in the country, when he hit his stride in the mid-'70s, was his ability to juggle Broadway showbiz, serious plays that don't make a dime, and free Shakespeare in the Park. But he hasn't been able to keep all his balls in the air lately. Except for The Pirates of Penzance and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, his Broadway excursions in the last decade have been expensive debacles, worthy plays but foolish moves: The Human Comedy, Serious Money, The Secret Rapture. William Finn's Romance in Hard Times and Todd Rundgren and Joe Orton's Up Against It, the two costly pop musicals he produced last year in hopes of picking up the post-Chorus Line slack, fizzled on the launching pad.
Where the Public once had virtual first-pick on scripts by terrific new writers (e.g., David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, Wally Shawn, David Hare, David Henry Hwang, etc.), today it has much more competition from major theaters around the country, increasingly attractive to artists disinclined to brave the treacherous financial and critical climate in New York. These theaters' employment of the major directors of the day has also put a crimp in Papp's style of producing Shakespeare; he often has to settle for third- or fourth-choice directors, which explains why so many of the productions are pointless and mediocre. And Papp can't help but have noticed that Lincoln Center Theater has stolen the New York Shakespeare Festival's thunder as the hottest theater in town. The Lincoln Center model -- low-key, creatively active artistic director (Gregory Mosher); savvy, bizwise producer (Papp's former partner Bernie Gersten); a core group of resident artists (David Mamet, John Guare, and, until recently, Jerry Zaks); exciting literary and casting departments (under Anne Cattaneo and Billy Hopkins, respectively) -- is one that Papp must surely have studied closely when conceiving the new configuration of the Public Theater.
It was advantageous -- though not, according to Papp, influential -- that there was funding available specifically for this kind of unprecedented change in programming. Last year the Andrew Mellon Foundation's Rachel Bellow, who has been described as "the guru of fundraisers right now," sent out a letter to the artistic directors of 26 not-for-profit theaters inviting them to submit dream-of-a-lifetime proposals in which money would make a difference in the direction of their theaters. One of 18 theaters accepted, the New York Shakespeare Festival got $330,000, which will cover -- at least for a year -- the salaries for Akalaitis and the three other directors.
It's undeniably a creative (rather than headline-grabbing or box- office-minded) decision for Papp to make. He's done great things and could easily rest on his laurels. But he is genuinely restless. He's an old dog who at least wants to learn new tricks. He'd probably be offended at being called an old dog. At the very least he'd prefer to be called an old underdog.
When I first heard the news, I couldn't help noticing that Joe Papp had hired a woman and a group of three men that included an openly gay man, an African American, and two Jews. Was that intentional?
"Not at all," says Papp. "But that's a pretty good range, don't ya think? I could have gotten three other people. There are three or four other people around like that, maybe, not more. It just so happened these were the people at the time I decided I needed a new infrastructure here."
Many people in the theater suspect, though, that there is a more urgent reason behind the restructuring of the Public Theater than simply Papp's getting inspired to remold the Shakespeare Festival's image after the closing of A Chorus Line. For years Papp's health has been a subject of discussion in theater circles -- not out of sensationalism or morbid curiosity (well, not just out of morbid curiosity) but out of a concern for his well-being and for his theater, exacerbated by the fact that has refrained from acknowledging it in any way.
Talking about people's health in print is something of a taboo. AIDS has made things worse because the issues are so loaded. People legitimately fear that if their illness is made public, they'll lose jobs; theater is such a freelance world that it's easy for employers to say, "Let's not hire him -- what if he gets sick?" When someone really high-powered is sick, though, contingency plans do need to be considered. A lot of Broadway deal-making screeched to a halt a few years ago when Bernie Jacobs, the wily, saturnine head of the Shubert Organization, suffered a distressing mental breakdown. The Shakespeare Festival had to deal with numerous crises over AIDS casualties from Wilford Leach, who for several years played a big part in developing musicals for the Public, to Chorus Line mastermind Michael Bennett to the Ridiculous Theater's Charles Ludlam, who was just about to direct his first Shakespeare for Papp. Then there's simply the issue of human compassion. The saddest thing about Ethyl Eichelberger's shocking suicide was that, because he chose to keep his illness secret, many people who loved him dearly didn't get a chance to let him know.
At least among themselves, people on his staff refer quite matter-of- factly to Papp's serious illness. "There was a scare several years ago, when everyone got freaked out," says a longtime employee. "This was never discussed, but for a while there was the sense that doing the whole Shakespeare roster was his way of ending it, of putting a bookend on it. He never discussed having cancer with his staff. It has nothing to do with worrying about raising money for the theater. It's about mortality. It makes him vulnerable in a way he doesn't want to be vulnerable. It was interesting to see the way he handled The Normal Heart, because he's always hated plays about illness. He doesn't want 'poor Joe,' that sympathy you have toward the ill."
