A public life Essay Example For Students

A public life Essay Joseph Papp was the most powerful and  infuential man in the American theatre, dominating his world through the force of his own dazzling paradoxical personality. For him, there was no contradiction in the diverse roles he chose to play. An idealist had to be a pragmatist, for how else would he able to bring his ideals into practice? It was natural that Papp, the preeminent figure in the nonprofit theatre, should become the producer of the longest running Broadway musical of all time. More than anyone, he was the bridge between those two traditionally anthithetical camps, the institutional and the commercial theatre and proved that for continuing coexistence one had to nature the other. Appropriately, Papps funeral was held in one of his theatres. Mournes spoke of him as a friend, father figure, mentor and boss, as a man of principle who never shied from confrontation. After his death, some of the artists who owed their entire careers (or at least the advent of their careers) to him lined up to carp at the fact that he had not given them the theatrical equivalent of academic tenure. Amid all the tributes, there were pockets of criticism, including what may have been the first instance of a paid obituary notice that was less than fully celebratory of the deceased. The Dramatists Guild said that with the death of Papp, its playwright members had sustained a grave loss, then added, in equivocation, He was impulsive, mercurial and grandiose, but he was a generous and loving promoter of our plays wherever he found them. I think Papp would have smiled at that notice, at the critical but an especially at that misspelling. Papp was mercurial in the extreme. In what may have been an attemppt to articulate his philosophy of theatre, he once said, I can bend, backtrack, switch directions, do this or that, whatever is necessary in order to survive. My tactics, out of necessity, keep changing, but my direction has never changed: new plays, new audiences. His legacy endures in the plays and playwrights he introduced, in the actors whose careers he encouraged and in the commitment to theatre that was his hallmark. Fiercely partisan, he stood up for the principles he believed in and for the plays he produced. In his extraordinary career, he found himself on both sides of the firing line as sharpshooter and as target. A favorite role was as critic of the critics and as self-appointed ombudsman, badgering and even banning reviewers when he felt they had been negligent in their responsibility. He could be self-defensive and self-destructive. In pursuit of a populist theatre, he acted as a radical in art and in politics. For him, theatre was a necessity, an instrument of social as well as cultural enhancement. He invented free Shakespeare in the park, a concept that was imitated in cities around the country and he drew many of our finest actors to challenge themselves in classics. In so doing, he brought Shakespeare to generations of theatregoers, although he never did fulfill his goal of creating an American approach to Shakespeare. His career was filled with grand schemes: a black and Hispanic classical company, the Festival Latino, a repertory ensemble that would allow for name actors to perform plays for short seasons (one of several dreams that never reached fruition). In his last years, he began a cycle of the complete Shakespearean canon. In its first life, his company was an actors theatre devoted to the works of that one playwright. But at the Public Theater, the company became a playwrights theatre, as Papp discovered writers like David Rabe and Wallace Shawn, and adopted others like John Guare, David Henry Hwang and David Hare and gave them a continuing platform for their work. After a play failed, he would ask the playwright what play he wanted to do next and then he woudl produce it, sometimes without ample regard for the works artistic merit. Similarly, a directors failure would be followed by an opportunity for redemption with another production. Papp banked on the development of careers, and with encouragement often came artistic accomplishment. He was surrounded by controversy and criticism, for what he did and for what he chose not to do. Though the New York Shakespeare Festival was the major American theatre of its time, it never produced a play by Tennesse Williams or Arthur Miller. Other significant younger writers appeared irregularly; Papps encounter with Sam Shepard, for one, was disastrous. Many of our best women writers have never had a play produced at the Public. But the theatre did present controversial works by Caryl Churchill, Ntozake Shange and Elizabeth Swados, and the Public was Vaclav Havels home in exile. Papps critical blind spots could change with the seasons, and his choice of plays was not as exclusionary as it might have seemed. His eclcticism ran from Arthur Wing Pinero to Miguel Pinero. In his theatre as in his life, he was an ardent advocate for civil and human rights, and he supported his positions through the plays he produced. He championed theh role of minorities in the theatre, crosscasting plays before that policy was generally accepted. Even when there was an urgent need for money, he rejected grants on moral grounds, and he was the first to demonstrate for free speech and against eradicating theatrical landmarks. With his natural flamboyance, he became a highly visible and therefore vulnerable figure on the theatrical landscape. The actor side of Papp could play to the grandstands, media-dramatizing his case. In the most literal sense, he was an opportunist. When he was attacked, he attached back. When he was struck by a financial crisis, he would announce an expansion. Defeat was not a word in his vocabulary. He was never at loss for ammunition; his mouth was his most effective weapon, turning failure into a psychological victory. Despite his eminence, he regarded himself as an underdog, and during his brief foray onto Broadway with a season of new plays, he boasted of his playwrights as renegades. Ironically, he became an insider, a producer who could have transformed Broadway, had he chosen to do so. He learned to use himself as a selling point, and became his own best spokesman and fund-raiser. Papps portrait, looking like a Tammany politician, would appear in advertisements for his theatre. In one daring performance venture, he did a one-man cabaret show, singing Depression songs like Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and directly confronting his disarmed critics. As always, Papp sang and danced to his own tune. Informally and never for attribution, his people referred to him as the Godfather, a title that was not necessarily intended to be pejorative. Rewarding the faithful, punishing the faithless and the cowardly, shunning at least for a time dissidents, he was responsible for everything, including art, that emerged on stage at the Shakespeare Festival. In terms of his personal decision-making, he was not so far removed from the old Hollywood studio chiefs. Just as a self-perpetuating tycoon selected and cast movies according to his wishes, Papp decided what he wanted to do and when he wanted to do it and when he