Word: papp
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...