Author Description

Go behind the scenes at the Public Theater and learn the amazing saga of how Joe Papp made American theatrical and cultural history. Free for All is the compulsively readable oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater -- an institution that under the leadership of Joseph Papp became the leading source of revolutionary and enduring American theater. To tell his story, Kenneth Turan interviewed some 160 luminaries -- including George C. Scott, Coleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, Raul Julia, Sam Waterston, Linda Ronstadt, Jone Guare, Charles Durning, Diane Lane, Larry Kramer, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Kevin Klline, James Earl Jones, David Rabe, Jerry Stiller, Tommy Lee Jones, and Wallace Shawn -- and masterfully weaves their voices into a rich tale of creativity, conflict, and achievement. We see how a dogged, idealistic, tough-as-nails theatrical visionary took a radically democratic, vision of first-rate productions of Shakespeare's plays for an urban audience -- for free, a policy that brought Joe Papp into an epic conflict with Robert Moses -- and not only succeeded but ended up making theatrical history. Here, in all their backstage drama are the accounts of how such landmark productions as Hair, No Place to Be Somebody, A Chorus Line, That Championship Season, Streamers, for colored girls..., True West, The Normal Heart, and Aunt Dan and Lemon came into the world. At the center of the engrossing account of artistic daring and excellence the larger-than-life figure of Joseph Papp reigns supreme: the difficult poverty of his childhood, the youthful radicalism it led to, his huge battles and clashes of wills and temperament, and, most of all, the achievements against long odds -- told with candor and often painful honesty. Some forty of Kenneth Turan's interviewees have died since he began working on Free for All, lending a special poignancy to their reminiscences. To read their testimonies and those of other witnesses and participants in this bo