DHH

David Henry Hwang is a regular YOMYOMF Guest Offender and playwright who has been producing plays, musicals and operas for three decades. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Tony Award for his play M. BUTTERFLY and also writes for movies and television. His latest play CHINGLISH has its world premiere this June at the historic Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Joseph Papp was hands-down the most important American theatre producer of the last half of the 20th century. Maybe, of the entire century. He founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare in the Park, and the Public Theatre; produced hit musicals like HAIR, PIRATES OF PENZANCE, and A CHORUS LINE; and championed most of the major American dramatists of his day, including Sam Shepard, David Mamet, David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, Charles Gordone, John Guare, Elizabeth Swados, Wallace Shawn, etc.

He also gave me my first production.

He was born Joseph Papirofsky, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in terrible poverty in Brooklyn, New York. Joe was complicated, difficult and unpredictable — but always passionate. During the 1950’s, he was called before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, accused of being a Communist, lost his job as a stage manager at CBS, then successfully sued to get it back.

Joe believed culture belonged to the masses, and fought the tyrannical “master builder” of New York, Robert Moses, to build a free theatre in Central Park. The plays he loved confronted social and political issues, often written by playwrights from underprivileged or minority backgrounds. He cast “ethnic” actors in “mainstream” roles long before the term “non-traditional casting” had been invented.

I met Joe in the summer of 1979, four years after A CHORUS LINE had opened to become the biggest Broadway hit of the era. My play, FOB, originally written to be performed in the lounge of my college dormitory, had come to his attention. He was thinking of producing it Off Broadway at his Public Theater. I was 22 years old.

John Lone and Ginny Yang in FOB. Photo by Martha Swope.

How had this happened? A few months earlier, the Public had hired Caucasian actors to play Asian characters in a play called NEW JERUSALEM. Angered that this “yellow face” casting had taken away some of the few theatre jobs available to them, Asian American actors protested outside the Public. This was a more than a decade before the media smackdown which erupted over the casting of Jonathan Pryce as an Asian character in the musical MISS SAIGON.

Unlike MISS SAIGON’s producer Cameron Mackintosh, Joe invited the protesters into his office and hired one of them onto his staff with an assignment to find plays for Asian American actors. Was this initiative a big priority for Joe? Probably not. But he acknowledged the need, and tried to do something about it. Just around this time, my play came across his desk.

So I am a beneficiary of affirmative action. Other artists pushed open a door, and I got to walk through it. As a result, I’ve tried to pursue my career to be worthy of this trust (OK, not always successfully, as I’ve written about in some of my earlier posts).

Joe took me into his office. “I’m interested in producing your play, but I have some thoughts about it.” He then proceeded to give me his notes. Now, I think it’s really important to listen to criticism. You never know when someone will identify a problem you knew in your heart, but hadn’t yet been able to articulate to yourself. I also believe, however, that even ideas from the smartest, most well-meaning people can be wrong, if they don’t happen to resonate with the author. Because there is no correct or incorrect way to write a play, which is ultimately an expression of a playwright’s personal, idiosyncratic vision.

In this case, Joe’s notes just weren’t ringing true to me. Yet, he was Joe Papp. And I was a first-time dramatist, who really wanted him to produce my play. I didn’t tell Joe I disagreed. I just nodded and muttered stuff like, “Hmmm. That’s really interesting.”

“Do some more work on the script, send me a new draft, then I’ll decide whether to produce the play.”

I went back home to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was living at the time, waited three weeks, then sent Joe back the exact same script. OK, maybe I’d tinkered with a few things, but I certainly hadn’t executed any of his notes. Ten more days passed. One afternoon, the phone rang. It was Joe Papp.

“The play’s great now, I’m going to produce it!”

(l to r): Tzi Ma, Calvin Jung & Willy Corpus in FOB. Photo by Martha Swope.

FOB opened at the Public Theater in 1980 along with Wakako Yamauchi’s THE MUSIC LESSONS, in a kind of mini-Asian American theatre festival. After my play got generally good reviews, Joe told me, “I’ll produce anything you write.” He was good as his word: over the next three years, he did my next three plays.

Then, as I would later learn was his pattern, Joe grew tired of me. As much as he committed himself to young writers, Joe was also adopting surrogate sons. Eventually, like some kind of serial Father Figure, he would move on to a new child. Many playwrights felt hurt when Joe’s affections waned. But I knew he’d left me with a priceless gift: a career.

A few years later, I scored my first Broadway success with M. BUTTERFLY, a play which Joe did not produce, and which won the Tony Award. I ran into him a few months later at the Public Theater. He looked more tired than I’d remembered. I didn’t know he’d been diagnosed with the prostate cancer which would take his life just three years later.

Joe threw his arm around me. “You did it!” he growled, passionate as ever. “And you know what the best part is? You broke all the rules!” He beamed with pride, like the father — and the fighter — that he was until the end.

If you want to know more about Joe Papp, an excellent book about him was published recently: FREE FOR ALL by Kenneth Turan. It’s a very exciting and inspiring read.