Wolfe at the Door

When George C. Wolfe announced a few weeks ago that he’ll leave The Public Theater as producer during the 2004-5 season, some observers were genuinely surprised while others were wondering what took him so long to make the leap.

The reasons for that discrepancy are germane to any consideration of Wolfe’s accomplishments. Over the years, the often affable and just as often opaque Wolfe has seemed absolutely committed to his notion of making the Public a five-auditorium venue where — to paraphrase the way he frequently puts it — the fringe can become the mainstream. On the other hand, he has regularly given the impression of being just as committed to maximizing the director-playwright name he was already in the process of making for himself before he took on the Public position.

So getting a clear view of the Wolfe balance sheet isn’t a simple task — especially if, as with most organizations, any references to intramural frictions and factions have been eliminated from official Public Theater statements. There’s no denying that, as Wolfe’s 11 years at the Public have passed, there have been many victories to make the theater’s board of directors as happy as clams — that is, those board members who haven’t bailed while Wolfe has been is in situ. True to his intention to bring in new playwrights from different backgrounds, Wolfe has produced no less than five Suzan-Lori Parks works; indeed, he’s largely responsible for that Pulitzer Prize-winner’s career. And though he’s backed no one else with the same unflagging devotion — definitely not any directors — he has introduced or helped to make prominent Nilo Cruz (the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner), Diana Son, Chey Yew, Jessica Hagedorn, Tracey Scott Wilson, and Ruben Santiago-Hudson. (Wolfe is set to direct Santiago-Hudson’s Lackawanna Blues for HBO.)

It was Wolfe who made waves with his interpretation of The Tempest and enticed Mike Nichols to direct The Seagull in the park, thereby bringing Meryl Streep triumphantly back to the New York stage. While the idea of having a bustling cabaret in the building had been bruited about for many years by the Public’s founder, Joseph Papp, it was Wolfe who brought to fruition Joe’s Pub — named after the late performing and cigar-smoking impresario. Noted playwrights as disparate as Arthur Miller (The Ride Down Mount Morgan), Sam Shepard (Simpatico), David Mamet (Boston Marriage), Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out), and Martin McDonough (The Cripple of Inishmaan) showed their wares at the Public — not to mention such acclaimed actors as Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Stewart, Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Ed Harris, Don Cheadle, and Liev Schreiber, who is now recognized as a pre-eminent Shakespearean thanks to his work at the theater. As far as substantial till-filling goes, the Public can point to Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, which Wolfe developed with the sensational tapmeister Savion Glover and subsequently sent to Broadway and the road. (Noise/Funk is Wolfe’s A Chorus Line, though not quite as big a blockbuster as the Papp phenom.) Wolfe also helmed Elaine Stritch at Liberty, another profitable Broadway transfer.

Yet, with all the pluses, there’s another way to size Wolfe up. Not long after he took over the Public’s complex operations in 1993, his producing-directing goals became the subject of much backstage buzz. Conjectures about his motives were compounded over the years as the shows that moved from the Public to Broadway were largely those Wolfe had directed — eight of 11, including the currently B’way-bound Caroline, or Change. Things looked grim when Wolfe’s 1996 Central Park revival of On the Town was carted to the Great White Way way at an eventual $8 million loss, and then the Wolfe-Michael John LaChiusa musical The Wild Party opened cold on the Main Stem during the 1999-2000 season and quickly dropped about three million Public dollars. (The show actually leaked a few more millions that had been fronted by co-producers Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Elizabeth Williams, and Anita Waxman)

Aside from the effect of these flops on Wolfe’s reputation, he was thought by many people to have had trouble working alongside the executive directors brought in by the Public after the On the Town and Wild Party setbacks. The scuttlebutt was that Wolfe bridled at having to keep the company’s financial belt as tight as his new colleagues wanted. Fran Reiter hung on for only a short while, though Mara Manus seems to have helped raise the theater’s shrunken endowment to just under $18 million. (Notice that Manus is staying and Wolfe is going.) And Wolfe’s personal ambitions looked suspicious when, a few years ago, it was reported in The New York Times — albeit buried at the end of a lengthy assessment — that the playwright-director’s agent had been sending out letters announcing her client’s availability for assignments.

A closer look at Wolfe’s Public stint may indicate that, aside from producing a group of winning productions in which he had a deft creative hand and a handful of other successes, his results were patchy. First, there’s the questionable degree of care he has accorded Shakespeare. Yes, his Tempest was generally considered a notable success, but he unleashed a Macbeth to far less acclaim. He did complete the Shakespeare marathon that Joe Papp, who established the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954, had dreamed up; needless to say, Wolfe was obligated to do as much. And yes, he gave Liev Schreiber — now a Public trustee — many golden chances.

