THE IMPRESARIO PERUSES THE PENGUIN MERCHANT OF VENICE AT THE NEW DELACORTE THEATER IN JOE PAPP IN FIVE ACTS"A Gatsby-like American"It's not till a third of the way into this documentary that we get its greatest revelation. Everybody knew Joe Papp, the fiery New York theatrical producer and creator of Shakespeare in the Park (originally Mobile Shakespeare, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, in the Fifties) was a communist. Papp had been fired from CBS for taking the Fifth when called before HUAC. The New York planner and empire builder Robert Moses had waved around Papp's communism as part of his battle, ultimately lost, to make Papp charge admission for the city's free outdoor summer shows of the Bard. But when Joe Papp was putting on what was to be a magnificent production of
The Merchant of Venice with George C. Scott, the New York Board of Rabbis tried to block it by saying the play was "an anti-Semitic play." Joe Papp said, "I myself am a Jew, and I would never do anything that in my opinion would harm my people." It came out that his mother was not English as he had always said; she was Lithuanian, his father Polish, both immigrants, and he was originally named Yusuf Papirofsky. People who had known him for thirty years did not know this. Nobody around him had known the magnetic, sexy, patrician Joseph Papp was Jewish.
Joe Papp grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the Thirties, where life was tough. He recounts that he learned at twelve that striking the first blow in a fight gives one an immense psychological advantage. He says he'd never have learned about Shakespeare if the library had not been free. That's why he first took Shakespeare to poor parts of New York City like where he grew up and tickets were free, and he kept them free. This film uses a lot of old footage to recreate Papp's raucous urban roots and show the early days of the mobile Shakespeare when a truck with loudspeakers went through the streets to announce a play, and crowds mobbed the open arenas they set up, hanging on every word and having a great time. "It was very much like the original Elizabethan audience," Papp comments.
A variety of speakers, including Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Chris Walken, Martin Sheen, Roscoe Lee Brown, cultural historian Lawrence W. Levine, former associate Pubilc Theater producer Bernard Gersten, English playwright David Hare (a longtime collaborator with many memories to recount in the
Guardian), David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, and many others, describe Papp's charisma, his empathy, his pugnaciousness, his determination, his triumphs -- and his secrets. David Hare thinks he was "a Gatsby-like American," someone who burst upon the scene, "nobody knows anything about him." In the Depression when he grew up, his father was out of a job. Joe took any little job. He shined shoes. When he was refused jobs because he was a Jew he began denying it, and it became a lifelong habit to conceal his Jewishness. Hence the
Merchant of Venice revelation.
In the Sixties Papp began looking for a year-round stage and he found it on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan, the old Astor Library, vast ruined spaces that after World War II had been converted into a temporary resting place for homeless Jews, home of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Society. This became the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater. The first play was
Hair, which Papp got from somebody he met on a train, "pure serendipity," which put the enterprise on the map immediately. Martin Sheen calls the theater "a mecca for playwrights." And failures did not daunt Papp; they inspired him. Hare's
The Knife was brutally panned by Frank Rich, then the
New York Times drama critic, the play was finished, Papp read Hare the review, and just said, "So, David, what do you want to do in my theater next?" (Meaning it.) When things started to go well, he'd get bored. Some of his playwrights who speak or are spoken of are: the "Davids," David Mamet, David Hare, David Rabe; Liz Swados, Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe; and Larry Kramer, whose
The Normal Heart was a dramatic weapon in the battle to get recognition for the cause of men with AIDS.
Papp wanted to be "radical at the center" (Hare), and he moves plays from the Public Theater to Broadway and wins prizes with his musical version of
Two Gentlemen of Verona and David Rabe's
Sticks and Stones, one of which made $10,00 a week, the other lost that amount. Shange's
For Colored Girls becomes a Broadway hit.
And then came
A Chorus Line, Papp's experiment, Michael Bennett's play, one of Broadway's biggest hits. At this point in the film if you do not know, you realize Joseph Papp is not just an important New York producer but an American cultural icon.
The "Five Acts" that are introduced by Kevin Kline reciting the relevant passages from Shakespeare are I. A Kingdom for a Stage, II. Once More Into the Breach, III. What a Piece of Work Is Man?, IV. Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown, V. A Bright Exhalation in the Evening. These represent successively Papp's start; his fights; his triumphs; his ugly side (saving the film from falling into hagiography); and finally his too early demise, in 1991, at 70, of prostate cancer. It's an appropriate structure, not only classically dramatic, but also, like its subject, a small, natty, handsome man who smoked big cigars, at once tidy and expansive. And with this subject, as large as the Delacorte stage with seating for 2,500 that Joe Papp built in Central Park for the free Shakespeare in the summer, the film needs to muster a suitable wealth of drama and pizzazz, and it does. Every biopic must have its death at the end, and this one is extraordinarily moving, since Joe and his 29-year-old son Anthony, who was gay and developed AIDS, both learned in the same year that they were dying. Anthony died before his father. The film's final moments show Papp singing "Brother can you spare a dime?" He has a good voice, and it's an unexpected and resonant ending to a moving documentary biography.
The film was written, produced, and directed by Tracie Holder and Karen Thorsen. Good work was done by directors of photography Jem Cohen (of the surprise current art house hit
Museum Hours) and Toshiaki Ozawa. Credit is due also to Deborah Peretz, Brad Fuller, and Samuel D. Miller for the thoughtful editing.
Joe Papp in Five Acts, 82 mins., debuted at Tribeca 2012. Previewed at an October 2011
celebration marking 67 years of the Public Theater. Earlier in 2013 Included in Ashland and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festivals, screened as part of the latter for this review. Scheduled for showing on PBS/American Masters in 2013(?).
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