Joe Papp: Populist and Imperialist

BY my plays ye shall know me," says Joseph Papp. He has never written a play but he has given life to many, and as an innovative impresario he exerts enormous influence. Each of the works produced in the Downtown Manhattan beehive called the Public Theater bears the Papp stamp. "That's my job," he says. "Oh, yes, that's my job! I'm very good at saving plays, you know." Some would add, at saving the American stage. He himself observes with characteristic modesty: "I am the most important producer on Broadway, off-Broadway--in the U.S."

His ambition is, if possible, even bigger than his ego, and he is now talking about taking theater--his kind of rough, tough, he-man theater--to national audiences, even those that think that Manhattan is an island halfway between Sodom and Gomorrah. Beyond that, there is of course TV, and if Papp has his way, the ether will soon be saturated with drama in the Papp manner. A greasepaint Napoleon, he encompasses the theatrical world. As he opens New York City's 16th annual Shakespeare Festival in Central Park this week with a production of Hamlet starring Stacy Keach, congratulations--even self-congratulations--are indeed in order.

In a year when Broadway has been suffering from an acute attack of the blahs, Papp's Public Theater has aroused and moved audiences with such plays as David Rabe's Sticks and Bones, Jason Miller's That Championship Season and Richard Wesley's The Black Terror. In a season when even the tune seems to have gone out of other musicals, Papp's Two Gentlemen of Verona, a high-spirited rock romp, has been a huge success. A kind of joke among his more profit-conscious colleagues a few years ago, Papp now has one of the hottest tickets in town in Two Gents. To multiply his injury to Broadway's pride, this year his plays monopolized the major theater prizes, taking assorted Tonys and New York Drama Critics Awards.

Stupid Question. Most of all, at a time when the American playwright seems to be an endangered species, Papp is discovering that the authors are in fact there, but that eager, adventurous producers are not. "There are more new plays worthy of production than can be produced in the U.S.," he asserts. "I've got five theaters [in the downtown complex], and I don't have enough space to do the plays I could do in a season here." During this season he has been responsible for eleven new productions; because of his reputation, he is receiving 40 to 50 fresh scripts a week.

"The work he's doing--the nurturing of playwrights--is enormous," says Donald Schoenbaum, managing director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. "His combination of brilliance and gall is untouchable." Both No Place to Be Somebody, Charles Gordone's Pulitzer-prizewinning play about blacks, and Championship Season were turned down by half a dozen other producers before they reached Papp. The original version of Hair was also his. Is the theater dying? Papp snorts at such a stupid question. "You accept the fact that you're alive. I accept the fact that theater exists."

Unlike Britain's National Theater, which under Laurence Olivier has become an actors' company, or the Royal Shakespeare Company, which under Peter Hall became a directors' company, Papp's Public Theater is first of all a writers' company. "Actors' theaters are dead theaters," he says, "and good directing is never visible. Any theater to be alive has to be a writers' theater." Nor, like some Continental companies, is the Public Theater guided by one principle or aesthetic. Its single commitment is to drama, and its only hallmark is openness and diversity. It occasionally encourages writers who would be better off doing something else, like pumping gas, but its commitment to good drama is unmistakable.

Papp is pre-eminently a cultural populist who, despite his affection for serious, cerebral works, sometimes sounds like a Brooklyn-accented Spiro Agnew. Part of the problem with some community theaters, he claims, is that the "sissies"--the elite and the overeducated--are identified with them; his own education stopped with high school. "Most people in this country associate the arts with the effete," he claims, "and most theater is so pallid now. Actually the theater is a very powerful, masculine kind of thing." The one common characteristic of all of the plays that Papp produces--including a few that are just plain awful--is a kind of animal energy and movement. Miller's Championship Season, for example, moves so fast that though it sometimes pants from exhaustion, it never bores. While Two Gentlemen of Verona received a few negative reviews with the raves, including one from TIME'S T.E. Kalem, it does have an undeniable vitality.

This energy is often reciprocated by audiences, particularly those that turn out to see the troupes that the Shakespeare Festival sends out every summer to perform on flat-bed trucks in the outlying parts of New York City. "You get a sense of street-level energy from them," Papp says. "It's strong. It's exhilarating. Sometimes it can even be damaging when it begins to push the play out. But boy, what a fantastic energy it is! And we have to match that life energy with theater energy. Shakespeare can do that. You can more easily reach a working-class audience with Shakespeare than you can with contemporary plays." Papp reveres Shakespeare, and he is prone to such embarrassing statements as "Knowing Shakespeare as I do," and "I know him very well; I know the man, if I may say that."

