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SCOTT SIMON, host:
This summer, New York's Public Theater is celebrating 50 years of charming and challenging audiences. What Joseph Papp started as a young stagehand in a church basement on the Lower East Side has become one of the most important theater companies in the world. Today it may best be known for presenting free Shakespeare in Central Park. Public Theater's also responsible for creating such award-winning productions as "That Championship Season," "Sticks and Bones," "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf," "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" and "A Chorus Line." Our man Jeff Lunden has this appreciation.
JEFF LUNDEN reporting:
For someone who was to become a major figure in New York City's cultural history, Joseph Papp was not to the manor born. He grew up poor in Brooklyn, the child of immigrants, and his first language was Yiddish. But he never forgot going to the park for free band concerts as a kid, or going on class field trips to the theater, where he first saw Shakespeare. As he told WHYY's "Fresh Air" in 1987, he came up with the idea of combining the two.
(Soundbite of 1987 broadcast of "Fresh Air")
Mr. JOSEPH PAPP (Founder, Public Theater): I started with this notion of wanting to bring Shakespeare to the people without charge and play in the city's parks, playgrounds. I felt he'd been taken over too much by the academics. He was being presented in a way that would turn a lot of people off. And so I made it sort of my commitment to develop American actors to act the works of Shakespeare with the right emotionality, the right speech, clarity.
(Soundbite of "Hamlet")
Mr. KEVIN KLINE (Actor): (As Hamlet) Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, fall and resolve itself into a dew; that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter.
LUNDEN: It was a long road between Kevin Kline as Hamlet and the young Joe Papp seeing Shakespeare in school. He served in the Navy, studied acting in Los Angeles and then returned to New York, where he became a stage manager for CBS Television. In his spare time, he and a group of like-minded...