Word: papp
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This may not be everyone's idea of how to spend a little under an hour in the theater, but for anyone who wants to seek out and comprehend the deepest wellsprings of drama, it is an hour well spent. Within the past two weeks, Joseph Papp's Public Theater, where The Grey Lady Cantata is housed, has offered playgoers: Subject to Fits (a free-form fantasy based on Dostoevsky's The Idiot), Slag (claustrophobic feminine hysteria in a decaying British girls' school) and Here Are Ladies (see below). The handsome landmark building on Lafayette Street...
...Joseph Papp is highly receptive to current issues; he believes that drama should involve itself intimately with subjects that stir, fascinate and disturb people. Out of this concern came the first off-Broadway production of Hair and of No Place to Be Somebody, the black play that won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama...
...surprisingly, Papp is the director and producer of the first musical related to the Women's Liberation movement, Mod Donna. A male playgoer is bound to approach a show like this with the trepidation of a little boy about to down a spoonful of cod-liver oil. He will be pleased to discover that Mod Donna is a bracing tonic...
...necessary to agree with the agitprop to discern in Playwright Lamb a deft lyricist with barbed wit and a no-nonsense lucidity about contemporary man-woman relationships. Papp moves an able cast around with fluent precision; as the other woman, April Shawhan is certainly one of the loveliest warriors who ever enlisted in the battle of the sexes...
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING, as adapted by Russell McGrath from the Vladimir Nabokov novel, is not much of a play-the characters are unreal, the tension is nonexistent, and the humor is heavy. However, Joseph Papp's Public Theater production is an elegant example of inventive staging, costuming and ensemble playing that all but makes up for the script...