When I brought up the subject of his health and its influence on the changes at the Public, Papp would only indicate...well, this is the way the conversation went:
"The effort is not a new effort, and it's not based on my demise. I don't think I'm gonna die tomorrow."
Everybody wants to know, though, what is the story with your health?
"You see me here."
Yes, but I also understand that you have cancer and that there have been times in recent years when you've been very ill.
"No, I've never been ill. I've never been very ill at all. [Slight pause] I've had certain things I had to attend to, but I'm not very ill, and my life is not at stake."
Having had "certain things I had to attend to" may well have contributed to making an older, wiser, more forward-looking Joe Papp. In any case, the reorganization at the Public seems like a noble effort on Papp's part to cure himself of some bad habits as a producer. He's been known to be heavy-handed and interfering at times, which he cheerfully admits. "I see directors' work sometimes, and I know they're going the wrong way. In the old days I used to come in and take the play away, fire the director. What you do is antagonize the cast. You undermine their confidence. You'll never win. So now I let well enough alone and make suggestions only down the road before opening the play."
He may not be as blatant as he used to be in firing directors, but he finds other ways to annoy artists. Last spring he had discussions with Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, about directing Denzel Washington in Richard III. Falls would have been an excellent choice, young, tuned into pop culture (in a smart way), but after his first meeting with Washington, shortly after the actor won his Oscar, the star told Papp, "This is my first Shakespeare. I need an English director." Exit Falls, enter Stratford veteran Robin Phillips. "I was naive," says Falls. "I thought Joe was calling the shots but it turned out he'd given Denzel director approval." For the record, Papp denies this account; both he and Falls say they're still eager to work together.
In recent years Papp's favorite way of dealing with productions he doesn't like (read: shows that got bad reviews) is cutting short their runs, as David Schweizer found out as the director of Marlane Meyer's Kingfish. That play opened last December and was expected to run through January 21; after the mixed-to-negative reviews came out, Papp decided to close the show New Year's Eve, as though it were a Broadway show that'd flopped. Sure, he had gambled and lost huge sums of money on Romance in Hard Times and Up Against It. But who can blame the artists for feeling like they suffered for someone else's mistakes?
Especially when you've had as long and loving a relationship as Papp has had with Elizabeth Swados. Last spring he held off reviews of Swados's Jonah until two days before the show was supposed to close. When the Times gave it a good review, Papp told Swados he'd extend the show; later the same day he changed his mind. I happened to see Swados the day after Jonah closed, and she was not a happy camper. It reminded me of the time I ran into Wally Shawn on the street. Papp had just decided not to produce the musical he had commissioned from Shawn and his composer brother Allen, a weird, sexually explicit, but fascinating show called The Music Teacher. "He's alienated every other playwright in town," said Shawn in that piping, fun-to-imitate voice of his, "and now he's alienated me!"
Of course, that was before Papp produced Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon (twice, with an English and then an American cast). Shawn will return to the Public this fall to perform a monologue he has written about his recent visits to Nicaragua. And he'll probably have other plays done at the Public. Same goes for Swados.
For this new structure to work, Papp will really have to change. And is change really possible?
"I'm moving toward institutionalizing in a more complicated way something that was really the personal idea of an individual -- that's me," says Papp. "I make all the major decisions as to what plays we do, what directors we hire. We agree on casting with the directors, but I'm at the center of it. Can't help that. It's the way it is.
"The press has been a little confusing," he continues. "JoAnne is not taking over the New York Shakespeare Festival. As long as I'm here, there's only one boss. But she is becoming involved in the festival, and she's being -- what's the word? Not shaped..."
Groomed?
"Groomed. Terrible word to use for her. I'd never ride that horse! Even though she works with an artistic group, with Mabou Mines, she's always been a lone wolf. She doesn't know how to run an institution yet. I told JoAnne, 'You're gonna have to help me, see. This is in my blood. I built this from the ground up.' I said, 'My whole desire is to prime you for the time when you can begin to run the institution.'"
What does that mean, concretely? Akalaitis has already been set to direct Henry IV Parts I and 2 in repertory (beginning January 22), but aside from that, what future role will she have in selecting plays she doesn't direct? "The kind of plays we do will begin to have a subtle change. It will not happen in one year. It'll take a few years. I'm doing a new play by Caryl Churchill on Romania [Mad Forest], we're doing this thing on censorship [Indecent Materials] -- we'll always have plays of this type. I want to do David Hare's new play, but he doesn't want to bring it to New York because of Frank Rich. Too bad, because he's one of the best. I'm building a relationship with John Patrick Shanley; I probably will do his new play. I like those writers. That's not exactly JoAnne's taste. So I think the line will begin to alter.
