"I know how to move my career forward like that," he says, snapping his fingers. His body may be at rest, but his mouth runs a mile a minute, his plummy voice filling me in on how he went about remaking the Public Theater in his own image. "I know how to navigate the landscape. Navigating a whole institution is a much more complicated thing. Fortunately, I have very, very, very, very, very astoundingly good instincts. And I trust them implicitly."

Those instincts, though they may not include modesty, have served him very, very well. In the slightly more than a decade since he crashed onto the scene as the author of the satirical sketchbook The Colored Museum, the 42-year-old Wolfe has influenced the city’s cultural life in ways that are boldly self-evident -- he’s won two Tony awards for directing -- as well as subtle. On Broadway, he’s staged a quixotic assortment of plays (Tony Kushner's two-part Pulitzer-winning gay epic Angels in America, Anna Deveare Smith's panoramic one-woman Twilight) and musicals (Jelly's Last Jam, Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk) that combine anger and joy, art and entertainment, innocence and intelligence.Downtown he has revivified Joseph Papp's venerable New York Shakespeare Festival while transforming it into something very much like George Wolfe himself -- cocky, fast-talking, opinionated, worldly, and adamantly committed to living in a multicultural metropolis.

Wolfe's hilarious and popular revival of On the Town last summer in Central Park, which may show up on Broadway next spring, was the latest turning point in the life of an artist who refuses to recognize boundaries even as he smashes through them. At the opening night gala at the Belvedere Castle, I watched him glide nonstop from one end of the party to the other like an imperial carp in an Olympic-scale aquarium. Wolfe paid his respects to Gail Merrifield Papp, Joe's widow. He stopped briefly to greet muck-a-mucks like Jessye Norman, Lauren Bacall, and the show’s original choreographer in 1944, Jerome Robbins. One minute he was huddled with a trio of chicly dressed black men; the next he was standing under a tree talking into a Hispanic reporter's tape recorder. Skipping the buffet of fried chicken and watermelon slices, he drank a beer the way he does everything else -- fast. And he continued his rounds, making sure that everybody was present and accounted for: the old guard and the young turks, this color and that color, the down-home and the fabulous.Earlier in the summer, on the open stage of the Delacorte Theater, the Shakespeare Festival had completed its decade-long marathon survey of the Bard's complete works, initiated by an ailing Papp in 1991. Having paid off his debt to the daunting Papp, Wolfe was also celebrating the beginning of a new era. If there's one thing he's determined to get right, it's having the right mix of people at the party. You can't underestimate the role of Wolfe's talent and charisma in creating that mix.

Well, maybe you can. He certainly doesn't. "I feel very proud of my accomplishments in four years," Wolfe announces from the couch. "I think it's amazing. Nobody else has said so, but I'll say so. I don't care. I think it's nothing short of amazing."
When Wolfe's on a roll, he's one of those animated speakers who can italicize or capitalize words without breaking his stride -- unless he wants to use his Southern drawl to stretch one syllable into two or three. Anna Deveare Smith considers his speech one of Wolfe's secret weapons. "Black people in segregated Kentucky, where he grew up, spoke in a marvelous and peculiar way that no one else talks," she points out, adding that it‘s “one of the ways he intoxicates people."
On the Town earned rave reviews for lesbian comic Lea de Laria's star-making performance as Hildy the man-hungry cabdriver; good reviews for Wolfe's direction; mixed reviews for the rest of the cast; and bad reviews for Eliot Feld's choreography. All that will be taken in account if the show goes back into rehearsal next February for an April opening on Broadway. Before that, however, Wolfe had an opera to stage (Anthony Davis's Amistad, which opened November 29 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago) and a Shakespeare Festival production of Macbeth, starring Alec Baldwin, to cast -- not to mention setting the rest of the theater’s season, his fifth at the Public.His first instinct on being named producer of the Shakespeare Festival, in April 1993, was to tackle the widespread perception that the Public Theater -- where such hits as Hair, Sticks and Bones, and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf were born -- was moribund. After nearly two decades as the largest and most influential not-for-profit theater in the country, the festival had gone into decline in the eighties. A Chorus Line, which had begun as a workshop at the Public Theater and gone on to become the longest-running show in Broadway history (while earning $38.8 million for the institution), closed on Broadway after fifteen years. Not only was the cash cow that had funded the theater's glory years gone, but Papp, the Public‘s charismatic founder, was beginning a long struggle with prostate cancer.In 1990, the year before he died, Papp finally acknowledged his illness and hand-picked as his successor JoAnne Akalaitis, a smart and spiky artist who'd made her name as a director with the avant-garde company Mabou Mines. Brilliant in theory, this choice was a debacle in reality, partly because her taste in material was serious and intellectual, partly because some -- including some in the press, especially the New York Times -- viewed her as awkward, dark, and prickly. And festival staff couldn't forgive her for not being Joe Papp. Suddenly, the Public, once the liveliest theater complex in America, seemed more populated by ghosts than by the living. Less than two years into her tenure, the board booted Akalaitis and installed Wolfe.

