Joseph Papp, Producer of 'Hair,' 'Chorus Line,' Dies : Theater: Broadway lights will dim tonight to salute the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival.

By TERRY PRISTIN

Nov. 1, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Joseph Papp, a giant of the American stage who brought free open-air productions of Shakespeare to two generations of theatergoers, created the nation’s most important showcase for new playwrights and launched such Broadway hits as “A Chorus Line” and “Hair,” died Thursday in his New York City apartment.

Papp, who had suffered from prostate cancer for five years, was 70.

A spokesman for the New York Shakespeare Festival, the vast enterprise he created more than three decades ago, said the lights on Broadway will be dimmed tonight in his honor.

Papp’s illness, which was a closely guarded secret, forced him to step down as artistic director of the festival three months ago, 35 years after he put on his first outdoor Shakespearean drama--”Julius Caesar”--in an amphitheater on the Lower East Side.

Moving to Central Park in 1957, the festival quickly became an institution, helping to spur interest in Shakespeare across the nation.

A cigar-chomping, passionate, contentious, nonstop talker who starred in television commercials for his plays and once appeared in a one-man cabaret show, Papp had all the trappings of an old-style impresario. He would yell at critics he saw in theater lobbies, sometimes forcing them to leave. His feuds with playwrights were legendary, and he seemed to thrive on controversy.

But there was no dispute about his contributions.

“Joe Papp has been the most important producer in the New York theater, period, for most of his 35-year-long career,” New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote recently.

“Joe’s showed more courage to do more things than anybody else,” Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, said a few years ago. “I think he’s one of the major reasons we still have a theater today.”

Papp was the founder of the Public Theater in New York’s East Village, which eventually grew to five stages, becoming the largest such institution in the country. Among its many celebrated productions were “That Championship Season,” “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” “Runaways” and Charles Gordone’s “No Place to Be Somebody,” the first play by a black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Papp’s other Pulitzer Prize-winning productions were “That Championship Season” and “A Chorus Line.” His productions also received 28 Tony awards, among numerous other honors.

A lifelong social activist, Papp had some misgivings about achieving commercial success and winning Tony awards--part of “that Broadway thing,” as he put it. Yet several of his plays--especially “A Chorus Line,” which traveled uptown and became Broadway’s longest-running musical--became huge cash cows, whose proceeds made it possible to finance more avant-garde and topical work.

In his last years, he vainly sought to find another musical to match the success of that blockbuster, which netted $39 million for the festival.

Four years ago, Papp announced plans to produce all 36 of Shakespeare’s plays by 1993. The project was not universally applauded by critics. But it attracted such stars as Michelle Pfeiffer, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.

He was born Joseph Papirofsky to Polish Jewish immigrants living in Brooklyn. His father was a trunk maker, his mother was a seamstress, and his first language was Yiddish. The family was poor in material terms, he once wrote, but it was “rich in culture” from the streets, school and the synagogue. “And taste--the ability to distinguish a good ballplayer, dancer, actor, songwriter, marble player, hot dog or knish from a mediocre one--was ever present.”

After graduating from high school in 1941, Papp joined the Navy and shipped out to the Pacific, where he wrote, produced and directed shows for servicemen, usually on the decks of aircraft carriers. After he was discharged, he took advantage of the GI Bill and studied acting and directing at the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood.

Returning to New York, he landed a job as a stage manager for CBS-TV. When the name Papirofsky proved too long to fit on a list kept by his boss, he shortened it to Papp.

He did not stay away from the theater for long. With two friends, he produced several plays by Sean O’Casey, directing two of them and drawing his first negative review from the New York Times, which said neither he nor his actors had “any sense of genre style for Irish drama.” But another newspaper singled out one of the plays, “Bedtime Story,” as the best production of 1952, spurring Papp to search for a permanent home for his shows.

He found it on the Lower East Side. With the help of friends, and using seats salvaged from a defunct Bronx movie house, he set up a theater in a church basement and began putting on free Shakespearean plays.

