For Joe Papp, the force behind bringing Shake-speare to the masses, all the world would have been his stage, had he had enough speed and energy to set up a platform and stretch a curtain around the globe. But it was enough that he was the genius behind Shakespeare in the Park and New York City’s Public Theater, which debuted such seminal works as ‘Hair,’ ‘A Chorus Line,’ ‘Short Eyes,’ ‘True West,’ and David Rabe’s loose trilogy of plays drawing on his experiences as an Army draftee in Vietnam. Now, more than 50 years after the Public was established in the East Village, readers can learn about the man behind the history in ‘Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public and the Greatest Story Ever Told,’ by Pacific Palisades author Kenneth Turan and Joe Papp. An invaluable source for theater professionals’producers, directors, writers and actors’the book is also a Horatio Alger saga of one man’s relentless mission to present Shakespeare to everyone free of charge. The story unfolds in a continuous collage of interviews Turan conducted over two years beginning in 1986. While he admits he has never been a theater person (Turan has been a film critic for the Los Angeles Times since 1991), his agent presented the idea to him. The project was all-consuming for Turan, who conducted 160 in-person interviews, some requiring frequent travel not only to New York from Los Angeles but also to the men and women’actors, directors, choreographers’who were scattered across the country. He moved to New York for six months, interviewed Tommy Lee Jones (who played in Sam Shephard’s ‘True West’) in the desert, and Jason Miller (‘That Championship Season’) in Scranton, Pennsylvania. With 10,000 pages of tape-recorded material, Turan wrote the first draft and gave it to Papp, with whom Turan shared a kinship despite a 20-year gap in their ages. (Both men grew up in Brooklyn in a Yiddish-speaking household.) And then the story became a drama unto itself. ‘A mercurial person under the best of circumstances, Joe was at A low point in his life,’ Turan recalls. ‘He had been diagnosed with the prostate cancer that would kill him three years later, and his son was dying of AIDS. He called me and said, ‘This book is over.’ ‘It was devastating. I put the draft in a box and there it stayed for the next 10 to 12 years.’ While Turan went on with his life and career, the book idea would not die. ‘I thought it was the best work I had done,’ Turan says, ‘so I wrote a letter to Gail Merrifield Papp and told her that I thought it was too important to be dead forever and could we get together to talk about the book.’ She not only agreed with Turan, but seemed to be on his wavelength and encouraged him to revive the project. After 18 years, he re-read the manuscript and saw how it could be envisioned. He sequestered himself at the MacDowell Colony in the New Hampshire woods, and set about shaping and cutting the book. ‘While I was there in my cabin, set among the trees,’ he recalls, ‘it was very disconcerting to be out among all those trees and I really went very deep into the material without distractions. I was really alone with the work and began to realize that my feelings had changed. It had been about me, but now I could see that this book was about these people’s testaments about Papp, and I started to feel an obligation to these people. This was valuable oral history.’ Not only is the reader privy to nascent careers of so many titans in the theatrical world’George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Tommy Lee Jones, Martin Sheen, Meryl Streep”but also to the nigh-mythical story surrounding Papp’s legacy. Here was this impoverished kid, son of Russian Jews, whose father made tin trunks and whose mother labored to keep a clean house and food on the table. It wasn’t until he was in the Navy that he could count on three meals a day. While not exactly an intellectual (and most likely the one goofing off in school), Papp nevertheless was fortunate to have seventh-grade teacher Miss McKay, who introduced him to Julius Caesar and his love of Shakespeare. ‘It sounded good,’ he says, ‘and it gave you something you could really chew on and learn.’ Daniel Petrie, who worked with the co-author when Papp was a floor manager at CBS’a job that would sustain his ambitious plans to launch free Shakespeare for all’characterized Papp’s love of Shakespeare as political. ‘He wanted to supply a place where ordinary people could go and experience it.’ Papp demonstrated his political activism as early as his high school years. He joined in demonstrations on Times Square on behalf of the poor who were evicted for past-due rent, raised money for the anti-Franco forces, and, after high school and working for a tough boss, went on strike on behalf of workers’ rights. All through his life, Papp fought for his goal with tenacity, fearlessness and conviction. ‘No’ didn’t compute for him. He prevailed against the powerful New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who was opposed to free Shakespeare in Central Park. He faced the House Un-American Activities Committee with his dignity intact. ‘Nobody was torturing me,’ he said. ‘It was just a matter of prison, possibly. I figured, that’s not the worst thing in the world. At least they pay for your room and board.’ Papp was unflinching in his fight to secure a permanent home for the Public Theater, which would provide a venue for contemporary work. His dealings with the developer were classic Papp. According to Papp, the guy, ‘Mr. Big,’ was all business, numb to Papp’s pleas to support public theater, alienated from his Jewishness, unmoved by the significance of the building, a designated landmark. Papp argued with him for more than an hour, until Mr. Big finally gave in. ”Look,’ I said, ‘you should be doing something for the city after all it’s done for you. It would be a disgrace if this building was torn down and we could not use it for this purpose.’ I was not going to leave that place without that building, I’ll tell you that. You get that determination.’ An apt title to be sure, ‘Free for All’ not only defined Papp’s lifelong passion, but also the rough and tumble life he lived to achieve his dream. ‘Theaters like that don’t happen because you get someone who’s going to be pleasing to you,’ producer Robert Whitehead surmised. ‘They happen out of a kind of vital, vigorous craziness which I knew Joe Papp had.’
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