Word: papp
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Flaws v. Foreign. For next season, Papp has scheduled two plays by off-Broadway Negro Playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and has commissioned Negro Actor Ossie Davis and Composer Gait MacDermot to do a contemporary musical on the race question. "I also have," says Papp, "an adaptation of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. But what I'm really looking for is American plays. I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays...
...What Papp is also looking for is a new audience. "Next year, we're not going to sit back and let audiences find us, but go out and search for them. We want to find younger audiences-high school, college, young married couples-who are awake when they come into the theater, who come to the theater without overeating and overdrinking. Society needs youth and middle age mixed, and so does an audience...