had to cut his losses. As a working director and playwright manque he could step in and assume control of an individual project. He would have preferred to write his own reviews. Where the Hollywood moguls were entrerpeneurs and, for the most part, not distinguished in matters of taste, Papp was a man of artistic sensibility and social conscience. He was shrewd, strong-willed and singleminded. He could also be sentimental. One never knew what he might do next: a cutting-edge experiment by Mabou Mines or a revival of a nostalgic Broadway comedy (Cafe Crown). He might close a show before it opened, fire a director and take over the staging, or extend the run of a play in the face of negative notices. Once had suddenly, closed a play on opening night, before my favorable review was printed in the next days newspaper. He agonized before taking over the theatre at Lincoln Center, and then when his work was on an upswing (matching innovative directors with classics), he surrendered his position and, in typical fashion, made it sound like a positive step. Papps mood was a variable as the weather in Central Park. A clear sky could rumble into a storm, but, as in the park, the performance continued. To him, theatre was not a business. He was a patron of the arts. There was always a double meaning in his concept of free Shakespeare. It was his conviction that theatre should be as public as libraries. One should be able to check out a production, as, in his youth, he could check out a book from the library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At the same time, he wanted to liberate Shakespeare from textbook traditionalists and elocutionary Englishmen. Papp was not a theatrical visionary like Stanislavsky or Grotowski. His theatre was not influential in the sense of the Comedie Francaise, the Moscow Art of the Berliner Ensemble. He created no new acting style, and, in the long run, the plays he produced could not be considered a body of work. However, as an institution, the Shakespeare Festival was our most important theatre. It preceded the burgeoning of the regional theatre movement, which brought about the decentralization, fragmentation and enrichment of the American theatre. As the New York equivalent of a regional company, the Shakespeare festival presaged the rise in New York of other, similarly intentioned organizations, inlcuding the Manhattan Theatre Club, Circle Repertory Company and Playwrights Horizons. When Papp was on top of several spheres, having spread his producing wings to encompass Broadway and Lincoln Center as well as Off Broadway and Central Park, I wrote, Without him, there would be a vast emptiness in the American theatre, and posed the question, Who would do all those plays, fill all those stages, employ all those actors? With Papps death, one suddenly realized how many evenings, how many hours had been spent in his theatres how much, in fact, he had determined the very course of theatre in his lifetime. Mel Gussow is a theatre critic for the New York Times. This article is based on material from a forthcoming book on Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. What Gives My Life Meaning EssayTHOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE   The day i walked into joseph papps office last March, he was talking David Greenspan out of directing Congreves The Way of the World with an all-male cast. When JoAnne Akalaitis phoned to intercede on Greenspans behalf, the cantankerous Papp upbraided her, declaring, Im not some sort of far-out pseudo-liberal! That exclamation might come as a surprise to those who know Papp and his causes how he has fought tirelessly for the inclusion of minorities in theatre, battled Jesse Helms in the National Endowment for the Arts controversy, and would have actively protested the Persian Gulf War had his health been better. But Papp had been going through a period of intense self-examination: He was trying to pass on his knowledge of the theatre to Akalaitis, and thus was having to think about things he had previously done on instinct. What seemed to emerge were a number of precepts that suggested Papp the Producer had quite a different set of ideals from Papp the Liberal. Q: This season you gave each of your associate directors including Greenspan a theatre with the understanding that theyd have artistic freedom in using it. Are you reneging on that? A: If I see us headed for disaster, Im going to stop it. I have a responsibility. I am an anti-censorship person, but Im also in the position in which Im saying, No, you cant do this. The New York Shakespeare Festival is an institution, not just a couple of guys and girls Off Broadway doing a show. . . .You have to be conscious of the fact that you have a $14-million-a-year operation that weve cut down to $12 million. Once I say to somebody, This is your theatre, its a relative statement. We finance it, but Im not a corporation or a foundation. Im an artistic person, so there are aesthetics in this institution. Its a delicate balance. Only someone of my experience can possibly walk that kind of tightrope. You dont practive democracy in the theatre. In arranging the New York Shakespeare Festival so it can eventually go on without you, why did you choose JoAnne Akalaitis? We have different aesthetics in a certain sense, but in terms of the way we look at life, were pretty close. I didnt want to get a duplicate of me. But I wanted somebody interesting, provocative and somebody who loves theatre. She has a single agenda: the theatre. You referred to your painful cutbacks. How worried are you about the future of the festival? Im worried, but I feel strong because of the artistic changes that are taking place. Ill lose some and gain some, but my gains will be better because they have a cutting edge on them. The directors are anything but conventional. There are at least 10 others I couldve chosen. I didnt make a mistake with any of them. Im extremely happy. You once said that if the New York Shakespeare Festival ever went down, youd rather have it die with a bang than a whimper. Now Im in a totally different frame of mind. I dont want to see this place to go down on any kind of scale. There would be a huge gap withou this institution. Have you always been a fighter? Ive been this way all of my life. I dont know if youd call that a fighter. I just hold onto things. I dont like to be pushed around, particularly on fundamental issues that affect our democratic system. Sometimes over the past few years, your role as a spokesman for various causes seemed to eclipse your life as a theatre producer. I was finding it more interesting to fight for freedom of expression than to put on plays. It was a more direct way of dealing with things. I spent months on the NEA situation because I was getting bored with the theatre. But I dont say that now. There have been many rumors about your health. Are they true? I dont know why people are so interested in somebodys health. I could say my health is nobodys business. But if Im dying, youll know it. Its not like Im some old king thats dying and making bum decisions. Nonetheless, do you ever feel any parallels with King Lear these days? No. He was crazy. Mymind has never been clearer.