Word: papp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more promising young U.S. playwrights, David Rabe. In his drama of last season, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the taste of blood and the apprehension of imminent death gave the evening an elastic tension. His offering last week, Sticks and Bones, presented at Joseph Papp's Public Theater (TIME, Nov. 15), might be a sequel to Pavlo Hummel. The hero has returned from Viet Nam not dead but blind, a walking corpse in some perpetual nighttime of the soul. There is blood again, but it is a kind of insane red laughter gurgling in the throat...
...most famous of Papp's productions is Hair, which opened the first Public Theater season in 1967 and, having transferred to Broadway, is still running there and round the world. Papp has staged-or supervised the staging of -such far-out musicals as Blood and Stomp!, classics like Trelawny of the Wells, and a modern-dress rewrite of Hamlet. He also has a good record of finding new American playwrights, whom he regards as a vital natural resource. "I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays," he says. Charles Gordone became the first black playwright...
This is New York's Public Theater, which in four years has become something of a city landmark itself. In the raffish, energetic image of its founder-producer, Joseph Papp, the Public Theater has converted the interior of the Astor Library into five theaters, a cinématheque, a photographic workshop, scene shop and offices. It offers an impressively wide range of inexpensive (top ticket: $6) and provocative artistic fare: plays from Shakespeare to experimental new works, films, poetry readings, dance programs and concerts...
...want a theater that is doubting, questioning," says Papp. "We're not a newspaper. Don't waste your time in the theater if you leave without having something about you changed. Go roller-skating. Make love. But don't go to the theater...
Vaughan did not turn to academics out of desperation, for his career to date has been a milestone in the serious professional theatre life of this country. With Joseph Papp, he helped found the New York Shakespeare Festival in the fifties, thus creating the single good reason for staying in New York during the summer. The Festival's greatest triumph, the three-play repertory Wars of the Roses presented last summer (two parts Henry VI and one part Richard III ), was both adapted and directed by Vaughan. Between stints with the Festival, he helped organize the repertory company...