Los Angeles Timesfilm 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 Allis 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 thisincredibly engrossing account of artistic daring and excellence the larger-than-life figure of Joseph Papp reigns supreme.

KENNETH TURAN has been a film critic for the Los Angeles Times since 1991 and the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes since 1993. He teaches nonfiction writing and film criticism at the University of Southern California and provides regular reviews for Morning Edition on National Public Radio.

JOSEPH PAPP (1921-1991) was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954 with the aim of making Shakespeare's works accessible to the public.

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1 Backstory 1921-42
Phillip Martel
Joe was Peck's bad boy; from the start he was never around the house. He was always running, always in trouble with the school authorities about attendance and this and that. He was a leader, always full of vibrant ideas. You could see from the beginning there was something there, something special. "Let's go here, let's go there, let's form a club, let's try a trick on this guy." He was always in the forefront, and whoever was around him listened to him. Our sister was the one who was worried about keeping something on the table; I don't think the stuff of geniuses feeds on worrying about mundane things like bread and butter and milk. He was like a rebel with a cause, a lot of causes.

Rhoda Lifschutz
Joe was always out doing something. He was never around. He was very restless. I knew he was reaching for something that was different. I just felt it. He needed challenges all the time. It was hard to know, really, what went on in his mind. Nobody knew what he really felt. He'd run off somewhere, it would get late, and I used to go crazy, running and looking for him, and never telling my mother because I didn't want her to worry. He was different. I worried all the time that something was going to happen to him, because he had the type of personality that wouldn't take any nonsense. I felt he would get into trouble. But we should all get into the same kind of trouble he got into.

Our mother, Yetta Miritch, came from Lithuania; our father, Shmuel Papirofsky, from Kielce, Poland. His father was a famous teacher, known in the town as Moshe Melamed. Except for one of my father's brothers, who lived in Israel, the whole family was gassed by the Nazis. My mother came to New York by boat when she was eleven, alone, an orphan, and a frightened child. She never talked about her past.

She met my father in a park with rides in Brooklyn called Goldberg's Farm. Most of the marriages in those days were all arranged, people didn't even know each other. This was the real thing. My mother was beautifully dressed, always conscious of her clothes. She was always cleaning-she'd clean instead of thinking of having something to eat. It was more important to keep the house clean. She was so immersed in problems, she wasn't that demonstrative. Maybe because she was an orphan and hadn't been given that, she couldn't give it herself. My father was much more emotional, and Joe was very close with him. My father always had an accent and he spoke Yiddish most of the time. My mother spoke beautiful English. You'd never know she wasn't born here.

Joseph Papp
My ancestral roots are in Eastern Europe, and I'm very conscious of that, conscious that I'm in the tradition of the Holocaust. I was born at home, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in 1921. Williamsburg was not what it is now, with a large Hasidic community. Our area was a mix of a lot of different ethnic groups, Italians in particular, and Jews were isolated there. You always felt that you were slightly embattled. You didn't have the emotional support and protection of other Jews in great numbers around you. I came from a certain kind of poverty level, which was really below that of most of New York's Jews. I've always felt that distinction, I've always felt slightly removed from, for instance, the world of Broadway and the Shuberts. I can talk to them, I'll walk with them, but, as Shylock would say, I won't eat with them.

My mother was a beautiful woman, very gracious with a great deal of her own kind of style. She was very poor, but she always had a kind of aristocracy about her. She was a determined woman, and her energy was amazing. My rhythm is like hers was, very rapid. I remember her going up and down five flights of stairs like a whiz with these grocery bags that we

Excerpted from Free for All: Tales from the New York Shakespeare Festival by Kenneth Turan, Joseph Papp
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