Two years later, the Shakespeare Workshop, as it was then known, moved to the East River Amphitheater. Shortly afterward, Papp received several foundation grants, enabling him to buy a truck. He equipped it with a platform stage and started bringing mobile theater to local neighborhoods in the city’s five boroughs.

In an incident that was to leave a permanent imprint on New York’s cultural scene, the truck broke down one day in Central Park. Papp decided to keep the stage there for the summer, not only initiating the tradition of free Shakespeare in the park, but also inspiring other institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic to present free performances of their own.

In the first of a series of public battles that were to punctuate his career, Papp refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 during its investigation of supposed Communist influence in the arts. In 1959, he tangled with New York Parks Commissioner Robert Moses when the official demanded that he start charging admission to the plays. Papp refused to back down, taking his case to a largely sympathetic press and also winning a favorable court ruling.

The ensuing deluge of publicity was a bonanza for the outdoor productions. Afterward, it was Moses who sought public funding for an amphitheater in the park.

In 1973, Papp canceled a $7-million contract with CBS after the network got cold feet over its scheduled airing of his production of the controversial anti-war drama “Sticks and Bones.” The play was postponed from March to August, and 90 affiliates preempted it.

More recently, Papp, who directed many of his own productions, took a leading role in protesting the National Endowment for the Arts’ anti-obscenity drive. Despite financial setbacks at the theater (caused in part by the closing of “A Chorus Line”), Papp turned down nearly $400,000 in NEA grants in 1990 and said he would have nothing more to do with the agency.

(The festival’s current operating budget is $10.5 million--down $3 million from the previous year.)

In 1967, Papp staged his first production at the Public Theater--the musical 1960s period piece “Hair.” His theater was a former library building that he had been able to buy for a mere $575,000.

Among the many playwrights whose careers were nurtured at the Public Theater were David Rabe, John Guare, Wallace Shawn, Michael Weller and Elizabeth Swados. The roster of actors who blossomed under Papp includes Kevin Kline, George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, William Hurt and Raul Julia.

Some of these relationships were stormy. In one notorious brouhaha, he and Rabe did not speak for four years after Papp told the playwright that if he weren’t a writer, he would be a murderer. In another, he and playwright Sam Shepard feuded over Papp’s production of Shepard’s “True West.”

Papp was also a major promoter of minority theater, especially by blacks. In 1979, he formed a black and Latino Shakespeare repertory company. He helped develop the careers of many black playwrights, including George C. Wolfe, Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange, as well as Gordone.

Never enthusiastic about drama that dealt with what he called “bourgeois encounters,” Papp once told an interviewer that the plays he liked most were those with “a kind of ardent compassion, where people are screaming at life.” He was most excited by drama dealing with large social themes--Vietnam, race relations and, most recently, AIDS, the subject of the 1985 play “The Normal Heart.”

As the supply of plays with socially relevant themes dwindled during the 1980s, Papp began channeling some of his activism into outside endeavors, such as his crusade a decade ago to save two Broadway theaters.

In August, Papp reluctantly gave up the reins of the Shakespeare Festival, naming JoAnne Akalaitis as his successor. “Joseph Papp ignited a flame in American theater that will never be extinguished,” Akalaitis said in a statement Thursday.

Divorced three times, Papp was married a fourth time in 1976 to Gail Merrifield, an official of the Shakespeare Festival. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters and a son from his previous marriages. A second son, Anthony, died of AIDS earlier this year at the age of 28.

A GUTSY FIGHTER: Joseph Papp was a passionate iconoclast who expanded the boundaries of theater art. F1

Some Papp Productions

Here is a list of some of the major productions of the New York Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp:

“Hair”

“No Place to Be Somebody”

“The Memorandum”

“The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel”

“Sticks and Bones”

“That Championship Season”

“Short Eyes”

“A Chorus Line”

“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”