Joe first provided the necessary backing for tyro playwright Jason Miller (an actor best known as the young priest in “The Exorcist”) and then held the production together when a fractious relationship among the actors began to mirror what happens in the play. Joe Papp was best known as an adventurous producer of new work and his particular gifts are on display in the story of “That Championship Season,” a Pulitzer-winning play about the troubled reunion of a former high school coach and the now-middle-age players he led to a basketball title. No one else will be hearing the stories from their lips, and to read this book is to reenter a moment in history ripe for rediscovery and amazement. Roughly 40 of the voices in this book, to be published this week by Doubleday, have died since I did the interviewing. Was there not some way we could bring it back to life? Gail thought there was, and we began to talk.Īs I worked on another draft, I increasingly felt the powerful responsibility I had to the people who’d talked to me at such length, people 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. This project, I said, was too important to die.
Once he read the manuscript, that is what happened, more than two decades ago: He refused to let the book to be published.įinally, years after the fact, I wrote a letter to Gail Merrifield Papp, Joe’s widow and collaborator.
Working with Papp on a project of this scope was enormously exciting, but from time to time I feared that, as had been the case with others he’d worked closely with, a rift would develop between us. Scott, Meryl Streep, Raul Julia, Kevin Kline, James Earl Jones and Martin Sheen.Ī story like this, filled with lively, articulate, not to say theatrical people, turned out to be especially suited to the oral history format, and over 18 months in the late 1980s, I interviewed close to 160 people, many for hours at a time, to produce a book called “Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told.” Papp also was essential in starting the careers of actors such as George C. During his lifetime (he died in 1991), Papp made theater in America both accessible and essential.įrom the late ‘60s to the mid-'80s, he produced landmark plays such as “Hair,” “A Chorus Line,” “That Championship Season,” “The Normal Heart” and “Short Eyes,” plays that transcended their moment in time. The New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater has been the most significant not-for-profit theater group in this country since it was founded by Joe Papp more than 50 years ago.
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