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Shakespeare in the Park (The New York Shakespeare Festival) |
Excerpted from Yu Jin Ko, "Shakespeare Festivals," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
The biggest jolt of energy from the East Coast came from a slight, perennially combative man from New York. Joseph Papirofsky or, as he later became, Joe Papp, was raised by his immigrant Jewish parents in rundown tenements of various ethnically-mixed neighborhoods of Brooklyn. He was the kind of Jew, by his own account, who was "despised" by the assimilated, prosperous, "uptown" Jews.1
As he liked to recount, no one in his family was a lawyer or a doctor, and he never went to college. He had certainly never been to the New York City Ballet, the cofounder of which (Lincoln Kirstein) had been an early supporter of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. But Papp, driven by his early experiences, sought to revolutionize festival Shakespeare by reaching the kind of people he grew up with—the "great dispossessed audience"—with shows that had casts who looked like those people. He was determined to bring Shakespeare closer to the urban populace and re-Americanize Shakespeare as a democratic contemporary.
As he was to say later, "I believe that great art is for everyone—not just the rich or the middle class. When I go into East Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant and see the kids who come to our shows, I see nothing so clearly as myself." After a series of fitful starts, Papp established the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) in 1954. His first shows—which were staged in amphitheater settings in different parks and traveled on flatbed trucks to the outer boroughs of New York—had many of the features that would become trademarks of NYSF: multiethnic casts and the kind of gutsy staging that enabled actors to engage audiences that had never seen a Shakespeare performance. (The Festival would soon launch the careers of actors ranging from Colleen Dewhurst and Meryl Streep to James Earl Jones and Raul Julia.) The shows were also free, as the summer shows still are.
1 For Joe Papp's story, see Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1994).
Additional sources for this essay include: festival web sites, press material, and interviews with festival personnel conducted by the author.
Joe Papp, 1959. Photofest.
New York, Delacorte Theater, Central Park. Henry V; Measure for Measure. Playbill, summer 1976. Folger Shakespeare Library.