The Public Theater is an arts organization in New York City. Founded by Joseph Papp, The Public Theater was originally the Shakespeare Workshop in 1954; its mission was to support emerging playwrights and performers.[1] Its first production was the musical Hair in 1967.[2] Since Papp, the theatre has been led by JoAnne Akalaitis (1991–1993), and George C. Wolfe (1993–2004), and is currently under Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham.
In addition to each season of full-scale theatrical productions, The Public produces several different series, festivals, and programs each year.[4]
The Public presented its inaugural Public LAB series in 2008 with an annual series of new plays presented in collaboration with LAByrinth Theater Company. With each Public LAB show, the corresponding speaker series is presented as after-show talkbacks to discuss prominent themes, ideas, and topics in the plays. Several plays that have appeared in the Public LAB series have gone onto full-scale productions, including Tracey Scott Wilson's The Good Negro, which ran at The Public in 2009, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, which had a sold-out, thrice-extended off-Broadway run at The Public in spring 2010 and transferred to Broadway that fall.[5]
In 2011, Public LAB expanded to include Public LAB SHAKESPEARE, which is a new platform for The Public's exploration of the Shakespeare canon. This expansion marks the growth of The Public's Shakespeare Initiative and provides more ways for The Public to produce American interpretations of Shakespeare's works. The first production of Public LAB SHAKESPEARE was Timon of Athens in March 2011, with Richard Thomas playing the title role.[6]
Since 2013, The Public's Mobile Unit has been bringing free Shakespeare performances to various locations throughout New York City's five boroughs, including prisons, homeless shelters, and community centers. The tour concludes at the Public Theater, having previously performed at notable venues such as Rikers Island, Borden Avenue's Veteran's Shelter, and The Fortune Society.[7] The Public also launched its inaugural Public Works production in 2013. Public Works combines diverse groups of people throughout the five boroughs of New York City to watch theater, participate in theatrical workshops, and perform in one full-scale Public Works production alongside professional actors at Shakespeare in the Park. Past Public Works productions include The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and The Odyssey.[8]
The Public Forum, begun in 2010, is a series of lectures, debates, and conversations that showcase leading voices in the arts, politics and the media. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, a senior writer at Newsweek, Public Forum events explore issues raised by plays in The Public's season, as well as the political and cultural headlines of today's world. Notable participants in the series include Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Arianna Huffington, Alec Baldwin and Anne Hathaway.[9]
The Public hosts the annual Under the Radar Festival, a festival tracking new theater from around the world.
The Public serves as the home of the Emerging Writers Group, which seeks to target playwrights at the earliest stages in their careers. The Emerging Writers Group is a component of The Public Writers Initiative.[11]
The Public also fosters Public Studio, a performance series dedicated to developing the works of new and emerging theater artists. Emerging playwrights get the opportunity to stage a piece somewhere between a workshop and a full production in front of an audience, as an opportunity to gage audience reaction and further develop their work.[12]
The Public Theater invests in theater education, training classical actors through the annual summer acting intensive known as the Shakespeare Lab. The Shakespeare Lab is The Public Theater's professional actor development program that immerses a selected company of professional, mid-career actors in a summer intensive exploring the rigors, challenges, and joys of performing Shakespeare.[13]
The Public Theater hosts educational programs for teenagers such as Shakespeare Spring Break, Summer ShakeUP, and A Midsummer Day's Camp programs, all for teenagers interested in learning about and performing Shakespeare.[14]
Suzan-Lori Parks, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Master Writer Chair of The Public, debuted her performance piece Watch Me Work as part of the 2011 Under The Radar Festival. In the performance, Parks worked on her newest writing project in the main lobby of The Public Theater.[15]
The Astor Library in the latter half of the 19th century
A drawing of the Library published in 1900
Notable works and awards
A number of The Public's productions have moved to larger Broadway theaters upon the conclusion of their run at Astor Place. The three most commercially successful of these works have been Hair (1967), A Chorus Line (1975), and Hamilton (2015).
The Public has been housed in a landmarked Romanesque revival structure at 425 Lafayette Street since 1967, built between 1853 and 1881 as the Astor Library, which later merged with the Tilden and Lenox collections to become the New York Public Library. The library was built by William B. Astor, son of the library's founder, John Jacob Astor. A German-born architect, Alexander Saeltzer, who had been the architect of the Anshe Chesed Synagogue, [16][17] designed the building in Rundbogenstil style, then the prevailing style for public building in Germany. [citation needed]Astor funded two expansions of the building toward Astor Place, designed by Griffith Thomas (1856–1869) and Thomas Stent (1879–1881).[18] Both large expansions followed Saeltzer's original design so seamlessly that an observer cannot detect that the edifice was built in three stages.
The building is a New York City Landmark, designated in 1965.[20] It was one of the first buildings to be recognized as such by the newly formed Landmarks Preservation Commission of New York City.[21]
In 2009, The Public began its "Going Public" campaign to raise funds for a major renovation of the historic building.[22][23] Groundbreaking for the $35 million renovation occurred on March 9, 2010, with notables such as Liev Schreiber and Philip Seymour Hoffman in attendance.[24] Plans included a renovation of Joe's Pub; the Pub went on a three-month hiatus during the summer of 2011 to allow for construction.[25] The building re-opened on October 4, 2012 after a renovation designed by Ennead Architects costing $40 million.[26]
Public Works productions
In 2013, The Public launched Public Works, which brings together diverse groups of people throughout the five boroughs of New York City to watch theater, participate in theatrical workshops, and perform in one full-scale Public Works production alongside professional actors at Shakespeare in the Park. Past Public Works productions include The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, and The Odyssey.[8] Two productions, Shaina Taub's adaptations of Twelfth Night and As You Like It, were later remounted as full Shakespeare in the Park productions in 2018 and 2022, respectively.[27][28]
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. He established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in Lower Manhattan. There Papp created a year-round producing home to focus on new plays and musicals. Among numerous examples of these were the works of David Rabe, Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody, and Papp's production of Michael Bennett's Pulitzer Prize–winning musical A Chorus Line. Papp also founded Shakespeare in the Park, helped to develop other off-Broadway theatres and worked to preserve the historic Broadway Theatre District.
