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The Joe Papp story, Part 2
For Part 1 of the Joe Papp story, scroll down to the previous post, or link here.
He also conquered Broadway again and again with hits such as “A Chorus Line,” “Sticks and Bones,” “That Championship Season,” “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “Pirates of Penzance.” (He also produced “Hair” first, but not later on Broadway.)
Papp typically nurtured playwrights early in their careers, saying “I want to produce all your plays,” then expected filial loyalty thereafter. Without him, the world might not know David Rabe, Wallace Shawn, Ntozake Shange, Larry Kramer, Miguel Piñero, Jason Miller and numerous other writers. With his wife and literary manager, Gail Marrifield Papp, the producer often adopted projects in their infancy, most famously Michael Bennett’s slow development of “A Chorus Line” out of group therapy-type sessions with New York dancers.
Turan doesn’t shy away from Papp’s disasters, such as his takeovers of Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center (he immediately alienated his Upper West Side subscribers) and Broadway’s Booth Theatre (he opened and closed his New American Playwrights series there with “The Leaf People,” an experimental play about indigenous Amazonians’ first contact with outsiders, performed in an invented language).
Turan details Papp’s frightening rift with playwright Sam Shepard over the Public’s production of “True West,” of which star Tommy Lee Jones says: “Of all the versions of that play that were done at that time, around New York and around the country, ours was distinguished by being the worst.” (Shepard, who refused to travel to New York during rehearsals, bears considerable blame.)
But there are also all the glorious, unexpected triumphs, like the poppy production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” despised by Savoyard purists, but adored by almost everyone else. The casting process that brought Linda Ronstadt, then at the top of the charts, and Rex Smith, dismissed as a teen idol, together with theatrical stalwarts like Kevin Kline and George Rose is as sensational as it is enchanting.
Papp’s two raging passions — Shakespeare and social justice — are never far from the page in “Free for All.” Almost single-handedly, he made Shakespeare available to the masses, even defying New York power broker Robert Moses to do so.
Hoping to mirror the city around him, Papp also introduced counterculture, black, Hispanic, female and gay artists to the public, whether they were creating a choreo-poem (“for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”); an intense prison drama employing ex-convicts as performers (“Short Eyes”) or incendiary tale crucial to the HIV-AIDS activism (“The Normal Heart”).
He could be a hectoring bully, who woke critics from their beds, shamed backers into donations and forced his tastes on audiences. Yet Papp left the theater a better place. Turan places Papp’s reputation on a higher plane.
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