"George is fortunate that he didn't directly succeed Joe Papp,” says Papp‘s former lieutenant, Lincoln Center Theater executive producer Bernard Gersten. “The buffer regime is the one that has to suffer all the barbs and darts and people saying 'Nobody can follow Joe Papp.' But following JoAnne is easier than following Joe.""About three days onto the job, I had incredible sympathy for what JoAnne had gone through," Wolfe admits. "This is an extraordinarily difficult institution to run. My goal for the first year was: Prove we're not dead. The second year was: Just make noise and give notice. The third year was to announce to the world The Vision."

That's the year Wolfe's carnivalesque production of The Tempest, starring Patrick Stewart, opened in Central Park and then moved to Broadway, as did Bring in da Noise, moved uptown from Lafayette Street -- in all, not a bad way of expressing The Vision. One of the first lessons Wolfe had to learn, though, is that barreling ahead with the high metabolism he evinces as an artist -- what he calls his "warrior energy" -- can come off as arrogance in an administrator. He announced plans for a revival of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate in Central Park with a new book from Christopher Durang before he’d secured the rights: Oops. No Kiss Me Kate. In his zeal to provide opportunities for artists of color, Wolfe mounted some plays before they were ready to be seen, suggests Thulani Davis, who's worked at the Public as dramaturg, translator, and playwright (her Everybody's Ruby will premiere there this season, and she is the librettist of Amistad). "He's gotten tougher as a producer," says Davis. “He wants playwrights to bring the plays further along now before they're shown."In retrospect, Wolfe acknowledges that moving two shows to Broadway in one season was too much. "My ambitions were ahead of the institution," he admits. "There was a lot of troubleshooting going on inside the building, 'cause it's a huge place with nine thousand agendas. I think most other theaters in New York City have one agenda, and maybe they're trying to think about two. But I mean, we've got nine thousand agendas. It's always been that way, and I think under me it's gotten worse. It's just insane."

Wolfe had never run any organization before he assumed the position at the Public, and he wasn’t prepared for the experience of having his every move scrutinized, every motive challenged. "One thing that fascinated me," he says, "was all these rumors circulating within the theater community. The first one was, 'The Public Theater's gone black.' And then the second year was, 'The Public Theater's gone gay.' And then the third year, 'Well, they're just doing plays about women' or 'George doesn't do plays by white men' -- even though Sam Shepard's play [Simpatico] had been done. The fourth year people began to see: 'Oh! He's doing that, and that, and that, and that and that and that.' The thing that was so fascinating..."Wolfe frequently uses fascinating as a euphemism for annoying or infuriating or even despicable.

