‘BOUNDLESS COURAGE’ OF JOE PAPP
New doc heralds 60th ann’y of Shakespeare in the Park
He brought the Bard full circle — and back to the public.
On the the 60th anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a long-awaited documentary on the life of founder Joseph Papp chronicles how it came to be.
Premiering Friday at 9 p.m. on PBS, “American Masters: Joe Papp in Five Acts” plumbs the pioneering producer’s life through his own eyes — culled from voluminous archival footage — and the recollections of the artists he nurtured.
“He didn’t level the playing field. He destroyed it,” actor Martin Sheen, who counts Papp as one of his most influential mentors, told the Daily News.
Papp invented public theater as we know it in New York City — shaking off its elitist mothballs to attract everyone from highbrow to groundling — and stood up to McCarthyism by refusing to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He challenged actors to push past their self-imposed limits and upended classic plays with casting that would presage the likes of “Hamilton.”
He founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, now called Shakespeare in the Park, in 1954, with the aim of making Shakespeare’s works accessible to the public.
“We have public libraries,” Papp was famous for saying. “Why not public theaters?”
“He was radical at the center,” says playwright David Hare in the film.
Papp burst barriers between art and social justice, letting the art do the talking. His championing of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” drew international attention to the AIDS crisis, controversially criticizing New York City leaders who were doing nothing as gay men died. His insistence on taking Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide | when the rainbow is enuf” to Broadway in the 1970s brought Black women’s stories into the mainstream. The juggernaut “A Chorus Line,” which he produced, became the longest-running show in Broadway history, earning $38.8 million over the course of its 15-year Broadway run.
“His courage was boundless,” Sheen told The News. “He went into areas that were so unexplored and so verboten. He challenged every conceivable level of barrier in the theater, in society, in culture.” Sheen starred in numerous productions by Papp, including playing Romeo in “The Subject was Roses” in 1968. Having grown up poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Papp knew who the people were who needed to see these works. And he knew who had to portray the characters — the modern versions of the same people who would likely have played them in Elizathat bethan times.
For Sheen, meant everything from delivering Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in a Spanaccent ish to playing a gay man in the London Production of “The Normal Heart” at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Papp nurtured and championed numerous playwrights, even paying them salaries to workshop their creations.
“The theater was his pen,” Hare says, “and we were the ink.”
The documentary drives its own narrative forward via clips of Papp himself espousing his philosophy, with each “act” set up by Kevin Kline reciting lines from Shakespeare delivered in the Delacorte Theater. Excerpts from the productions through the decades are also woven in.
Filmmakers Karen Thorsen and Tracie Holder had 1,500 hours of film and video of archival footage going back to the 1950s to draw from, thanks to Papp’s insistence on documenting his life and work, Holder told The News.
Born in 1921, Papp started his theater career staging vaudeville sketches during downtime when he served in World War II. He enlisted Bob Fosse, then a private, who himself would go on to Broadway greatness.
Papp’s productions garnered 28 Tony Awards, 96 Off-Broadway Obie awards, 29 Drama Desk Awards, six New York Drama Critics Awards and three Pulitzer Prizes during his 40-year career, according to a PBS timeline. Inclusion and diversity were woven throughout his work in ways that still resonate.
“Papp didn’t separate his responsibility as a conscious member of society with his involvement in the theater,” Sheen said. “And he really managed to unite the two. He found a way to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. That’s a vital part of his legacy.”
In 1987, Papp was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the same year his son, Tony Papp, learned he was infected with HIV. The cancer took Joe’s life in 1991, when he was 70 — a few months after Tony Papp died of AIDS complications in the next room.
“I adored him,” Sheen told The News. “I can’t think of anyone in the theater who had a more profound influence on all of us. You left that experience and you took him with you wherever you went, and you always compared. And it was never as good, or as exciting, or as much fun.
“He gave you a stage and an opportunity to really explore and not hold anything back.”