Still, Wolfe’s dedication to Shakespeare doesn’t register as particularly firm. There are those who say that Wolfe has referred to Shakespeare behind closed doors as “just another playwright,” but that kind of remark may have been said in jest and perhaps no conclusion should be drawn from it. Nevertheless, the Public’s Shakespeare ventures under Wolfe have rarely risen above the mediocre and have sometimes fallen well below that mark: Vanessa Redgrave in Anthony and Cleopatra, which she also directed, is an example. (The actress had done a far superior version with Timothy Dalton in London some years earlier.) And, in recent years, the plays by Shakespeare and other classics that are presented each summer in Central Park have been cut back in number from two to one. (Wolfe will return to the Delacorte in the summer of 2005 with, fittingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)

Has the total number of Shakespeare plays presented by The Public Theater been reduced under Wolfe? It may seem so but people tend to forget that, in the company’s earlier years, Shakespeare was never done on the downtown premises; only with the initiation of the marathon did Papp start producing the Bard’s works at the Public’s Lafayette Street home, which opened in 1967. But recent productions elsewhere in Manhattan suggest that the company’s lease on Shakespeare has been appropriated. In particular, Jack O’Brien’s Henry IV at Lincoln Center and Bartlett Sher’s Cymbeline and Pericles for Theatre for a New Audience have put the Public in the shade.

An even deeper investigation of Wolfe’s endeavors turns up more so-so news. For instance, Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities was a triumph at the Public in 1992, but when Smith brought in Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the start of Wolfe’s reign, the piece received a multimedia production that all but overwhelmed its documentary-like text. Subsequently, Smith’s House Arrest made very little impact. Though Wolfe is enough of a believer in the American musical to have written Jelly’s Last Jam before his Public days, and though he continued to pay respects to the form with Noise/Funk and the doomed Wild Party, some of his other musical entries proved to be embarrassments — not Elaine Stritch at Liberty nor Adam Guettel’s Saturn Returns but certainly Harold Prince’s Petrified Prince, for which Michael John LaChiusa provided the score, and last year’s expensive misfire, Radiant Baby. While having David Mamet return to the Public and Martin McDonagh bow there may have been worthy gestures, the former’s Boston Marriage was a head-scratcher while the latter’s Cripple of Inishmaan was undermined by Wolfe’s misguided decision to have Jerry Zaks direct without any affinity for the playwright’s eccentric sense of humor. Finally, some people contend that Wolfe might have tapped a few of the Public’s more well received shows for commercial runs — Caryl Churchill’s Skriker, for example — had he not earmarked the necessary funds for shows that he was directing.

In tallying Wolfe’s successes against his missteps, the ratio is not all that impressive. But maybe his batting average is acceptable if we consider that the same sort of stats attached to the great showman Joe Papp, who offered many poor productions during his hectic years running the Festival/Public but was so shrewd in terms of public relations that he distracted people from peering too closely at the spreadsheet. Remember also that Papp wasn’t much of a director, though he would have liked to have been. (Possibly Wolfe’s directorial victories have been somewhat overrated, as well; his Tonyed Millennium Approaches was bland as compared to Declan Donnellan’s version at London’s National Theatre and his Perestoika missed the imagination of Michael Mayer’s production at New York University with a cast made up of graduate students.)

Running the Public is a daunting job that requires no end of skills: kid-gloving Shakespeare, holding the hands of myriad artistic and administrative types, keeping the $12 million annual operating costs under control, running a building, fund-raising, glad-handing subscribers, and so on. Candidates to replace Wolfe most likely understand this, just as Wolfe must have when he was offered the post. But this doesn’t mean that the best qualified people are likely to turn their noses up at the prestige position. (Come on, this is arguably the country’s leading not-for-profit theater outfit.) According to one rumor floating around, the board has put out feelers to a number of desirables — Jack O’Brien, Robert Falls, and Mike Nichols among them — and has detected genuine interest. (This could lead one to surmise that the board let Wolfe go rather than Wolfe having elected to walk away, but those in a position to know insist that’s not the case.)

As the Public board prepares to retain a search firm, many names are already thought to be in the mix. Among them are Doug Hughes, formerly of the Long Wharf Theatre; the New York Theatre Workshop’s James Nicola; the Huntington Theatre’s Nicholas Martin; and the La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff. Most of the names volleyed belong to directors, which may indicate that he board isn’t too worried about someone giving the impression that his own work takes precedence over the theater’s. Curiously, no African-American names are being bandied nor, according to the rumor mill, have any women been mentioned as possible Wolfe successors. Whoever is chosen can be expected to change the Public dramatically — as George C. Wolfe has done — and eventually call enough attention to his or her own particular strengths and deficiencies that the theater cognoscenti will no longer cry, or decry, Wolfe.