"The thing that was so fascinating," he was saying, "was that I did the exact same things Joe Papp would be praised for because he was a straight white man reaching beyond his boundaries. But because I'm a person of color and gay, when I did it, I wasn't ‘being available to the complicated universe I'm a part of,’ I was ‘serving my own personal agenda.’"In fact, there are a lot more artists of color working at the Public since Wolfe took over. And the buzz in the lobby at showtime was discernibly younger, hipper, and more racially mixed than it has been in years, maybe decades. Certainly, the flowering of the Public into a multicultural institution isn't exactly a radical change. Papp, a white Jewish liberal with a social conscience and a genuine curiosity about the rest of the world, created a theater whose product and patrons were a lot like him. Along with everything else he produced came a steady stream -- okay, sometimes a trickle -- of work by non-white-male artists.

By contrast, George Wolfe is a black man from Kentucky who's old enough to have attended segregated movie theaters and young enough to have grown up on pop music and TV. He's also an artist and a gay man, both identities which give him license to move through an enormous variety of social worlds without settling down. In a theater that looks like him, diverse programming means not just casting Denzel Washington as Richard II and producing Anna Deveare Smith; it also means nurturing playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks and Robert O'Hara and Roger Guenveur Smith. It means promoting not only David Henry Hwang but also Chay Yew and Han Ong and Philip Kan Gotanda.
"So much of my professional life, I've been the only person of color in the room," says Wolfe. "At a function at the Dramatists Guild, I wrote a poem which was: 'He was the only spot in the spotless room, and he got through the door without pushing a broom.'" He lets out a big, gusty laugh. "I was part of a generation of Negro children, whose job it was to be bright and groomed and special, because we were going to go into these white rooms, and we were going to be so well-behaved and so well-mannered and so bright that we would be accepted. And then when no one was looking, we were going to open up all the windows and doors and let our cousins in. That was the cultural agenda."

When Wolfe headed west for Pomona College in southern California in the seventies, he discovered a new world where skin color was only the beginning of the conversation about identity, not the end. He quickly found himself drawn to "border culture, that messy zone where cultures collide." That encounter changed his life. After the success of The Colored Museum, Papp tried to talk him into turning one of the five spaces at the Public into a specifically black theater. Wolfe turned Papp down for the same reason that he declined a job overseeing the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta: It wasn’t "messy" enough. Later, he was offered a deal to create projects for Broadway; he wasn't interested in that either. "I was moving in the direction of figuring out a way to attach my success in the commercial landscape to a larger cultural agenda," Wolfe says.Being the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival -- Papp is the only other person to have held that title -- gave Wolfe the chance to do precisely that, and to do it in his own fierce, quirky way. Scanning his first four seasons, I remark that he seems to be committed to producing at least one play every year geared toward each of several minorities: black, Latino, Asian, and gay. Wolfe confirms the commitment but bristles at the language: "It sounds too much like a Whitman sampler."

Instead, Wolfe regards his first show at top man at the Public, Oliver Mayer's Blade to the Heat, as a kind of manifesto for his taste in cultural collisions. The play, which he produced (some would say overproduced) and directed at the Public in 1994, was written by a half-Mexican, half-Irish writer and portrayed a closeted gay Chicano boxer who's in love with a black soul singer and who defeats a Cuban middleweight champion. "It had a black world colliding with a gay world colliding with a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, a Mexican world . . . I just luuuuuved that!"

This passion is more than a personal fetish. It's a matter of principle.
"When you walk down the street in New York City, you don't have permission to negotiate who you share your space with,” Wolfe says. “That's one of the exhilarating things about this city. You're constantly colliding with rhythms and people and energies that are different from your own. We often experience those collisions in very violent ways. I'm fascinated by the excitement and possibilities of living inside those collisions and crafting a theater that is reflective of that."AT least, he is for now. Wolfe is being pulled in several directions at once, and as anyone who has taken on the task of running a nonprofit institution in these times of the incredible shrinking NEA can attest, the administrative duties can make weary the strongest artistic heart.

