Impresarios: Public Papa

"There are public libraries," says Joseph Papp. "Why not public theaters?" One of the most creative producer-directors of the American stage, Papp has done his best to make good drama as accessible to New Yorkers as a good book.

This week Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival begins its twelfth three-month season in Central Park, where the top price in the 2,300-seat Delacorte Theater is—nothing. Next month Papp-trained Mobile Theaters will be taking free productions of Hamlet, with an all-black cast, and a children's musical based on The Pied Piper to New York's slums. In a partially refurbished 117-year-old building that once housed the Astor Library, Papp is completing a successful first season of contemporary plays at the Public Theater, where tickets are only $2.50. This month he opened an experimental theater where budding playwrights can see their work in progress. Next year the complex will also include a 150-seat theater-in-the-round for coffeehouse productions on week nights and children's plays on weekends.

No Menu Theater. The Papp who is papa of all this theatrical enterprise was born Joseph Papirofsky 47 years ago in the tough Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where his father was a trunkmaker from Poland and his mother a seamstress from Lithuania. After high school and some 20 miscellaneous jobs, including short-order cook and sheet-metal worker, he served a four-year hitch in the Navy and used the G.I. bill to join the Actors Laboratory Theater in Hollywood. In 1954, back in Manhattan as stage manager for CBS-TV, Papp organized an unsalaried Shakespeare workshop in the basement Sunday-school room of a church on the Lower East Side.

Slowly he moved his free Shakespeare uptown, expanding his company's scope with whatever funds he could beg from foundations and individuals. In 1962 the city chipped in $250,000 and George T. Delacorte Jr., chairman of the board of Dell Publishing, gave $150,000 to build the open-air theater in Central Park. Conversion of the Astor Library into the Public Theater will ultimately cost $3,000,000, of which Papp has raised only $1,000,000 so far. The annual budget of Papp's company is $1,300,000.

The idea for the Public Theater began with Papp's feeling that, while Shakespeare speaks to modern man, he wanted also to stage contemporary plays dealing with contemporary themes. "I wanted a theater," he explains, "that was doubting, questioning, grey not pink, that took on a social character. The world is dark, and I felt a need for works that would reflect that mood. I did not want another menu theater—a little of this, a little of that—like our regional and repertory companies."

The plays Papp chose for his first season suited his grey color scheme very well, at least as he characterizes them. Papp directed a freewheeling modernization of Hamlet, which he says is about alienation and the question of existence, and Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel's The Memorandum, a satire on the evils of selling out and compromise. The Public Theater's artistic director, Gerald Freedman, staged the rock musical Hair, which to Papp is "about loneliness," and Jakov Lind's Ergo, which dealt with guilt for the horrors of World War II.