Shakespeare provided not only Papp's personal lodestone, but the beginning of the Public Theater, which he started in 1953 in a Presbyterian church on East Sixth Street as the Shakespeare Workshop. "It was hard enough to imagine we could get any audience for Shakespeare down there at all," says Bernard Gersten, Papp's second in command, "let alone charge money for it. Romeo and Juliet? Theater? What's that?" he asks with an illustrative shrug of the shoulders. "At least we could get people in with the word 'free.' " The original budget: $750. What was at first necessity, a free show, became an idee fixe to Papp, and he became convinced that his theater should be as accessible as books in the library. In 1957 the first outdoor performances were given in Central Park.

Free Shakespeare was never anything less than a struggle. Besides the usual problem of financing, Papp and his crew were beset by those, including New York's then parks commissioner, who were scandalized by the very idea of free theater. With surprising political skill and an iron will, both picked up on the streets of Brooklyn, Papp hung on, determined not only to use the park but to have the city pay part of the cost of production as well. Eventually he got his way, and in 1960 the city gave him $60,000--revenue from subway chewing gum machines. Crisis followed crisis, but in 1971 he persuaded the city to buy the former Astor Library, a beautiful piece of Italian Renaissance Victoriana that had been destined for the wrecker's ball, and lease it to him for $ 1 a year.

Though his operations will still run a projected deficit of about $2.5 million in the fiscal year starting this month (with revenues of $9,000,000 to $11 million), Papp seems on firmer ground than ever before. The principle of public subsidy has been firmly established, with a $350,000 contribution from the city, $200,000 from New York State and $100,000 from Washington. Beyond that, Two Gentlemen of Verona, which started as a four-week production in the park last summer, has become the biggest money earner on Broadway and its profits keep alive such worthy but unprofitable plays as Sticks and Bones, until they find an audience of their own.

To Papp, however, deficit is no more frightening a word than any other. What would make him nervous is surplus, a word that he is unlikely ever to hear. Deficits keep him running. Every time he falls further into the red, it seems, he announces an even more audacious program, generating enough money to pay the current debt while guaranteeing a still larger budget gap in the future. Far from disdaining money, he knows that it is only valuable when it is spent. "First Joe says, 'We'll do it,' " observes Gersten, "and after that, 'We'll see what we'll do next.' "

In fact, Papp leaves the impression that if he ever slowed down, he would stop altogether. Movement, fast movement, is as necessary for him as it is for his plays. A man of medium height, with only a few gray hairs to betray his age (51 last week), he walks so quickly that he is halfway down the street before those with him are out the door. There is no wasted motion, no nervousness, no visible temperament. For a Polish immigrant's son like Joe, proud of his plain taste and blunt speech, an artistic temperament is soft, alien to his ideals.

Aside from the occasional Cuban cigar he has bootlegged from Paris, he allows himself few luxuries. He and his third wife Peggy live with their two children in an eight-room, $240 a month, rent-controlled apartment on Broadway (upper Broadway, that is). For a man who describes himself as the most important producer in America, he pays himself a relatively small salary, something in excess of $25,000 a year--little more than petty cash for a David Merrick.

Where will Joe's movement carry him next? Having conquered New York, he wants to help take his kind of theater to the rest of the country. "There are maybe twelve or 14 theaters now which are really professional," he says, "and I want to induce them first of all to do new plays by American authors, instead of revivals of hoary classics and rehashes of Broadway, and then to tour those plays in their own areas." He wants Washington to establish what he calls a National Theater Services Agency to ladle out the money, about $15 million a year for openers, with $ 10 million from the Federal Government and the other $5,000,000 from private sources. "Eventually this would run to lots of money," he says, "but you'd be producing new playwrights and conserving the ones you have. Writers are an important national resource."

Bumptious Phase. His colleagues at some of the regional theaters are not entirely pleased with his notion and fear his imperialist instincts. "I think Joe is in a very bumptious phase," responds Zelda Fichandler, producing director of the Arena Stage in Washington. "He just wants to spread that which he creates around. He wants to cover more of God's green earth, and he needs green money to do it." She tartly adds: "It is only lately that he is in the new play department. He has done European things at the Public Theater."

Despite his commitment to live, national theater, Papp the populist sees an even bigger audience in television and is now dickering with CBS for four prime-time specials next season. "None of that boring Playhouse 90 look," of course. And a Papp special would certainly not be like educational TV, the lighting on which reminds him of "prisons or hospitals, as if there is something wrong with the color of the walls. I believe in keeping drama bright and popular, reaching lots of people. We've got all sorts of things in mind, and CBS is anxious to get us--anxious to get me in particular."

When he talks of future artistic empires, Papp sometimes sounds like Jay Gould, the robber baron, sometimes like Serge Diaghilev, the great impresario of ballet. When he discusses TV, however, he sounds more like the prophet Isaiah, with a vision of glory in his eye. "Eventually," he says, talking about his specials, "it will be essential to do 50 a year, 50 a month. Just by the sheer doing of it--and having it come directly out of live theater--we'll be setting up a whole cultural movement."

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