"George doesn't need the Public, but the Public very much needs George," says Tony Kushner, whose adaptation of S. Ansky‘s The Dybbuk, retitled A Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds opened the Shakespeare Festival‘s season in October. "It's not an indefinite run. George is a great director, and he will want to move on. But I think he'll do it at a point where, as Gorbachev said about perestroika, the point is not to succeed but to change things enough so they can't change back."Not long after he took over, Wolfe came to understand that putting on shows at the Public is probably the easiest part of running the New York Shakespeare Festival. Attracting audiences who appreciate those shows is a whole other story. Notwithstanding the success of The Colored Museum, the Public still had trouble attracting minority theatergoers. To remedy the situation, Wolfe hired Donna Walker-Kuhne, former director of marketing for the Dance Theater of Harlem, to create a community affairs department. "He told me, 'I want the Public Theater audience to look like a subway stop,'" says Walker-Kuhne.

What she set in motion was more akin to old-fashioned labor organizing than to modern audience development. After Bring in da Noise opened at the Public, two Brooklyn women, Aliyah Abdul-Karim and Elizabeth McKinney, contacted Walker-Kuhne to brainstorm how to get local kids to see the show, which tells the history of black Americans through tap dancing. With Walker-Kuhne’s help, they formed a group called the Griot Alliance. “We went around and approached businesses in the Fort Greene/ Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods to match ticket prices,” says Walker-Kuhne. “We went to the superintendents of the schools and asked them to underwrite tickets. The first six months of Wednesday matinees on Broadway were filled with youngsters developed by this Griot Alliance."Such bridge-building tactics have succeeded in making non-traditional audiences feel welcome at what they previously perceived as a white institution. Unassailable as community-building, it's an iffy business proposition. "Converting them into paying customers is difficult," says Wiley Hausam. "When you do this for a living, it's hard to remember that, whatever your race, theater is an elitist experience."
An even tougher task than developing new audiences faced Wolfe when he first arrived at the Public. Cognizant of the internal rifts that had derailed Akalaitis, he set about reorganizing the Shakespeare Festival’s structure, building a functional board of trustees and a staff he could work with. Developing a management style has taken Wolfe some time. Rosemarie Tichler, a highly respected Papp stalwart, has consistently headed the artistic staff and provided continuity for A-list artists (Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Richard Foreman, James Lapine) who've worked at the Public over the years. Yet Wolfe has gone through three managing directors in four years."I'm sure for some I'm not a day at the beach," he says mildly.

Wolfe ruffled a lot of feathers when he closed down the Public's movie theater and abruptly fired its programmer Fabiano Canosa, who is revered in the independent-film community. And he did an elaborate dance with actor Kevin Kline, whom the theater's board named artistic associate alongside Tichler when Wolfe was hired, with the idea that he would bring additional glamor and know-how to the season planning. Kline was attracted to the romantic idea of assembling an acting company that could be called an American national theater. Initially, he served as a key consultant, especially on Shakespeare productions, but over time his billing on Public Theater programs dropped from third to fifth to tiny print at the bottom the page until it quietly disappeared altogether.

In conversation with me, Wolfe never mentioned Kline's name, but he brought up the national theater concept only to disparage it. "I don't know what the hell that is. I cannot imagine what it would be. It just sounds scary, three steps away from fascism." Wolfe can be surprisingly stingy when it comes to complimenting other artists. Asked which theater-makers he admires as role models, he’s hard-pressed to name anyone since Brecht. And he's positively scathing about other directors. "Actors are kind of neurotic people. Writers are probably the most sensitive and the smartest of the group. And directors are 'Me, I, I, me, me, I, I, me I I me I I me.'"He's laughing as he says this, but you can't help thinking he's a teensy bit, shall we say, competitive? One grumble that emerges from within the Public Theater's walls is that if Wolfe's tenure has been good for him and the artists he works closely with (Savion Glover, Thulani Davis, Tony Kushner), it hasn't yet set anyone else's career on fire. Although he "truly has a desire to nurture and support a wide range of talent," a former employee says, "there's something in him that doesn't want to share the sky yet. The signals are sent throughout the organization that it's all about him."
When I ask about that, the famous George Wolfe motormouth hits a patch of turbulence. He starts a sentence six or eight or ten times, then comes to a full stop and sits in complete silence for half a minute. Nothing moves except his eyes, which tick around the periphery of the room like a clock spinning backwards. Finally, a complete thought emerges, and he speaks again.