"I said to her, 'Everything is negotiable that you want to do.' She mentioned a certain director she wanted to direct this play. I won't mention his name, but I would never hire him again because he walked out on a show. I'll mention his name, I don't give a damn, Woody Woodruff." (Just before the opening of Sam Shepard's True West in 1980, Robert Woodruff resigned and Papp took over as director, which caused Shepard to issue a statement denouncing Papp and the production, sight unseen. Ouch!) "If I had my choice, I would say no. But I said, 'If you like him, I'll put no obstructions.' I could have said absolutely not. She's interested in the new play by Squat Theater. I could have said, 'They shit onstage, I don't want them, I don't want any shit on the stage.'" (Squat has done all kinds of wild things onstage, but defecation isn't one of them.) "If I can say Squat Theater's negotiable, that's giving her quite an opportunity."
Interviewing Papp is a trip. He likes to perform, and even if he's looking at you across his Great Man Desk, sometimes his eyes stray away, as if he's playing to the balcony. He doesn't suffer fools gladly; his eyes glaze over, and his tone of voice can freeze water. But he loves to laugh, and he can be surprisingly vulnerable and nervous at times. Nervous about what? Approval, of course. That's easy to forget, when a titan of industry has as many awards, hit shows, honors, and glories as Papp has had. He's given his whole life to his theater and his artists, and he never feel sufficiently appreciated. He just wants to be loved -- is that so wrong?
He's also hilariously forgetful. Sometimes conversing with him is like playing Password. Listing the actors he has a "very strong personal relationship" with, he mentions Kevin Kline, Bill Hurt, and "uh, the guy who played Coriolanus..." Christopher Walken? "Chris Walken, gorgeous actor!" Discussing his newfound interest in Restoration comedy, he says he was inspired by seeing The Way of the World in London, starring "Olivier's wife, what's her name..." Joan Plowright? "Joan Plowright! I've known her for years." Comparing JoAnne Akalaitis to another figure whose leadership was based on artistic rather than administrative skills, he says, "She gonna have to be protected by other forces around her, like what's his name, the choreographer...not Baryshnikov, the guy who died...the older man, the Russian..." Balanchine? "Balanchine had nothing to do with raising the money. He was a pure artist."
Hmm, Balanchine. What a fascinating model for Papp to conjure in relation to JoAnne Akalaitis. With the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein built around Balanchine an organization that catered not to the lowest common denominator but to the highest aspirations of the art form, on the assumption that the best work will not only find the audience it deserves but be sustained by that audience. Does Papp have the same faith in Akalaitis?
"The thing that was most meaningful to me in relation to the continuation of this institution, is that I wanted to make certain there's someone in command who has an unmovable point of view about society," he explains. "When I say unmovable, I mean that she is a radical. Aesthetically she's radical. Even though everything she does has a political cast to it, she's fundamentally not an ideologue. That gives me great security, thinking of the future of the theater.
"Also her interest in classics is very important," he says, "not because of 'the great wonders of the past,' but to me that gives a richness to a theater. And she's an older person. She's in her fifties. She has a certain obsession with the theater, which guarantees the energy that it takes to run the theater. I said, 'Don't you want to go to Broadway?' She said, 'No, I don't. I just love the theater.' She said it with such wonderment and such truthfulness that I almost cried."
In the hierarchy of the New York Shakespeare Festival, few people have ever had the opportunity of being number two, never mind future leader. There was a time, long ago, when Gerald Freedman held the title of artistic director, and for a while Stuart Vaughan directed for Papp so regularly that he was considered a de facto second-in- command. But most observers, including those who work for him, assumed that Papp would have to be dead and buried before discussion of his successor could take place in public.
"For the last eight or 10 years, there's always been talk about who would be there after him," says Morgan Jenness, who worked in the play department from 1982 to 1988 and remains an unofficial ear-to-the-street for Papp. "Des McAnuff [artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse] was the scuttlebutt at one point, and for a while Max Stafford-Clark [artistic director of the Royal Court in London] was being bandied about. But Joe was very closed about it. Words like successor and heir apparent were never used; it was more like future involvement and artistic associate."
