Joseph Papirofsky, also known as Joe Papp, in 1982. (Photo via Wikimedia)
Remembering the life of celebrated theatrical director, Shakespeare in the Park-creator, and Williamsburg native, Joseph Papp
GEOFFREY COBB
Author, “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past”
gcobb91839@Aol.com
Shakespeare in the Park has become a New York City institution. Founded seventy-two years ago, this amazing theatrical event offers free presentations of the bards plays in Central Park’s legendary Delacorte Theater. This year’s season begins Tuesday June 9th with As You Like It, but this great free theater tradition would never have been born were it not for a poor Jewish boy from Williamsburg named Joseph Papp. An immigrant child who grew up in poverty, Papp’s life was changed by his exposure to theater, and he dedicated his life to creating theater accessible to all New Yorkers. Papp not only took Shakespeare to the schools and to the city streets, but he also brought to the attention of the public the work of many important black, Hispanic, and Asian American playwrights and actors and was among the first producers to use minority actors in major Shakespearean and other classic roles. Altogether, his plays garnered more than 20 Tony Awards.
Papp was born as Josef Yossil Papirofsky into a Yiddish speaking, Russian immigrant, Williamsburg family. Papp grew up during the Great Depression and also had to work many odd jobs during his early life, from shining shoes to shoveling snow to selling penny pretzels, to working nights at a laundry. The family was so poor that they often were unable to pay the rent and had move to new lodgings in the middle of the night several times a year. Papp was often the victim of bullies who repeatedly beat him up.
Papp’s fascination with English literature, and the theater, began at an early age. At Eastern District High School Papp had Miss McKay for English class, a woman who inspired him to love literature. Papp attributed his precision with language to the African American playwright Eulalie Spence, who taught him English at Eastern District. Papp wanted to study drama in college, but the family was destitute. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the U.S Navy and staged dramatic productions on board an aircraft carrier. After the war, Papp moved to Hollywood and joined the Actors’ Laboratory Theater, an experimental theater troupe, and studied acting and directing under the G.I. Bill of Rights. After two years, he became managing director of the lab, graduating in 1948. The lab, however, split apart because of political disputes: Many of his colleagues, he wrote, were members of the Communist Party.
He returned to New York and found work as a producer and director of off-off Broadway plays that were panned by reviewers who called them amateurish. Between 1952 and 1960, Papp worked as a television stage manager with CBS and also on Broadway. In 1958, Papp was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities for his alleged Communist affiliations. He refused to answer some of the questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, and CBS summarily fired him. He insisted on an arbitration hearing, and the network was forced to re-hire him. He changed his name from Papirofsky to Papp because, he said, Papirofsky was too long to fit on the television screen during the credits. In 1953, Papp organized the Elizabethan Workshop (later renamed as the Shakespeare Workshop), which was dedicated to giving actors classical training. He held rehearsals in a small basement meeting hall of a church, after convincing the pastor that it looked just like Shakespeare’s Globe Theater. The following year, he began staging free Shakespeare at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in the Lower East Side. To Papp, theater was always more than theater. “Theater is a social force,” he once said, “not just an entertainment.” His goal, he said, his guiding force, was to bring theater to the people and to “radicalize the environment.”
Papp was daring and willing to take risks that big money Broadway theaters were not. In 1956, Papp’s Shakespeare Workshop held its first outdoor performance at the East River Park Amphitheater. 2000 people came to watch the unpaid actors, on a budget of $250, perform “Julius Caesar.” Papp’s groundbreaking idea of free Shakespeare was becoming a reality. Rich donors supported Papp’s idea and Papp raised enough money to start his “Mobile Theater” performances. A stage mounted to a trailer tractor travelled to all five boroughs for a whole summer, before eventually breaking down in Central Park. Papp decided to leave it there and thus began the tradition of Shakespeare in the Park. Performances continued all over the city for three years during the summer, until Papp began to further court city officials for support for his newly established New York Shakespeare Festival.
In the mid 1960s, Papp decided to expand the Shakespeare Festival into a full-year repertory theater, setting up productions at dilapidated former Astor Place Library, which needed a huge infusion of cash. In 1969, faced with a daunting financial crisis, Papp pulled off a miracle: he convinced the city to buy the Public Theater from him for $2.6 million dollars, and then lease it back to the Public for $1 a year and Papp’s venture was miraculously saved.
In 1974, Papp took perhaps the biggest gamble of his career, and it paid off. At the behest of his donors, he spent almost $1.1 million developing a concept musical with director Michael Bennett called A Chorus Line. The ground-breaking musical was never Papp’s favorite, and he had serious reservations about the plot and ending, but it ended up being a Broadway sensation, running for fifteen years and becoming the longest-running Broadway musical ever up to that point. A Chorus Line paid back Papp’s initial investment over seventy-five times, making enough cash to establish a permanent endowment for the NYSF and the Public.
In April of 1987, Papp was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given six months to live. As a sort of a last hurrah, Papp began to produce the Shakespeare Marathon; The Public was going to stage all thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays. Papp passed away at the age of 70 on October 31st, 1991, in his home in Greenwich Village. Papp had staged more than 350 in the course of his 35-year-long career. Though he died almost three decades ago, the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park survive, the common people’s great legacy of this visionary man.
