Self-made impresario, controversial producer, contentious champion of human rights and the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, and unquestionably the most dynamic force in American theater in the last quarter century, Joseph Papp (1921–1991) changed forever America's cultural landscape. He was the first to demand and to provide—against enormous odds—free Shakespeare to the public, and the first to pioneer colorblind casting and minority-group theater. He discovered and showcased at the Public Theater playwrights like David Rabe, John Guare, and Vaclav Havel; directors like Michael Bennet and James Lapine; actors like Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Denzel Washington; and produced such classic American plays as Hair, Sticks and Bones, Streamers, The Normal Heart, and A Chorus Line, the longest running musical in Broadway history. Joe Papp offers readers a compassionate, unsparing portrait of a complex man who inspired both anger and admiration, but whose far-reaching impact on American theater remains unsurpassed.
Helen Epstein is the author of six books of literary non-fiction including the two memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for her Mother's History and the biography Joe Papp: An American Life. All three books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is also the translator from the Czech of Acting in Terezin by Vlasta Schonova and the late Heda Margolius Kovaly's classic memoir Under A Cruel Star: A LIfe in Prague 1941-1968. She and her husband are the founders of Plunkett Lake Press (www.plunkettlakepress.com). See
ceskapozice.cz/en/news/society/letters-distant-prague.
Her work on Kindle includes Children of the Holocaust; Music Talks: The Lives of Classical Musicians; Joe Papp; Tina Packer Builds a Theater; Meyer Schapiro: Portrait of an Art Historian; Memoir; A Living Will; Training as a Shakespearean Actor (with Tina Packer);and Ice Cream Man (with Gus Rancatore). Her book on memoir, Ecrire La Vie, as well as translations of Where She Came From and Children of the Holocaust are published by La Cause des livres (Paris) and available on amazon.fr.
Born in Prague in 1947, Helen grew up in New York City, where she attended and graduated from Hunter College High School (1965). She became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post.
In 1971, Helen graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times where her first Magazine cover story on freelance musician Ed Birdwell ran in 1974. Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks.
She began teaching journalism at New York University in 1974 and became the first woman in the journalism department to be awarded tenure. In 1986, she left NYU to move to the Boston area. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues including universities in Europe and North and South America; health organizations; high schools; synagogues, libraries and churches; the United States Military Academy at West Point; the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The mother of two grown sons, Helen shuttles between the Berkshires and the Boston area with her husband and blogs about the arts for the New England cultural website The Arts Fuse.
Photos show Helen with late author Heda Kovaly and son Sam, with her Czech researchers Jiri Rychetsky and Jiri Fiedler in 2001; speaking with Jean-Gaspard Palenicek at the Centre Tcheque in Paris; lecturing at SUNY Geneseo; at the El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires; in Rome with her Italian editor Annalisa Cosentino and translator Elisa Renso; and at Freud's birthplace in Pribor, Czech Republic. To see a video interview of Helen, please cut and paste: http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/2007/02/05/uo-today-229-helen-epstein/
