New York Shakespeare Festival

New York Shakespeare Festival. Founded in 1954 by Joseph Papp, it was chartered by the State of New York Educational Department to “encourage and cultivate interest in poetic drama with emphasis on the works of William Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries, and to establish an annual summer Shakespeare Festival.” Performances were given in various locations before the company acquired a permanent home at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in 1962. The productions were often refreshingly experimental and sometimes featured such notable players as George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and James Earle Jones. In 1966 the organization took over the old Astor Library, not far from Washington Square, and converted it into an Off‐Broadway theatre center called the PUBLIC THEATRE. The first of the theatres in the building opened in 1967 with the musical Hair. Although the summer outdoor productions, which were offered free to the public except for some reserved seats, continued to emphasize Shakespearean mountings, the Off‐Broadway venue presented a wide‐ranging program of revivals and new plays. The large number of productions, their variety and striking percentage of successes made the New York Shakespeare Festival–Public Theatre probably the most exciting producing organization since the heyday of the Theatre Guild. However, some of the plays wallowed in gratuitous profanity and nudity, others took aggressively confrontational stances, and many tended to be trendy and more interested in current topics than solid dramaturgy. Still, the Public became the voice for many African‐American, Hispanic, and Asian‐American playwrights, and the summer Shakespeare offerings were groundbreaking in color‐blind casting. Among the Festival's many offerings, besides Hair, were No Place to Be Somebody (1969), The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971), That Championship Season (1972), A Chorus Line (1975), a popular The Pirates of Penzance (1980), and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985). The Public also hosts experimental theatre companies from across the country and around the world. For a short period in the early 1970s, Papp and the organization attempted to also manage the Repertory Theatre at Lincoln Center but withdrew from the ever‐problematic venue. The Public Theatre has suffered since the death of Papp in 1991. JoAnne Akalaitis was named his immediate successor but didn't last a full season. George C. Wolfe has been more successful in managing the large, disparate organization, though the number of plays and musicals to achieve any notoriety has been small. But the goal of both the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theatre has never been to create hits; both continue to serve the New York community with valuable theatre ventures that might not exist were the organization not there.