The one person who came closest to being proclaimed next-in-line was Wilford Leach. Though hardly the most creative or dynamic director who ever worked at the Public Theater, Leach did a good job with Wally Shawn's Marie and Bruce and Galt McDermot's musical The Human Comedy, and he executed a number of high-profile, high-concept productions such as Meryl Streep and Raul Julia in Taming of the Shrew, the all-black Mother Courage adapted by Ntozake Shange, and Linda Ronstadt's operatic debut in La Boheme. Most important he successfully staged Papp's biggest post-Chorus Line moneymakers, Pirates and Drood, first in Central Park and then on Broadway.
Understandably, then, Leach's untimely death from AIDS in 1988 at the age of 59 came as a severe blow to Papp. "Joe loved him so much," says a Public Theater staffer. "In our Christmas cards a few years ago, Joe enclosed this poem he'd written called 'To Wilford Leach.' I don't know how to describe it. It was an amazingly sentimental, rather maudlin eulogy in which he said, 'The sun has gone back in...How could you have left us?,,,My heart cries out for you.' It was so startling, when I read it I just put it back in the envelope and put it in my desk."
Papp confirms that Leach "would have been the next person. He was an extraordinary director and a great person, great man. I loved that man." And he admits that he's been actively seeking a successor for the last five years. "I'm 69 years of age. You can't run a theater forever. I began to think about this really seriously when I turned 50. How does this continue? Or does it continue? We're negotiating now a lease with the city which may go up to 99 years. Why should I care what's gonna happen 99 years from now? But I do. It isn't that I want to extend myself. If I'm dead" -- if I'm dead in 99 years? -- "I'm dead, I'm gone. You know how much effort it takes to create an institution in this city, a theater that has any longevity? It's too valuable."
When he gets going, Papp reminds me of the late critic and man of the theater, Harold Clurman, who could turn a cocktail party, a rehearsal, a lobby at intermission into an occasion for oratory -- long-winded, maybe, but always passionate. It's a muggy, overcast Friday afternoon, and Papp is overdressed in a tan summer suit and tie because he has a meeting later with an NEA site reporter to discuss his grant application for next season, "a grant I'll probably have to turn down anyway." He's an impy guy; he likes to tease. In order to avoid giving his spiel twice in one day, he had originally invited me to sit in on his meeting with the NEA person: "I told her you were a very sensitive guy. [Beat] I lied." Trying to reschedule, I asked him if the weekend was sacred. "I'm Jewish!" he replied. (Oh, really?) "So that takes up one day. Sunday I'm going to a wedding, and then I have a meeting with a famous novelist who shall remain nameless." Without a pause, he continues, "Okay, I'll give you a hint. Who's the most famous Latin American novelist?" Thinking politics, I guess Vargas Llosa. "Close. Who's one of the two most famous Latin American novelists?" Marquez. "Very, very close. [Stage whisper] That's it!"
Another thing you can never forget about Joe Papp: he's still as starstruck as a little kid. When he started seriously seeking a successor, Papp claims, "I wasn't looking for a star particularly. But I wanted someone who was well-recognized, who first of all would be an artist but also had the administrative and organizational sense to operate a theater of this scale." The first person he asked was Mike Nichols, who directed the legendary 1976 production of David Rabe's Streamers for Papp, as well as E.L. Doctorow's 1978 Drinks Before Dinner; he turned it down. Next Papp approached Jerry Zaks, who staged the brilliant production of Christopher Durang's The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Public in 1985 and later Larry Shue's 1988 Wenceslas Square. He said no, as did James Lapine, who has directed A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale for the Shakespeare Festival, as well as his own play, Twelve Dreams. Papp even tried to get Zaks and Lapine to work together. "Both of them were extremely interested but couldn't commit," he says. "You know, you have to really want a theater. They didn't." Nonetheless, both directors will maintain a relationship with the Shakespeare Festival; Zaks will direct As You Like It in the marathon, and Lapine The Merry Wives of Windsor.
I ask why Papp hadn't considered people who have experience running theaters of their own: McAnuff, for one, or Robyn Goodman and Carole Rothman of the Second Stage, or Hartford Stage Company's Mark Lamos.
"I was looking really for someone who hasn't had that experience, someone fresh and individual that I know and have worked with. With all due respect to everybody else, I can't think of anybody that could measure up to [Akalaitis] outside of [Nichols, Zaks, and Lapine]. Even compared to those guys, she has that original mind. They do some excellent work in a very clear-cut vein, but I like some of the imperfection of her work. There's a certain roughness to it. It's risky."
Is Papp willing to share the risk inherent in Akalaitis's work over the long haul? Or will the whole deal be off after the first round of bad reviews? It's not a question he enjoys hearing. It makes him nervous.
"A lot of these critics hate her. I know that now," he mutters with a grim, I'm-a-big-boy-I-can-take-it bravado. "I don't have to wait for her reviews."
(to be continued)
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