"If some people feel neglected by me, I would hope they don't feel they've been neglected by the institution," he says carefully, clearly a bit bruised by this accusation. A minute later, he snaps back to a blunt, focused practicality. "I can't be intimate on every single project. I would die."

As producer of the Shakespeare Festival, Wolfe has to constantly worry about the financial health of an institution with an annual budget of $12 million. Joe Papp was blessed with a steady string of commercial subsidies, and the Public benefited from his considerable skills as a fund-raiser. After the closing of A Chorus Line, the Shakespeare Festival’s endowment dropped from more than $24 million in 1986 to less than $11 million today. The last two seasons ended with a balanced budget, which Gail Papp assures me with a cackle, was "absolutely unprecedented" in the history of the Festival.Of course, one way Wolfe has accomplished that is by producing fewer shows and sharing the costs with other theaters. "When I first started at the Public, Joe was constantly producing plays,” says writer-director James Lapine. The economics are harder now. You can only do a finite amount of work, and so much is resting on what you do."Aggravating the Public's financial picture is Shakespeare in the Park. Papp adamantly refused to charge admission to shows at the Delacorte, generating enormous good will but no income (though hit shows such as The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Pirates of Penzance were staged there before moving to Broadway). For years, the Shakespeare Festival’s annual deficit routinely equaled the $2.5 million cost of the two shows at the Delacorte.Wolfe is no more willing than his predecessors to give up Shakespeare, free or otherwise, as Macbeth (with Angela Bassett as Baldwin's Lady Macbeth) is meant to attest. He's also intent on nurturing young directors who want to tackle the classics -- not just Shakespeare but Restoration drama, Moliere, and the Greeks.

For both artistic and financial reasons, Wolfe has been weighing whether to produce Macbeth at the Public or at a Broadway house. After all, a big part of what put the Public on its financial feet was the Broadway revenue from Bring in da Noise, which has earned $3 million for the Shakespeare Festival so far and shows no sign of disappearing soon. A touring company, which opened in Detroit in October, is expected to bring in another $300-400,000 if it does well.
Anxious to avoid a Chorus Line-like dependency, the theater chose not to dump all the profits from Noise into the operating budget. A quarter of a million went toward establishing a school to train new performers in the particular style of tap dancing the show demands. Last season, $200,000 went into producing the Public Theater season, and the rest went into the reserve fund. This season, the board has allocated almost double that amount to meet the $12 million budget.
While board members stress that the theater doesn't want to rely on hit shows to pay the bills, Wolfe surely must feel some pressure to produce more commercial successes. He didn't accept "enhancement money" from a consortium of Broadway producers -- including Margo Lion, Roger Berlind, and Jujamcyn Theaters -- to mount On the Town in Central Park just for the fun of it. The show was, in effect, a Broadway tryout.

Can Wolfe the artist coexist with Wolfe the producer? Rumors persist that he will resign at the end of this season, to be replaced by either Michael Greif, the director of Rent, who runs the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, or James Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theater Workshop, which produced Rent.

"I miss sitting around and reading a book simply because I want to read a book,” Wolfe admits. “I miss the rhythm that would be my life as a director: I finish On the Town, I float for two or three months doing nothing and let things percolate, and then go back to work on a project. I deeply miss that rhythm. The unfortunate dynamic is that I come back to a building that has missed me because I've been away directing, and they need to be replenished as well. So when do you ever find the time to recharge yourself?"Refurbishing his new house, Lincoln Kirstein's old mansion on Gramercy Park, is one way Wolfe figures to recharge himself. But the larger question obviously lives pretty close to his heart.

"I'm always trying to negotiate the relationship between art, success, and self,” Wolfe says.” My ability to do that -- not Hollywood or a movie or any of that crap -- will determine how long I'm here."

New York magazine, December 15, 1997