Searching for Joe Papp

Tell me if this doesn't sound like an ideal artistic director of a New York theater to you:

Give me an annual budget of $5 million, all my downtown contacts and see if I don’t make a splash. I’d program a season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker and Will Eno. Plus—eventually—younger, unproduced playwrights who landed on my desk. (The more violent and obscene, the better.) Foreign writers, too, in fresh translations. Every first Monday I’d throw a free play reading with an open bar. In the summer, I’d open the doors for a two-month workshop by a favored company—Radiohole, the Debate Society or Nature Theater of Oklahoma—ending in a massive celebration. The advertising would be slick and bold, the tickets cheap, the parties raucous and the shows calculated to enrage, excite and astound. For the first five years, I would not accept any subscriber over the age of 35. I’d have blogs, press conferences, preshow talks and fat souvenir programs. I’d constantly bombard the media with video and op-ed pieces tied to our shows—when I wasn’t hosting a kick-ass party.

Time Out New York editor David Cole, who devised this dream scenario, dismissed it as damn near impossibly in today's theater culture, where companies are strained by subscriber demands, critical scorn, raising ticket and rent prices, and the decline in NEA funding. Cole then turned to asking where the next theatrical impresario in the mold of Joe Papp could be found, and preferably one who was slightly less of a douche. It's worth noting that exciting, dangerous theater is somewhat lacking in the U.S., political or otherwise. What I should note is that Chicago, with its smaller real estate prices and less subscription-based audiences, has the potential to support Cole's dream theater, but so far have yet to push quite hard enough.