Variety on stage - and in lobby

Having seven stages means New York's Public Theater can offer a diversity of voices, says director Oskar Eustis. Sara Keating reports

Theatre and economics are often regarded as an unholy alliance, but for Oskar Eustis, the director of New York's famous Public Theater, the relationship between artistic ideals and material possibilities is an unavoidable condition for achieving excellence.

Speaking at Irish Theatre Institute's Conference and Networking event, Eustis's address suggested that it is as much a practical approach to the financial costs of running a theatre as an ambitious artistic sensibility that is key to The Public's survival in the commercially-driven environment of Broadway.

The success of Eustis's not-for-profit theatre in such a cut-throat environment suggest some interesting models for nurturing both the social function of theatre in Ireland, and the economic issues that limit artistic potential.

The theatrical philosophy underlying The Public is driven by both a social and an artistic ideal. The seeds for its development were sown in 1954 when Joseph Papp - a Russian immigrant who had taught himself English by reading Shakespeare in New York's public libraries - founded the Shakespeare Theatre. Papp's socialist beliefs extended to his cultural interests, and in 1956 he organised a free Shakespeare Festival, which expanded to Central Park in 1959, where the Delacourt was built to accommodate the annual event.

However, Papp's democratic artistic ideals were plagued by the politics of economics. Papp found himself dismissed from his full-time job at CBS, involved in a law-suit with the New York City Parks Commission who were trying to force him to charge an entry fee, and hauled in front of the House for Un-American Activities, where he was accused of disseminating propaganda from the stage ("Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays . . . I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare. They were written 500 years ago.").

Papp prevailed, and in 1967 the Shakespeare Theatre moved into the Astor Place Library building and was renamed The Public. It has since grown to become the most important production house for new American writing and classic Shakespeare, while maintaining the economic ideal, as Eustis describes it, that "the cultural wealth of the planet belonged to the people."

The Public now has five theatre spaces at its Astor Place home, a sixth local venue called Joe's Pub, and - of course - its original venue, the Delacourt in Central Park, where it still produces free theatre every summer. It probably comes as close to what Europeans would consider an American national theatre, but while Eustis acknowledges the nationalistic function of theatre on a local level - its ability to address specific communities about issues that concern them - he is keen to dismiss the suspicion that The Public asserts any kind of "hegemonic voice" that might define contemporary American society.

"The great thing about The Public is that we have seven stages and there's no single place that gives a single main-stage perspective. It's the diversity of voices that creates the national voice, and being in New York positions us beautifully to create a place where a national theatre, or even a national identity, is not monolithic but pluralistic."

Eustis's philosophy extends from the stage to the auditorium, where he sees the diversity of the spectators as vitally important to The Public's function.

"While we do have a core audience that is not dissimilar from some of the other New York theatre audiences - older, better educated, progressive - we have other audiences, too. They are sometimes limited to certain venues or shows - such as Asian audiences for Asian shows - but they overlap with that core audience that tends to see every show in our programme. Still, the theatre audience is not as integrated as I'd like - and we are working on that.

"But the great thing is the lobby. There was a time last June when we were hosting a hip-hop festival with an intensely African-American audience; we were performing Diana Son's play Satellites with Sandra Oh which had a young Asian audience, we had José Rivera's play about the death of Che Guevara which brought in an intensely Latino audience, we had Meryl Streep in Mother Courage and Her Children rehearsing in the building and we had Kevin Kline doing a workshop of King Lear. The audience mixed in the lobby; and that's a real form of interaction."

But economic imperatives weigh heavily on The Public's capacity for expansion and production. Eustis feels strongly about the failure of the government to help support the cultural fabric of the nation.

"The argument is simple - serious art in every society, and every moment of history that we know, required subsidy in order to exist. The only question is, where does that subsidy come from? Usually the subsidy comes from the ruling class, so in a democracy, the appropriate place for the subsidy to come from is the people, and the government is the expression of the people. But government involvement in the arts is anathema to the Republican Party and indeed to most Americans with a stake in government right now. They don't accept that the government should have that proactive a role in the life of the country, and that's an ideological struggle which, for the moment, we've lost."

Artistically, however, The Public is still winning the battle, and Eustis is happy to keep on pushing the economic and artistic boundaries. "Anything worthwhile", he concludes, "has to break the boundaries of the processes set out to develop them."