Broadway theatre, or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.
Astor Place is a one-block street in NoHo/East Village, in the lower part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It runs from Broadway in the west to Lafayette Street. The street encompasses two plazas at the intersection with Cooper Square, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Eighth Street – Alamo Plaza and Astor Place Station Plaza. "Astor Place" is also sometimes used for the neighborhood around the street. It was named for John Jacob Astor, soon after his death in 1848. A $21 million reconstruction to implement a redesign of Astor Place began in 2013 and was completed in 2016.
The Delacorte Theater is a 1,800-seat open-air theater in Central Park, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is home to the Public Theater's free Shakespeare in the Park productions. As of September 2023, it has been closed for renovations that are expected to complete in spring 2025.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Shakespeare in the Park is a theatrical program that stages productions of Shakespearean plays at the Delacorte Theater, an open-air theater in New York City's Central Park. The theater and the productions are managed by The Public Theater and tickets are distributed free of charge on the day of the performance. Originally branded as the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) under the direction of Joseph Papp, the institution was renamed in 2002 as part of a larger reorganization by the Public Theater.
Kelli Christine O'Hara is an American actress and singer, most known for her work on the Broadway and opera stages.
John Doyle is a Scottish stage director of musicals and plays, as well as operas. He served as artistic director at several regional theatres in the United Kingdom, where he staged more than 200 professional productions during his career spanning over 40 years.
Joe's Pub, one of the six performance spaces within The Public Theater, is a music venue and restaurant that hosts live performances across genres and arts, ranging from cabaret to modern dance to world music. It is located at 425 Lafayette Street near Astor Place in Manhattan, New York City. It is named after Joseph Papp, the theatrical producer who established the New York Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theater and the free Shakespeare in the Park program in Central Park.
Norm Lewis is an American actor and baritone singer. He has appeared on Broadway, in the West End, film, television, recordings and regional theatre. He’s also noted for his wide vocal range. Lewis was the second African-American actor after Robert Guillaume to perform in the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera and the first one to do so in the Broadway production. In 2023, he reprised the role in the show's sequel, Love Never Dies, in London's West End.
The Shakespeare Center was the home of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, an Equity professional theatre company in New York City, established in 1980 and dedicated in 1982, when the company established its center of theatre production and advanced actor training at the 90-year-old West-Park Presbyterian Church on Amsterdam Avenue at West 86th Street. The Shakespeare Center's facilities consisted of the main offices of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, costume and set construction and storage rooms, a main lobby, and a theatre in the balcony of the church equipped with lighting and sound amplification.
Thomas Robert Kitt is an American composer, conductor, orchestrator, and musician. For his score for the musical Next to Normal, he shared the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Brian Yorkey. He has also won two Tony Awards and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Next to Normal, as well as Tony and Outer Critics Circle nominations for If/Then and SpongeBob SquarePants. He has been nominated for eight Drama Desk Awards, winning one, and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for Jagged Little Pill in 2021.
Shakespeare in the Park is a term for outdoor festivals featuring productions of William Shakespeare's plays. The term originated with the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City's Central Park, originally created by Joseph Papp. This concept has been adapted by many theatre companies, and over time, this name has expanded to encompass outdoor theatre productions of the playwright's works performed all over the world.
Edward Cornell was an early associate of Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He was the first managing director of the Festival's experimental wing, The Other Stage, where he directed No Place to Be Somebody, the Festival's first Pulitzer Prize winner.
Alexander Saeltzer was a German-American architect active in New York City in the 1850s and 1860s. His work includes the Anshe Chesed Synagogue, Academy of Music, Theatre Francais, the Duncan, Sherman & Company building and the South Wing of the Romanesque revival structure at 425 Lafayette Street built between 1853 and 1881 as the Astor Library.
Sharr White is an American playwright and screenwriter. He's known for his Broadway plays The Other Place (2011), The Snow Geese (2013), and Pictures From Home (2023). He's also known as a producer and writer for Showtime series The Affair (2015–2019), the Starz series Sweetbitter (2019), the HBO Max series Generation (2021), and the Netflix limited series Halston (2021).
Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. As a playwright, he has five full-length titles amongst other works which have been widely produced and developed. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. The play gave him the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play and the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award. In 2024 he received a nomination at the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Musical with Alicia Keys for Off-Broadway production Hell's Kitchen.
Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, charged with expanding Lincoln Center's cultural reach within New York City. Thake launched the organization’s Summer for the City Festival in 2022, which brings live programming across Lincoln Center’s campus to 10 stages. Under her leadership, Lincoln Center has significantly increased the organization's free and Choose-What-You-Pay ticketing for all their programming. Thake's influence has led to regular collaborations with Lincoln Center’s resident organizations, including the first ever cross-campus celebration of a single artist, Terence Blanchard.
Maria Manuela Goyanes is a first-generation Latina theatre maker, chiefly known for her work at The Public Theatre in New York City, as well as her September 2018 appointment as the artistic director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington D.C.
Bernard Gersten was an American theatrical producer. Beginning in the 1960s through the early 2000s, Gersten played a major role in shaping American drama and musical theatre.
References
↑ Epstein, Helen. Joe Papp: An American Life, Da Capo Press, March 1, 1996. ISBN978-0306806766
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