- ISBN13: 9780767931687
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan takes you behind the scenes at the Public Theater and tells the amazing story of how Joe Papp made American theatrical and cultural history.
Free for All is the irresistible oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater-two institutions that under the inspired leadership of Joseph Papp have been a premier source of revolutionary and enduring American theater. To tell this fascinating story, Kenneth Turan interviewed some 160 luminaries-including George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, David Rabe, Jerry Stiller, Tommy Lee Jones, and Wallace Shawn-and masterfully weaves their voices into a dizzyingly rich tale of creativity, conflict, and achievement. And at the center of this incredibly engrossing account of artistic daring and excellence the larger-than-life figure of Joseph Papp reigns supreme.Amazon.com Review
Kenneth Turan Introduces Free for All
More than twenty-three years ago, I signed a contract with producer Joseph Papp to work on a definitive oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, the most significant not-for-profit theater group in the country. Joe had made theater in America both accessible and essential. He’d produced landmark plays like “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “That Championship Season,” “The Normal Heart,” and “Short Eyes,” plays that people had to pay attention to because they transcended their moment in time. Papp had been essential in starting the careers of actors like George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, Raul Julia, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones, and Martin Sheen. He was larger than life just by being himself.
A story like this, filled with alive, articulate, not to say theatrical people, turned out to be especially suited to the oral history format and, over the course of the next 18 months, I interviewed close to 160 people and turned out what I still consider the most significant and compelling work I’ve done in more than 40 years of journalism. The story of why something with so much to recommend it would take so many years to appear is in some ways as dramatic and surprising as the book itself.
Working with Joe on a project of this scope was enormously exciting, but I also from time to time feared that, as had happened with others he’d worked closely with, a rift would develop between us. And once he read the manuscript, that is what happened, with a vengeance. Disturbed and troubled, Joe refused to allow the book to be published.
Needless to say, this was devastating. The blow was so severe I had difficulty talking about what transpired for weeks, months, even years after it happened. Finally, perhaps a dozen years after the fact, I wrote a letter to Gail Merrifield Papp, Joe’s widow and collaborator and a woman whose clear vision and integrity I had always admired and respected. This project, I said, was too important to die. Was there not some way we could bring it back to life? Gail thought there was and we began to talk.
Eventually I went to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire where, as I worked on a new draft, I increasingly felt the powerful responsibility I had to the people who had talked to me at such length. All alone in the woods, I sometimes found myself literally in tears at the thought of the people, Joe first among them, who had been painfully honest about the most significant events of their lives and counted on me to relay their last testament to the world. For roughly 40 of the voices in this book, one out of every four, has died in the two decades since I did the interviewing. No one else will be hearing their stories from their lips, and to read this book is to reenter, as if by magic, a moment in history ripe for rediscovery and amazement. –Kenneth Turan
(Photo © Patricia Williams)
Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told
Art & Entertainment
Automotive
Theater
“Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Joe Papp was clearly a revolutionary living in revolutionary times, and his life’s story serves as a dramatic lesson about the nature and nurturing of art and culture. And it provides yet another data point–a biographical one–in the Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity debate as to whether commerce or community best serves the interests of creativity and the cultural arts.
“Free for all” teaches how a love of Shakespeare could overcome all obstacles, including public performance and assembly laws, financial challenges, professional skepticism, and, most of all, the engagement of audiences with no prior appreciation of the material whatsoever. And, as the title richly implies, all of this is possible precisely because Shakespeare himself was not there to assert copyright or to impose a DMCA takedown. (It is a great irony that the most significant obstacle to the publication of this book was Papp himself, while he was still alive.) It is therefore, at its core, a story about how a man with a vision and the bare minimum of freedoms to act transformed acting and theater in New York City and then in popular culture around the world.
“Free for all” also teaches (by example) the organic nature of art, and how Papp succeeded where others thought him crazy by starting small, building his audience among an authentic public slowly and organically, and, only then moving productions into larger private venues. And we are lucky that while this book was largely completed 20 years ago, virtually no new material was admitted so that we can see in retrospect, but without revisionism, Papp’s process and results. When we ourselves wonder “where are the new voices?” or, more desperately, “where are the new audiences?” we can study how Papp was able to discard the false premises of commercialism and conjure art from an engaged and empowered community.
Unlike some experimentalists today, who exercise their freedoms mostly behind closed doors, Papp was sufficiently “out there” to be called before that most Un-American institution ever created, the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His formal denial of communism may seem like a historical footnote, but it underpins another key fact of the Free Culture movement: as Richard Stallman points out in Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, cherishing freedom does not a communist make. “Free for all” thus forces us to think about both “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. It is obviously the latter that Papp enjoyed the most, not merely his own speech, but giving freedom of speech to an entire community.
If we want to understand how to maintain our hard-won freedoms in art and culture, and to reclaim those that are increasingly under attack by those who wish to enclose and destroy the public commons (by claiming such destruction is necessary for its survival), we’d do well to study Papp’s biography and to honor the lessons he taught in his lifetime.
Rating: 4 / 5